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IT IS autumn in New York City and a monarch butterfly is setting off on a 4000-kilometre journey to a fir tree on a mountainside in central Mexico, where it will spend the winter.

It is autumn in New York City and you come out of a café, set off for your hotel just a few blocks away, take a wrong turn and get utterly lost.

Perhaps it is unfair to compare the navigational skills of a human to those of the legendary monarch butterfly but, however you look at it, our sense of direction isn’t up there with the greats. Despite our stunning cognitive abilities, we can be dunces when it comes to finding our way around, and some of us are very good at getting lost indeed.

Why we are so bad at navigating has been a mystery for centuries, but now, at last, we have some answers. For a start, the mechanisms of the brain’s GPS are being laid bare. We are also discovering why some people have a better sense of direction than others. The latest findings even address the stereotype of men as better navigators than women. They also show how we can all become better navigators. Although we will never match a monarch butterfly, there are ways we can help ourselves make it back to that hotel.

First things first: your sense of direction is not, of course, an actual single sense. What we are talking about here is your ability to get to a destination as quickly and efficiently as possible, without getting lost. To do this, you need to know where you are in relation to landmarks. You must also be able to update your position if you turn a corner, or decide to take a shortcut, say.

Experience tells us that some people are much better at these things than others, and science backs this up. Some of the most enlightening research has been done at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). In a classic study published in 2005, Toru Ishikawa and Dan Montello of UCSB drove individual university students along a few routes in a residential neighbourhood they didn’t know with lots of hills and winding roads. Then they probed the students’ spatial understanding of the area. For example, standing at one landmark, students had to point in the direction of another one that they couldn’t see, or sketch a map of the neighbourhood.

“This research addresses the stereotype of men as better navigators than women”

in the performances of the 24 people tested. Some of them improved gradually over the 10 weekly sessions, but most either “got it” within a single session, or simply never did.

Further work has revealed that we seem to have reasonable insight into our own ability to make it home. That has been shown by the , developed at UCSB’s Spatial Thinking Lab by Mary Hegarty and her colleagues. It asks people to indicate how much they agree or disagree with statements such as, “I am very good at giving directions”, “I have a poor memory for where I left things” and “I very easily get lost in a new city”. People’s scores on this scale correlate pretty well with how they actually perform in tests of navigation. However, their performances on these tasks don’t correlate with scores on intelligence tests. Sometimes they don’t even correlate with other kinds of spatial ability, such as mental rotation tasks, says Hegarty.

If our sense of direction is unrelated to general intelligence, what does explain the chasm between individuals? One way to get at this is to consider the two main approaches we use to navigate. Route-based navigation entails remembering landmarks on a particular journey: turn left at the church and then right at the park, and so on. It works pretty well in familiar towns or on regular journeys, but it is inflexible. What do you do if roadworks force you to take another route?

Then there is mental mapping, which involves creating – either consciously or unconsciously – a mental map of your environment, akin to an app map. This approach is sometimes considered superior because it is more flexible and allows you to take shortcuts where appropriate. However, it is also more cognitively demanding.

“Super-navigators such as migratory birds can sense Earth’s magnetic field”

Most of us use both tactics, but the trick is to get the balance right. Good navigators probably select the best strategy for the job automatically, says Hegarty. And this is where we can say something about the loaded question of whether men are better with directions than women.

There have been many studies, using a variety of tests of navigation, to probe this. Sometimes men and women perform equally well. However, in tests where men outperform women there are hints that this may be down to a preference among men for using mental mapping, compared with a preference among women for using route-based navigation.

, for example, Hegarty and others put 140 UCSB students in a virtual reality maze with high concrete walls. The maze contained 12 objects, including a chair and a duck, placed at various junctions. After being taught a route through the maze, the volunteers were started off at one object and asked to navigate to another. Sometimes the learned route was the shortest path and at other times it was quicker to take a novel route. The researchers found that women were more likely to follow learned routes and to wander. Men showed a greater preference for trying to work out shortcuts, which calls for mental mapping. On average, males were faster and covered less ground in reaching their target.

Previous studies have also found that women are less likely than men to explore shortcuts. Why might that be? Sarah Creem-Regehr at the University of Utah has an idea. Her research shows that when navigating an unfamiliar virtual environment, women have a more cautious approach and tend to than men do. She suggests that in ancestral times, a woman who got lost would have been more vulnerable than a man. Her potential gain from taking a shortcut would arguably have been lower than a man’s, given the relatively higher risk to her life if she encountered an unexpected threat such as a predator’s den. It isn’t faster, but “it is safer to return to places you’ve already visited”, says Creem-Regehr.

“Good navigators tend to have a superior sense of smell and better posture”

That sounds plausible. However, until very recently, researchers interested in navigation have . As such, the results might not apply to women generally, or to our ancestors. Might we get a different view of sex differences in navigation by looking at people in traditional societies? That is what anthropologist Elizabeth Cashdan at the University of Utah and others are trying to find out.

Cashdan and her colleagues are looking at small-scale societies, in particular the Tsimane of Bolivia and the Twe of Namibia. The researchers have found that Twe and Tsimane boys and girls are equally good at pointing accurately to distant locations, and at imagining being in one location and pointing towards another (two classic tests of navigational ability). Then, around adolescence, girls from both groups become increasingly concerned about physical dangers, including the risk of getting lost.

In the driving seat

This seems to support Creem-Regehr’s ideas, but there is a twist. Although a sex-linked difference in navigation emerges in Twe adults, it doesn’t for the Tsimane. . The Tsimane hunt, forage and fish in dense, dangerous jungle, and tend not to roam far. The Twe live in open savannah. Unlike the Tsimane, Twe men have much larger ranges than women – in particular, they travel long distances to visit partners; the society isn’t monogamous. As a result of this they face greater navigational challenges, and gain more experience, which may explain the differences in adults, says Cashdan.

This suggests that our navigation abilities have less to do with whether we are male or female per se, and more to do with environmental factors and personal experience. In the West, men tend to drive more than women, which would give them greater experience at navigating, says Kate Jeffery, who studies cognitive maps at University College London. In addition, most tests of navigation are done in virtual reality environments, giving an advantage to people who regularly play video games, and these tend to be men.

The physical environment we inhabit also seems to play a part, as it does for the Twe and Tsimane. In yet-to-be-published research, Erica Barhorst-Cates, a student of Creem-Regehr, found that people who live in the city of Padua in Italy, with its dense network of irregular, small streets, were better at point-to-landmark tests than people from Salt Lake City, which is built on a strict grid system.

Other factors underpinning individual differences are emerging from a massive study led by Hugo Spiers of University College London, which surveys people’s navigational abilities using a mobile-phone-based game called Sea Hero Quest. In an analysis of more than 500,000 people from 57 countries, the best performers were living in nations with greater gender equality and greater economic wealth – associated with higher levels of education, which improves abstract problem solving. The presence of four Nordic countries in the top 10 has led Spiers to speculate that there may have been selection for good navigational abilities in their Viking and seafaring past. Perhaps it also helps to have a culture of participating in sports requiring navigation, such as orienteering.

“Satnav and phone app maps may be undermining our natural navigation abilities”

Another reason for individual differences could, in theory, lie in the way our brains process the sensory information we use in navigation (see “Your brain’s GPS”). For example, a recent study revealed that . Another suggests that why some people attempting to take a straight route might eventually start taking a circular one in dim light or darkness. The key here seems to be slight variations in the functioning of the vestibular system in the inner ear, which is crucial for orientation.

It is all very well knowing why your sense of direction might be lacking, but is there anything you can do to improve it? “No one is really looking systematically at how to train people to be better navigators,” says Hegarty. Nevertheless, our growing knowledge of what is involved does provide some clues. She and Jeffery both advocate simply paying more attention to the environment: consciously noting landmarks and turns that you make, for example, and regularly looking behind you, a technique that some animals use. In addition, Jeffery checks for the direction of shadows to orientate herself when she comes up out of a tube station. “I also look at the compass on my phone – I’m not averse to modern technology,” she says.

But perhaps we are better off not relying on technology. “I’m fairly confident that regular use of map software impairs a person’s ability to wayfind on their own,” says Montello. “It certainly impairs cognitive map formation.” He believes that satnav and phone map apps are undermining our natural navigation abilities, going as far as to describe this as “technological infantilism”.

We know there is a virtuous cycle when it comes to navigation: people with a better sense of direction are more likely to explore an environment rather than rely on known routes, which helps to build their cognitive maps and so improves their sense of direction. “If you want your children to be able to find their own ways without nav technology, you will have to let them practise,” he says.

The disorientated ape?

Why do humans seem to be so poor at navigating compared with other animals? One answer is that we don’t generally undertake long migrations. Our survival hasn’t depended on being able to do so, and we therefore haven’t evolved abilities found in animals that must. , leatherback turtles, honeybees, Atlantic salmon and migratory birds are able to sense Earth’s magnetic field, for example, helping them cover vast distances with unerring accuracy.

But is our sense of direction really any worse than that of animals that are more like us? It is hard to know for sure, because it is difficult to find tests that allow direct comparisons. “Animals probably have senses unavailable to us like [superior] olfaction, that give them large-scale compass information that we lack,” says Kate Jeffery of University College London. “We, on the other hand, are very good at reasoning and at constructing complex mental maps. We also have language which gives us a whole other domain.” She thinks that in a natural environment – when we can see mountains, rivers and the sun, for instance – we may not be much worse than other mammals.

However, navigating in a city, where tall buildings often block directional cues, isn’t easy. And we make it even more difficult, says Jeffery. Signs within the London Underground, for example, require you to decide whether you want to go northbound, southbound, eastbound or westbound. This assumes that you already know the layout of London. Worse, it won’t help you to build a good mental map.

Elizabeth Cashdan at the University of Utah also thinks we are too hard on ourselves. She has studied the navigational abilities of modern hunter-gatherers and suggests that if humans appear to have a worse sense of direction than other species, it might be because we have to cope with such a wide array of environments. Generally, we cope pretty well, she says. “We didn’t evolve needing to travel from North to South America, but we do need to know how to forage locally, and get to the drug store – and we usually can.”

This article appeared in print under the headline “Get lost!”