WEBVTT

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Whether you’re an Inuit hunter,

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a forging insect,

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or someone out for a stroll, your brain is
performing one of its most fundamental services,

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it’s navigating. Some of us
do it better than others.

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Some people have this innate spatial sense

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that makes them good at navigation, good away
finding. Maybe they are building mental maps.

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Is it a mental representation of where
things are in space and knowledge about

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where things are with respect to one another.
Do men find their way better than women?

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A lot of the differences that would be
genetic between male and female psychology

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would relate to our hundreds of
thousands of years as hunter gatherers.

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Why are some of us good at finding
our way, while others are not?

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Mom, are you sure you can get us home?

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Where am I?

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Where do you want me to turn right?
Go right. I know, but where?

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Where do I turn right on?
Calgary’s Ann Dodd is lost again.

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I’m glad Dad taught me how to use a map.

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Yeah, have no faith in mom, huh? Well, I believe
in you. It’s just sometimes with directions,

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you’re not the best.

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I’ve always knowing when I’m not good but directions.
My automatic reaction to a map is panic.

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Especially, we’re driving in the car,
my husband hands me a map and says,

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\"Where do we go next?\" I get all anxious.
Many people struggle with directions.

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Ann’s problem is more acute than most.
She gets so be wildered, she can’t even

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find her own relatives across town. My youngest
sister, they were somewhere at Southwest, Calgary.

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I wouldn’t know how to get there, same thing with my brother’s
house. I don’t know how to get to my brother’s house.

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But about three years
ago, I heard on radio,

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there’s getting lost test, they were looking
for participants, I’ll be perfect participant.

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Neuroscientist Giuseppe laria

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has a theory why people like Ann Dodd, people
who appear to have perfectly normal brains

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have so much trouble navigating.

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These people are unable to form mental maps
of the environment and that’s the main reason

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why they get lost in very familiar surroundings. Your job is,
while we’re showing you these (inaudible), it starts to build

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the representation of that environment. Iaria
has found about one thousand people like Dodd.

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He’s coined a syndrome for them, Developmental
Topographical Disorientation or DTD.

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Iaria wonders whether there’s
a genetic cause to DTD,

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because Ann isn’t the
only one in her family

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who has trouble finding her way around. My
father has very poor sense of direction.

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Then, my youngest sister, we were living on 20th
Avenue and she wanted to get to 16th Avenue

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from my home. She end up coming back to the
house because she couldn’t find 16th Avenue.

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And I have another sister for the
longest time, she always thought,

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whichever direction you’re facing, you’re
going north. And so my husband said to her,

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so if you had to go south, you’d have to go
backwards. Ann comes from a very big family.

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In her family, they have been a
lot of people identified has,

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with challenge, in terms of orientation
skills. And so this for us

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was an amazing opportunity to look into the
genetics of this very complex condition.

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Iaria is trying to learn
what navigating tools,

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people like Ann are missing. Good
navigators use both memory and imagination,

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remembering where they
have been and imagining

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where they are going. But exactly
how that works in our brains

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is still a bit of a mystery.

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Insects are surprisingly good navigators,
despite having 8,000 times fewer neurons

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in their brains than we do.
So what’s their trick?

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Tom Collett of the University of Sussex in England
has devoted his entire career to ants and bees.

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Insects’ behaviour is probably more mechanistic.
So you can get more easily details of

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how they work, from insects
than you can from mammals.

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Collett records the comings and goings
of bumblebees at 500 frames a second.

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They are easier to study than most other kinds
of bees. Bumblebees are really nice because

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they, they come out with small nest hole and
B, they could come out fairly infrequently.

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So you got a chance of recording.
His outdoor laboratory

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is covered in a relic of the 70s,
shag carpet. It’s a regular surface,

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helps the bees depth perception when they
first exit from the hive, which in this case

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is a Plexiglas container under the table.
On their out barn trip,

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the bees memorize all their various
flight directions to create a route

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that will take them home again,
it’s called path integration.

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So what that means is, that integrate
all the little turns and zigzags

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and then they’ve got themselves a, back
to the point straight back to the home.

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In these experiments we take colonies
of bees and then we record their

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very first flight. It’s this inaugural
flight, Collette is most interested in.

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He discovered that during their
first foray out of the nest,

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bees create two dimensional images or
snapshots of important scenes like their nest

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or their food source. It’s a more
basic way of seeing than ours.

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If you train bees to a food sight
that’s marked by just a few landmarks,

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than what they primarily learn is the
appearance of that’s on the retina.

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So they are learning a two dimensional
view and then trying to match

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the view when they want to find the place
again. So what happens if Collett changes

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these landmarks around the nest hole?
The confused bees

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can’t find their home.
It’s awfully cruel of him.

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But by changing one feature at a time,
until the bees fail to find home,

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Collett has determined that bees layer images
from their eyes onto images in their memory,

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until they find a match. If they
can find a match, they are lost.

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They can’t imagine where their home is,
because they don’t have the brain power

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to create a mental map. In (inaudible) land routes,
but they probably don’t learn cognitive maps.

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Researchers speculate that a cognitive map

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is a kind of bird’s eye view of our
surroundings outside our own view point,

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a view that can be rotated in our mind.
There’s been 60 years of argument

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about whether mammals can form these maps.
One tool used to try

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to solve that dispute is this
tank called a Morris water maze.

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Rats are excellent but reluctant swimmers.
This one is dropped into a tank of murky water

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to search for a hidden island.
The rat gets visual clues

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from the geometric markers or landmarks
around the edges of the room.

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Uh… Success. Next time,
the rats put in the tank

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from a different position. It still able
to find the island, which suggests,

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it could be using a mental map.
But some tests

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in water mazes that were partly
obscured, suggest that rats don’t form

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a cognitive map. They seem to generate
a viewpoint specific snapshot,

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a bit like bees do. So these behavioral
water maze tests were inconclusive.

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Then, studies reveal the existence
of navigational neurons

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in rats brains.

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That evidence has helped McMaster University
neuroscientist draw some conclusions

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about the human brain, how memory
and imagination might combine

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to form a kind of map.

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What we’re going to do is measure your brain signals by, by recording
the electrical activity on the surface of your scalp with these….

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What is actually going on
inside our brains is probably

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more like a very piecemeal map. We have
cells in hippocampus that actually,

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have been recorded from in the human brain as well
as in the rodent brain, they’re called plate cells.

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And these plate cells will actually
fire when a person or animal

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is in a particular location. Those plate
cells are thought to be the building blocks

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for our ability to map the world. If one plate
cell is active in one corner of the box

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and another plate cell is active
in another corner and so on,

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then from a collection of plate cells, you can deduce
that the animal can represent the whole environment.

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The black line is the path that rat
has taken in a box. The red dots

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show how the firing of different kinds of
plate cells mapped the boxes dimensions.

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Is this a cognitive map at work?

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Sue Becker’s research now focuses on
learning which circuits in the human brains

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hippocampus are firing as we
remember where we’ve been

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and imagine where we’re going. When you lay down
memories, it’s not just for the purpose of reminiscing

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but you use your memory in
order to be able to imagine

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what’s going to happen next. There’s a lot of
evidence that you are using the same circuits,

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whether you’re remembering
or imagining future events.

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[sil.]

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Imagining a route on the snow

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and ice of Canada’s Arctic
requires more than just memory.

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It calls upon thousands of
years of navigational wisdom.

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The University of Calgary’s Giuseppe laria

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has come to the village of Igloolik
to learn about the traditional way

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finding methods of the Inuit. I
really want to know traditionally

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what has been the way to really make sense of
space, in a place where information is really,

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really minimal.

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[sil.]

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Hey. Hi, John. Hey. Giuseppe
Iaria, how are you?

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Iaria is heading out across the snow fields
beyond Igloolik with John Arnastiac(ph),

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who has been a hunter for 40 years.
Today, visibility is

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well over a mile. But with nothing to focus on
and with the sky, the same color as the snow,

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these are white out conditions.

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Arnastiac is guided by a faint pattern in the
snow, which holds in its shape a record of the

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two prevailing winds. The snow is always
formed from the wind. Here I’ll show you.

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See. If it was from the north… it would be…

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hard like this. Oh, it would be hard like
this. Yeah. Yes, because this is older.

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Its spring in the Arctic, so it’s
always light out, that means no stars

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by which to navigate, but
our Arnastiac is guided

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by the ripples of the snow. And when the
light is poor, he puts his foot out

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and feels the ripples as he drives.
When he is near the ocean,

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he can be guided by ocean currents.
And as far as 40 kilometers away,

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he can see its imprint, a dark band
across the horizon called water sky.

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[music]

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Another hunter approaches.

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Hittany Paniac(ph) is 20 years younger

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than our Arnastiac. He uses a GPS device
but he knows the winds just as well.

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Yeah, I know this, note this,
when I was scrolling up

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and north wind get back this a lot harder

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and from the south wind, it’s a lot softer.

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Like this part is powdery. Yeah. North wind
are really more packed than south wind.

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But it gives you a lot of information.
Yes. And they are always facing

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north and south directions
and it never faces…

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East or west? East or west.
Can I see your GPS?

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Oh, yes, I have a GPS here to show you.
And you always keep it with you?

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Yes, this is my best friend
when I go along the line.

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John, you don’t use the GPS.
For me it’s a waste of time.

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Because I know which direction
to go in a weather like this.

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I was a young lad when he was teenager

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and back then, they were
using more dog team instead

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of our skidoo. Oh, I see. And
dog team knows more about

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camp growing and… Yes. So the
dogs can actually take you back,

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they can sense it. They’ll go home.

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This is one of the last dog
teams left in Igloolik.

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More and more the Inuit are
depending on snowmobiles and GPS

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to get around. They run the risk of
losing their ancient wayfaring skills

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if technology takes over.

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Half a world away, there’s
another society of way fares

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who don’t need GPS. Oh, we’re going to go over (inaudible),
we’re gonna hug the river. London’s famous cabbies

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are among the world’s most studied navigators.
His evidence of that elusive cognitive map

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contained in their brains.

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Well, I’ve got my own GPS

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as well in my head. It’s called
the knowledge. Terry Foreman

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has been driving a tax cab for 20 years. He
studied three years to gain the knowledge.

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And the knowledge was, I suppose don’t
change the work. I called it blood,

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sweat and tears and it’s certainly everything. London
is one of the toughest cities in the world to navigate.

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To qualify as a cabbie,

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they have to be very, very
good at not getting lost.

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I mean, we have to learn six mile radius from the center
of London. And you think that’s gonna be, you know,

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impossible but it’s not. It’s…
it’s like a joint jigsaw puzzle,

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when you just put in a little bits at a time and, until
soon and later you put that final piece of jigsaw

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and then, and you know it. In 2001,
researchers at University College London

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discovered that the cab drivers had a
larger than normal posterior hippocampus.

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The part of the brain working
the hardest were navigating.

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But was it the confidant driving that
affected the size of the hippocampus

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or the searching for the best route?

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The team could pay taxi drivers and bus drivers and they both have to drive
through London, they both have to deal with customers, they are there all day

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watching the cars and the city fly by. Only
taxi drivers are taking novel routes each day.

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And so the team were able to show that the posterior
hippocampus is larger in, in London taxi drivers

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than London bus drivers. Spiers now wanted to
find out if people used the posterior hippocampus

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to picture the direct route to a
place where the actual street route

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they would have to take, the ability to
picture which direction something is in,

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without actually seeing it, is key
to the concept of a cognitive map.

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I think that’s the most important thing that knowledge
teaches you. It teaches you what direction to head-in

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to where you’re gonna go straight away. You know,
I’ll go ahead that way or I’ll go ahead that way.

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So Spiers launched a new study,
this time using pedestrians

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instead of cabbies. First subjects walked
around the complex streets of Soho

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until they knew them like their own backyard.
Then in a scanner, they were asked to think about

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direct routes versus street
routes, while watching video

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of a virtual walk through Soho. I found not what
I was expecting. What I found was the brain

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seems to flip between these two different possibilities.
When subjects thought about the direct route,

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they used the front or anterior
part of the hippocampus.

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When they thought about the street route,
they used the back or posterior part.

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So my guess now is that, perhaps the taxi drivers
are expanding that posterior hippocampus

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because they are happen to think about
the paths. All these studies confirm,

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cognitive maps mainly
reside in the hippocampus

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if they exist. There are some people
who think that there is no such thing

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that is basically a fiction. So Nora Newcombe’s
spatial intelligence team took advantage

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of a brand new Temple University campus to
determine whether or not cognitive maps exist.

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So I’m gonna have you put his blindfold on.
In the name of science,

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Canary Teet(ph) is temporarily
blinded, deafened, and immobilized

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to thoroughly disorient her in the
place she’s never been in anyway.

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One way of seeing if there’s a cognitive
map is to ask somebody to imagine

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they’re at a distinctive location
and then point to something else,

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and you can get from those points some idea of how
accurate they are in placing themselves in this space.

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On each of the routes you’re gonna
learn four buildings. So this is the

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first house on the first route you’re gonna learn.
It’s called Gibson House. Okay, Gibson House.

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Canary is shown around one area of the
campus. This is called the Green House.

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Okay. Blindfolded again,

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then toured around the
completely separate area.

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So this is called Dixon Hall. Okay.
The tricky part is being asked

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to point a building she was shown in the first area,
while she’s standing somewhere in the second area.

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It’s difficult because Canary has no
information about the relationship

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between the areas. I was trying to think about
where buildings that I learned in the second route

00:18:55.000 --> 00:18:59.999
were in relation to buildings that I learned in the
first route. There were… It was hard to figure out

00:19:00.000 --> 00:19:04.999
where they would be. Finally,
she’s taken on a connecting route

00:19:05.000 --> 00:19:09.999
between the two areas and asked again
to point to certain buildings.

00:19:10.000 --> 00:19:14.999
All the test subjects were now able to do this.
They could imagine the location of buildings

00:19:15.000 --> 00:19:19.999
even when they were out of sight. We found that
by the time people went on connecting routes

00:19:20.000 --> 00:19:24.999
between the two separated routes,
everyone was able to point from

00:19:25.000 --> 00:19:29.999
one building to another building. In other
words, they could build a mental map

00:19:30.000 --> 00:19:34.999
once they had enough information to
create it. I think we went that way.

00:19:35.000 --> 00:19:39.999
It’s your final answer? Yes. Okay. We
found that there is a cognitive map

00:19:40.000 --> 00:19:44.999
pretty much and that there is one for everyone.
Keep left. But having one and using it

00:19:45.000 --> 00:19:49.999
are two different things. At the
end of the road turn right.

00:19:50.000 --> 00:19:54.999
These days, it’s often simplistic
to just follow directions.

00:19:55.000 --> 00:19:59.999
Which navigation technique we preferred

00:20:00.000 --> 00:20:04.999
could have big implications for our mental health
according to McGill University’s Veronique Bohbot.

00:20:05.000 --> 00:20:09.999
The hippocampus is the area
of the brain that is affected

00:20:10.000 --> 00:20:14.999
with Alzheimer’s disease. So it’s an
area of the brain involved in memory,

00:20:15.000 --> 00:20:19.999
but specifically for events
that occur in one’s life.

00:20:20.000 --> 00:20:24.999
So that’s your, the slice of the hippocampus
I like you to take. It’s good to exercise

00:20:25.000 --> 00:20:29.999
your hippocampus to keep it
healthy, but GPS doesn’t do that,

00:20:30.000 --> 00:20:34.999
it triggers a similar and more
automatic navigational technique,

00:20:35.000 --> 00:20:39.999
Bohbot calls stimulus response. It develops a
different region of the brain, they call it nucleus.

00:20:40.000 --> 00:20:44.999
So stimulus response means that
we make a specific motor action

00:20:45.000 --> 00:20:49.999
when we’re faced with specific stimuli.

00:20:50.000 --> 00:20:54.999
So at the white building, turn right. And
then when you see the gas station, turn left.

00:20:55.000 --> 00:20:59.999
Bohbot has a slate of virtual
reality tools to find out

00:21:00.000 --> 00:21:04.999
whether people prefer to build a
cognitive map or use stimulus response.

00:21:05.000 --> 00:21:09.999
In this perfectly symmetrical room, Zahra
Shadari(ph) is the human equivalent

00:21:10.000 --> 00:21:14.999
of a rat in a water maze, but
this time, no one’s getting wet.

00:21:15.000 --> 00:21:19.999
The room has four separate images
projected on the walls, one is a barn,

00:21:20.000 --> 00:21:24.999
the other is at distant hills. Her
instructions are to roam around the room

00:21:25.000 --> 00:21:29.999
until she finds a spot where
the pull she’s carrying beeps.

00:21:30.000 --> 00:21:34.999
After learning the location of the beeping spot,
Zahra is sent him to search for it again.

00:21:35.000 --> 00:21:39.999
But the picture of the barn has been moved.
Using this room,

00:21:40.000 --> 00:21:44.999
Bohbot can judge whether a subject creates
a wide mental map using all the images

00:21:45.000 --> 00:21:49.999
or responds to the more
immediate stimulus, the barn.

00:21:50.000 --> 00:21:54.999
Another crucial tool in Bohbot’s
tool box is this virtual maze,

00:21:55.000 --> 00:21:59.999
eight pathways extend from a central hub.
There are virtual treasures

00:22:00.000 --> 00:22:04.999
to find at the end of each pathway. In
the background are various landscapes.

00:22:05.000 --> 00:22:09.999
Bohbot wants to find out
who’s finding the treasures

00:22:10.000 --> 00:22:14.999
by building a mental map linking the landscape to the
pathways and who’s finding them by keeping track

00:22:15.000 --> 00:22:19.999
of the immediate stimuli, the pass.
She knows that people

00:22:20.000 --> 00:22:24.999
who navigate using stimulus response will have a
smaller hippocampus. Why this is really important

00:22:25.000 --> 00:22:29.999
is because when there’s a loss in grey
matter in hippocampus, it’s been identified

00:22:30.000 --> 00:22:34.999
as a risk factor for numerous
neurological and psychiatric disorders.

00:22:35.000 --> 00:22:39.999
Bohbot study show that about half
of this favor building mental maps

00:22:40.000 --> 00:22:44.999
have favor stimulus response. The
best navigators can use both.

00:22:45.000 --> 00:22:49.999
GPS is a form of stimulus response.

00:22:50.000 --> 00:22:54.999
If we respond to the instructions of a
voice, we don’t need to build a mental map.

00:22:55.000 --> 00:22:59.999
In 200 meters turn left. Bohbot is
concerned that too much reliance on GPS

00:23:00.000 --> 00:23:04.999
will inhibit the healthy
growth of the hippocampus.

00:23:05.000 --> 00:23:09.999
What I recommend people to do is
to learn about their environment

00:23:10.000 --> 00:23:14.999
even if the GPS is on. Keep looking
outside, keep acquiring details,

00:23:15.000 --> 00:23:19.999
knowledge about the environment, so that you can
find your way back at all times without it.

00:23:20.000 --> 00:23:24.999
That seems to be what children do.
Bohbot was surprised

00:23:25.000 --> 00:23:29.999
to discover that children exercised
their hippocampus more than adults.

00:23:30.000 --> 00:23:34.999
Eighty five percent of 300 kids that
we tested, that were eight years old

00:23:35.000 --> 00:23:39.999
were using special strategies,
85%, this is a very large number,

00:23:40.000 --> 00:23:44.999
that suggests that we actually initially
start by using spatial strategies

00:23:45.000 --> 00:23:49.999
and we gradually shift over to using
more response strategies probably

00:23:50.000 --> 00:23:54.999
as the atomic ties more and
more tests in our daily lives.

00:23:55.000 --> 00:23:59.999
Drive 350 meters then turn left.

00:24:00.000 --> 00:24:04.999
Bohbot test differences between age groups

00:24:05.000 --> 00:24:09.999
and differences between cultures. She knew
that the Inuit were using GPS more and more,

00:24:10.000 --> 00:24:14.999
then she found out that her former
collaborator Giuseppe laria

00:24:15.000 --> 00:24:19.999
had gone north to talk with Inuit hunters.
So she made her way to Igloolik

00:24:20.000 --> 00:24:24.999
armed with her virtual maze test.

00:24:25.000 --> 00:24:29.999
She wants to find out to what extent
the hunters are building mental maps

00:24:30.000 --> 00:24:34.999
rather than just responding to a GPS. We’re
stimulating our cardiac nucleus by response learning.

00:24:35.000 --> 00:24:39.999
There’s a cost meaning
that is gonna be a loss

00:24:40.000 --> 00:24:44.999
in utilization and perhaps in a long term
loss in gray matter of the hippocampus.

00:24:45.000 --> 00:24:49.999
[Bohbot is worried that reliance
among Intuit hunters on]GPS

00:24:50.000 --> 00:24:54.999
will lead to a greater chance of
early senility. John and Itany(ph)

00:24:55.000 --> 00:24:59.999
are worried, the next generation will lose
the knowledge of how to find their way.

00:25:00.000 --> 00:25:04.999
Already there are many stories of young
people becoming lost because they can’t read

00:25:05.000 --> 00:25:09.999
winds and drifts.

00:25:10.000 --> 00:25:14.999
Bohbot tested nine older hunters
including John and Itany

00:25:15.000 --> 00:25:19.999
and seven younger hunters. So you’re at the center
of a platform. You see this is the platform

00:25:20.000 --> 00:25:24.999
form which branch out pathways. I
just go straight. There’s GPS…

00:25:25.000 --> 00:25:29.999
While most of the older men built a
mental map when doing the maze test,

00:25:30.000 --> 00:25:34.999
only half of the younger men did.
The results of Bohbot’s small study

00:25:35.000 --> 00:25:39.999
seem to support her theory that the
technological nature of Western culture

00:25:40.000 --> 00:25:44.999
is reducing the use of mental maps.

00:25:45.000 --> 00:25:49.999
But perhaps the trickiest divide for
researchers to navigate is between the sexes.

00:25:50.000 --> 00:25:54.999
Whenever you give a talk, somebody
in the audience often ask you,

00:25:55.000 --> 00:25:59.999
\"Did you compare the sexes and so on?\" And so you
almost have to deal with it even if you don’t want to.

00:26:00.000 --> 00:26:04.999
It’s a loaded issue, but that didn’t
stop geographer Daniel Montello

00:26:05.000 --> 00:26:09.999
from finding 79 men and women for a
study at the Santa Barbara campus.

00:26:10.000 --> 00:26:14.999
First they learned a route on the campus.
Your task is trying to memorize

00:26:15.000 --> 00:26:19.999
the landmarks I pointed at. They
were asked to place the landmarks

00:26:20.000 --> 00:26:24.999
on their maps, then a geography quiz.
Which city is

00:26:25.000 --> 00:26:29.999
closer to Albuquerque, Houston or Denver?

00:26:30.000 --> 00:26:34.999
Denver. Here’s another. Which
city is closer to Winnipeg,

00:26:35.000 --> 00:26:39.999
Calgary or Toronto? And there
is always entertaining

00:26:40.000 --> 00:26:44.999
mental rotation test. This is a test
of your ability to look at a drawing

00:26:45.000 --> 00:26:49.999
of a given object and find the same object
within a set of dissimilar objects.

00:26:50.000 --> 00:26:54.999
Which of the three choices
on the right is the same

00:26:55.000 --> 00:26:59.999
as the object on the left?

00:27:00.000 --> 00:27:04.999
In the object memory test,

00:27:05.000 --> 00:27:09.999
participants try to remember the
location of random object. What’s this?

00:27:10.000 --> 00:27:14.999
And what did the test show? They
showed that men do outperform women

00:27:15.000 --> 00:27:19.999
on tests especially that involve
learning environmental layouts

00:27:20.000 --> 00:27:24.999
more so than learning pictures. Men
are usually significantly better

00:27:25.000 --> 00:27:29.999
at indicating directions straight to locations
that are not directly along routes.

00:27:30.000 --> 00:27:34.999
Women outperform men on the object memory test
and this is confirmed by tests from other labs.

00:27:35.000 --> 00:27:39.999
Men do better on the object
rotation test and while both sexes

00:27:40.000 --> 00:27:44.999
do equally well finding their way with a wealth
of landmarks, as the landmarks are removed,

00:27:45.000 --> 00:27:49.999
men gradually outperform the women.
Many researchers including

00:27:50.000 --> 00:27:54.999
women as well as men would agree
that men do tend to be better

00:27:55.000 --> 00:27:59.999
at creating novel routes, then the question
becomes why? Is it nurture or nature

00:28:00.000 --> 00:28:04.999
that mostly shapes our ability to find
our way. A lot of the differences

00:28:05.000 --> 00:28:09.999
that would be genetic between male and
female psychology would relate to

00:28:10.000 --> 00:28:14.999
our hundreds and thousands of years as hunter
gatherers, where it was almost always the case that

00:28:15.000 --> 00:28:19.999
men did the hunting, they traveled around with other
men, they hid, they had to figure out locations

00:28:20.000 --> 00:28:24.999
and follow dynamically moving prey and so
on and women were primarily gatherers,

00:28:25.000 --> 00:28:29.999
they had to know the
locations of fruits and nuts

00:28:30.000 --> 00:28:34.999
and things that were not changing around
but still they had a particular location.

00:28:35.000 --> 00:28:39.999
And 10,000 years of civilization, so
the theory goes, hasn’t yet changed

00:28:40.000 --> 00:28:44.999
our basic genetic make up. Men
are better at finding their way,

00:28:45.000 --> 00:28:49.999
but women are more likely to find the car keys.
But maybe it’s partly our cultural roles

00:28:50.000 --> 00:28:54.999
and fears that make men
better at way finding.

00:28:55.000 --> 00:28:59.999
The fact that men traditionally do the driving,
I think, may be a big part of this story.

00:29:00.000 --> 00:29:04.999
But there’s another part of the story also,
which is that the consequences of getting lost

00:29:05.000 --> 00:29:09.999
are different for men and for women
and women are often actively afraid

00:29:10.000 --> 00:29:14.999
to explore foreign cities for example, because
if they get lost in a bad neighborhood,

00:29:15.000 --> 00:29:19.999
they, you know, fear being,
you know, robbed or raped,

00:29:20.000 --> 00:29:24.999
more so than men. And I think that’s a
much neglected aspect of this story.

00:29:25.000 --> 00:29:29.999
Or maybe it just comes down to our
interests, whether innate or learned.

00:29:30.000 --> 00:29:34.999
It isn’t even so much what you can do,
it’s what you like doing. And if you like

00:29:35.000 --> 00:29:39.999
traveling around in the environment, if you enjoy reading
maps then you’re gonna spend a lot more time doing it.

00:29:40.000 --> 00:29:44.999
Ken Jennings doesn’t
just enjoy reading maps,

00:29:45.000 --> 00:29:49.999
you could say, he’s obsessed with them.
If there is a map in the room, you know,

00:29:50.000 --> 00:29:54.999
I can’t look anywhere else. But how good is
the winningest ever contestant on Jeopardy

00:29:55.000 --> 00:29:59.999
had building one in his head?

00:30:00.000 --> 00:30:04.999
Winning more than two million
dollars on a quiz show

00:30:05.000 --> 00:30:09.999
requires a prodigious memory. Now Ken Jennings is
a writer and one of the things he’s written about

00:30:10.000 --> 00:30:14.999
is people’s obsession with maps.
I remember being four years old

00:30:15.000 --> 00:30:19.999
and just sit in the library paging through a Road Atlas
for fun, like it was a pleasure reading, you know,

00:30:20.000 --> 00:30:24.999
like the way a more normal kid would, would read Hardy
Boys book and I want to get to the bottom of that.

00:30:25.000 --> 00:30:29.999
I wanted to figure out what, what it was about me that made me such a
weird kid. Why was I sleeping with an atlas at the head of my bed,

00:30:30.000 --> 00:30:34.999
instead of a teddy bear or a
security blanket? Veronique Bohbot

00:30:35.000 --> 00:30:39.999
found out about Ken’s book and thought
maybe she could help answer his question.

00:30:40.000 --> 00:30:44.999
Hi, I’m Dr. Veronique Bohbot. Nice to meet you.
Nice to meet you. And answer a question of her own.

00:30:45.000 --> 00:30:49.999
It would be interesting for us to investigate
what are the navigational strategies

00:30:50.000 --> 00:30:54.999
that people like Ken Jennings who
have superior memory, what strategies

00:30:55.000 --> 00:30:59.999
he would be using. So she and the lab
technician Meghan Polisca(ph) ran some tests.

00:31:00.000 --> 00:31:04.999
So remember this is in Tibet speed.

00:31:05.000 --> 00:31:09.999
I feel, you know, a little bit nervous because, you know, I’ve written
this book about, you know, \"My Deep Love For Maps and Geography\"

00:31:10.000 --> 00:31:14.999
and, and now they’re gonna look at my results and tell me. No, I’m
sorry, you actually couldn’t find your way out of a paper bag.

00:31:15.000 --> 00:31:19.999
Polisca(ph) uses a modified
version of the virtual maze test.

00:31:20.000 --> 00:31:24.999
You were at the center of a platform
from which branch out several pathways.

00:31:25.000 --> 00:31:29.999
There’s also a virtual town to learn.
There will be placing a virtual town

00:31:30.000 --> 00:31:34.999
and you have to visit and identify the
different locations they make up this town.

00:31:35.000 --> 00:31:39.999
After two hours of testing,

00:31:40.000 --> 00:31:44.999
Bohbot delivers the verdict. You performed
really well. You did go in a direct path

00:31:45.000 --> 00:31:49.999
most of the time, which is a sign of cognitive
mapping. People who can go in a direct path

00:31:50.000 --> 00:31:54.999
to a new location have to have some kind of

00:31:55.000 --> 00:31:59.999
internal sense of where things are
in order to derive this novel route.

00:32:00.000 --> 00:32:04.999
And we have MRID that will suggest
that, in those situations

00:32:05.000 --> 00:32:09.999
people use their hippocampus. So you see what’s going
on inside the brain when people take that test

00:32:10.000 --> 00:32:14.999
and you can tell, you know, which
mental muscles they’re pulling? Yes.

00:32:15.000 --> 00:32:19.999
That’s cool. I feel like a cognitive map must exist just
because I feel like that’s how I experience places.

00:32:20.000 --> 00:32:24.999
You know, I feel like there is some world in my
head that’s, that I can rotate and zoom in on.

00:32:25.000 --> 00:32:29.999
You know, it’s almost like I have some
mental version of, of Google Earth up here.

00:32:30.000 --> 00:32:34.999
I know there’s a lot of controversy on
whether a dog can do that or a bumblebee.

00:32:35.000 --> 00:32:39.999
Or an ant. With cameras and eavesdrops, the
University of Edinburgh’s Michael Mangan

00:32:40.000 --> 00:32:44.999
is measuring the navigational tools of
one of the world’s greatest navigators,

00:32:45.000 --> 00:32:49.999
Cataglyphis velox, the European desert ant.

00:32:50.000 --> 00:32:54.999
But Mangan is first and
foremost not a biologist

00:32:55.000 --> 00:32:59.999
but a roboticist. When I seen the story
of the desert ant, where she can

00:33:00.000 --> 00:33:04.999
navigate in complex environments as we have
here, then I really inspired that something

00:33:05.000 --> 00:33:09.999
with such a small brain, the size of a
pinhead, and with low resolution eyes

00:33:10.000 --> 00:33:14.999
can actually get herself home there. So if he can
understand how she’s doing that, then maybe I can apply it

00:33:15.000 --> 00:33:19.999
in robotic systems. If robots ever take
up much of civilizations workload,

00:33:20.000 --> 00:33:24.999
they will need to navigate on their own
and the simpler the system, the better.

00:33:25.000 --> 00:33:29.999
What we’re looking for is to fain
the minimum solution that allows

00:33:30.000 --> 00:33:34.999
navigation to happen. Mangan
is searching for clues

00:33:35.000 --> 00:33:39.999
to ant way finding, a few miles outside
Seville, Spain. So the ants here

00:33:40.000 --> 00:33:44.999
and classically move in environments
that of larges tusks or bushes of grass

00:33:45.000 --> 00:33:49.999
and this gives them a little maze which they must
move. It’s like this, winding streets of Seville.

00:33:50.000 --> 00:33:54.999
One place will look the same as the place I was
five minutes ago. You imagine leaving your hotel

00:33:55.000 --> 00:33:59.999
and you look down one side of the street
and you say, I’m not sure, really vibe.

00:34:00.000 --> 00:34:04.999
Most of that scallion looks most familiar, so
I’ll follow it for a while. And I will say, okay,

00:34:05.000 --> 00:34:09.999
now I remember the lovely platha with a Tapas
bar. So now I remember I went that way

00:34:10.000 --> 00:34:14.999
and you start linking these together into routes. That’s
one suggestion as how the ants are navigating as well.

00:34:15.000 --> 00:34:19.999
In the eavesdrops experiment, Mangan
is purposely trying to confuse

00:34:20.000 --> 00:34:24.999
the ant sense of distance. So we’re
interested in seeing whether the ants

00:34:25.000 --> 00:34:29.999
are also taking into account while
they are certain and uncertain about

00:34:30.000 --> 00:34:34.999
in their calculations. First,
the ant leaves the rest

00:34:35.000 --> 00:34:39.999
and eventually finds a cookie tree. Then,
Mangan carries at halfway back home

00:34:40.000 --> 00:34:44.999
and puts it in what he calls his assault
course. We forced them to take lots of tons

00:34:45.000 --> 00:34:49.999
and wiggled our paths when they are going home. Then maybe, with
this assault course they would say, okay, I think I traveled

00:34:50.000 --> 00:34:54.999
this half distance, but I’m not so sure. Mangum
wants to know whether the next time out,

00:34:55.000 --> 00:34:59.999
the ant searches based on its
memory of the outward journey

00:35:00.000 --> 00:35:04.999
on the straight eavesdrop or its
memory of the shorter homeward journey

00:35:05.000 --> 00:35:09.999
in the assault course or maybe
an averaging of the two.

00:35:10.000 --> 00:35:14.999
Or maybe the animals have a completely different strategy. And if
that’s true, then I’d really like to know what they are doing as well,

00:35:15.000 --> 00:35:19.999
because they navigate in this environment,
no problem. So ant seem to have us

00:35:20.000 --> 00:35:24.999
at an advantage, because in our
cities we can easily get lost.

00:35:25.000 --> 00:35:29.999
Urban Design and way finding
are Colin Ellard’s passions.

00:35:30.000 --> 00:35:34.999
He began his career studying animals

00:35:35.000 --> 00:35:39.999
like ants and bees.

00:35:40.000 --> 00:35:44.999
I spent many years trying to understand how animals dealt
with problems of space. And I thought, Chief, that,

00:35:45.000 --> 00:35:49.999
there was an animal that, that built really interesting spaces
that might relate to how their minds were put together.

00:35:50.000 --> 00:35:54.999
And it took me an embarrassingly long time
to realize that those animals were us.

00:35:55.000 --> 00:35:59.999
Ellard has a virtual reality town
in which he can manipulate features

00:36:00.000 --> 00:36:04.999
to make way finding easier or harder.
What I want you to do is imagine

00:36:05.000 --> 00:36:09.999
that you’re visiting a city that’s laid out, it’s like any
other city you’ve been to. In this task I want you to find

00:36:10.000 --> 00:36:14.999
an identical statue to that one somewhere
inside the city around you. Oh.

00:36:15.000 --> 00:36:19.999
One of the things that we manipulate in the experiment
is, what you could think of as the grammar of space.

00:36:20.000 --> 00:36:24.999
In this town’s grammar, Ellard
is purposely left out landmarks,

00:36:25.000 --> 00:36:29.999
that’s kind of like leaving out the nouns.
Where am I?

00:36:30.000 --> 00:36:34.999
Ellard wants to see how the lack of landmarks
affects how Christine searches for the statue.

00:36:35.000 --> 00:36:39.999
First, she tracks around the town’s
wall, then plunges into the center

00:36:40.000 --> 00:36:44.999
and finds the statue. Hey.

00:36:45.000 --> 00:36:49.999
Here we go. Great. So how was it? I was
looking all the time for other landmarks

00:36:50.000 --> 00:36:54.999
to help guide me back out again, but everything
was just the same, just the same window and that,

00:36:55.000 --> 00:36:59.999
so that was frustrating. Going into a
landscape that is really devoid of landmarks

00:37:00.000 --> 00:37:04.999
can be a bit discomforting and it can take people
some time to, to figure out what else they can use

00:37:05.000 --> 00:37:09.999
to find their way. Ellard
has a real world test

00:37:10.000 --> 00:37:14.999
that measures people’s emotions as they walk
the streets of the city and how that affects

00:37:15.000 --> 00:37:19.999
their way finding. Christine and John get
palm monitors to measure their stress level

00:37:20.000 --> 00:37:24.999
as they wander around kitchen or Ontario.
Meanwhile, they have to play

00:37:25.000 --> 00:37:29.999
an annoying little game intended to distract them.
We’re going to see a rolling display of digits.

00:37:30.000 --> 00:37:34.999
Every time you see a digit appear, I
want you to press the scroll button.

00:37:35.000 --> 00:37:39.999
But if you see the number three, I want you to not press
the scroll button. All right, let’s go for a walk.

00:37:40.000 --> 00:37:44.999
Great. Often we get lost simply
because we’re not paying attention

00:37:45.000 --> 00:37:49.999
to where we’re going, we’re day dreaming.
Unlike any other animal,

00:37:50.000 --> 00:37:54.999
we have this ability to move effortlessly through
time and space mentally. So we can imagine ourselves

00:37:55.000 --> 00:37:59.999
being somewhere other than where we are
right now. The downside of that is that,

00:38:00.000 --> 00:38:04.999
it increases the likelihood that will become
lost. So we’re gonna walk into this building

00:38:05.000 --> 00:38:09.999
and then out the back doors. Oh, oh.
But Ellard gets lost.

00:38:10.000 --> 00:38:14.999
This seems to be a long way
up, maybe it was down.

00:38:15.000 --> 00:38:19.999
It is the way out.

00:38:20.000 --> 00:38:24.999
There we go. I would put my way
finding skills as below average,

00:38:25.000 --> 00:38:29.999
but a lot better than they were
before I began to get into

00:38:30.000 --> 00:38:34.999
the business of studying way finding. Then,
Ellard, let’s John and Christine lead.

00:38:35.000 --> 00:38:39.999
He asks them to make note of what attracts
them to their route. How does the definition

00:38:40.000 --> 00:38:44.999
of the street influence how people feel,
where they look, and what they do.

00:38:45.000 --> 00:38:49.999
Why here? Well, it’s
sheltered, I like the people,

00:38:50.000 --> 00:38:54.999
and lots of greenery too. The streets
cape that captures our interest,

00:38:55.000 --> 00:38:59.999
puts us in the here and now. We
pay attention to where we are

00:39:00.000 --> 00:39:04.999
and where we’re going. That’s entirely the reason I
went over here. I wanted to see whether this spun.

00:39:05.000 --> 00:39:09.999
And now, is their cognitive map working? Now could you
both close your eyes? Now point to the clock tower.

00:39:10.000 --> 00:39:14.999
Pretty good. Good navigators figure out

00:39:15.000 --> 00:39:19.999
the strategy that’s going to work best. They have a good
sense for what’s going to work in some particular context.

00:39:20.000 --> 00:39:24.999
But some things will always be a challenge.
Where’s the car?

00:39:25.000 --> 00:39:29.999
[sil.]

00:39:30.000 --> 00:39:34.999
Exploring the mysteries of navigational
disorientation has led Giuseppe laria

00:39:35.000 --> 00:39:39.999
to design a training course to overcome it.

00:39:40.000 --> 00:39:44.999
Okay, Ann, so this is the belt I mentioned to
you about. One of the tools he has hopes for,

00:39:45.000 --> 00:39:49.999
is this magnetic belt. You will hear them vibration,
they’re very reliable source of information.

00:39:50.000 --> 00:39:54.999
They always tell you where north is.
Okay. And, you know,

00:39:55.000 --> 00:39:59.999
that means nothing to me… Yeah. Yeah. Iaria is
hoping compass directions will someday mean

00:40:00.000 --> 00:40:04.999
something to Ann. We’ll
do a lot of tests today.

00:40:05.000 --> 00:40:09.999
Some of these are really simple
for you or others okay, some,

00:40:10.000 --> 00:40:14.999
there’s very challenging, very difficult, huh? We’ll
start off with the heading our intuition task.

00:40:15.000 --> 00:40:19.999
So in this task… We ask
people to do a comprehensive

00:40:20.000 --> 00:40:24.999
battery of training on
attention, perception.

00:40:25.000 --> 00:40:29.999
Mental imagery is a very, very critical one,
mental rotation, working memory and so on.

00:40:30.000 --> 00:40:34.999
Ann worries that her kids
might inherit her problem.

00:40:35.000 --> 00:40:39.999
Of course, my children are my
greatest motivation. If they show

00:40:40.000 --> 00:40:44.999
some DTD characteristics, I
wanted to be able to prevent them

00:40:45.000 --> 00:40:49.999
from having all the inhibitions
or, you know, being incapacitated

00:40:50.000 --> 00:40:54.999
the way that I have been. Iaria
is trying out a new test

00:40:55.000 --> 00:40:59.999
on Ann’s daughters. Okay, Emily, let’s give Riley a
chance to try the control us and go through the rooms.

00:41:00.000 --> 00:41:04.999
So I seem to have gone through
all of the rooms so far,

00:41:05.000 --> 00:41:09.999
I’m now in the hallway. Not the butterfly
room. Except for the butterfly room.

00:41:10.000 --> 00:41:14.999
The main purpose of the video game is
really trying to identify children

00:41:15.000 --> 00:41:19.999
who may actually be potential DTDs.
Meanwhile, on her favorite walking paths,

00:41:20.000 --> 00:41:24.999
Ann may have taken care of some
of her navigational struggles

00:41:25.000 --> 00:41:29.999
on her own. She’s learned how
to remember where she is

00:41:30.000 --> 00:41:34.999
by imagining she’s flying
over the world around her.

00:41:35.000 --> 00:41:39.999
Last spring was probably the first time I
actually felt like a sense of direction up there.

00:41:40.000 --> 00:41:44.999
It would be like, I was flying or

00:41:45.000 --> 00:41:49.999
on my stomach and then seeing the mountains
west, then that I’ve been having orientation

00:41:50.000 --> 00:41:54.999
and that was north and that was east and
that was south. For me it was just…

00:41:55.000 --> 00:41:59.999
I guess, like just feeling
thrilled that I actually felt

00:42:00.000 --> 00:42:04.999
some sort of sense of direction.

00:42:05.000 --> 00:42:09.999
Ann is learning how to find her way,
but some people like getting lost.

00:42:10.000 --> 00:42:14.999
I actually love the sensation of
becoming lost. I get lost on purpose.

00:42:15.000 --> 00:42:19.999
When you lose that kind of comfortable feeling of,
of knowing your place, that everything kind of pops

00:42:20.000 --> 00:42:24.999
and you experience the here and
now much more immediately.

00:42:25.000 --> 00:42:29.999
And I just like not knowing where I’m going. It’s so free. You
know, it reminds me why I should turn off the GPS sometimes,

00:42:30.000 --> 00:42:34.999
you know. Let’s see what’s over this rise,

00:42:35.000 --> 00:42:39.999
you know. I almost think we should have like one day a
week where, you know, it’s like turn off your GPS day,

00:42:40.000 --> 00:42:44.999
you know, maybe, maybe every Sunday in, in memory of the good old Sunday
drives, you know, of yesteryear. On Sunday everybody turns off their GPS.

00:42:45.000 --> 00:42:49.999
Getting lost, if you
really want to enjoy it,

00:42:50.000 --> 00:42:54.999
is not to be confined to space and time.

00:42:55.000 --> 00:42:59.999
So if I define getting lost this way, well,
it can be a very pleasant experience.

00:43:00.000 --> 00:43:04.999
Eventually someone will find you.

00:43:05.000 --> 00:43:10.000
[music]

00:44:15.000 --> 00:44:20.000
[sil.]