darkemeralds | Directionally challenged

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Directionally challenged

I discovered this function on my new Android phone last night. Well, okay, my 14 year old nephew showed it to me:

You push a button and say, "Navigate to 1234 Southwest 5th Avenue."

And it tells you how to get there.

I know, I know: people who've had iPhones for years, or who have GPS in their car, are no longer impressed by this. And people who actually have a sense of direction could never, ever be as thrilled about it as I am.

But I have no sense of direction. It's a borderline handicap, a slight but very real disability, that carries all kinds of baggage: it's funny to people, it's goofy, it's "feminine," it's an allowable form of "stupidity" for an otherwise very bright, creative person. It's also annoying and incomprehensible to people who don't suffer from it. They think I'm just not trying. "Come on!" they'll say. "Just picture the route in your head!"

There's no picture there. On a good day, if I know that that's west over there (because the sun is setting or I can see the West Hills, or the Pacific Ocean or something obvious), then I can painstakingly work out that to the right of west is north, and to the right of that is east, and to the right of that is south, using the "Never Eat Shredded Wheat" trick. But I can't feel it, and even if I can see it, I'm unsure.

As a prosthetic aid, I have whole catalogs of street names and their sequence memorized from long residence in my hometown. Jefferson Street is south of Madison Street, so if I set out from Madison and come to Jefferson, I can deduce that I'm heading south. If I come to Salmon, on the other hand, I know I've gone north. I cannot sense directions. When I'm moving, I'm just heading forward. When I turn left, I'm still heading forward. That's all I've got.

I've burned a lot of calories and a lot of gasoline over the years correcting for this handicap.

So when I got in my car this morning and said to my phone, "Navigate to [XYZ Address in unfamiliar neighborhood]" and my phone talked to me, right in my ear, and said, "Head west on NE Beech Street and turn right on NE 11th Avenue," and kept telling me exactly when and where to turn--well, I'm not exaggerating when I say I felt like I'd been let out of a prison.

And when I got to where I was going and there was a Google Street View of the destination house right there on my phone screen looking exactly like reality, I wish I could describe the sense of safety and security it gave me.

When I think that I ever, ever ventured out without this tool, I am amazed at myself.

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omg. i'm directionally challenged too!!! i have no "grid" in my head. generally, i don't know/feel how the streets relate to one another. like, i know they do - i can read a map and figure out how to get places, and i do understand numbered streets go bigger in one direction and smaller in the opposite (except when i get to the "middle" and the numbering starts all over and is the opposite!!) - but i can't fully visualize how the streets are laid out around my route. and i always use directions like left/right and not north/south/etc

people always say things like: go south about a quarter mile, then go east on x street, etc, etc. and i have absolutely no idea what the fuck they are talking about. lately i just tell people that i have my gps and i'm gonna use it but they still keep trying to give me instructions. i just nod and say thanks but it goes in one ear and out the other!

and i am terrible at remembering how to get places until i've navigated the same route at least 4 or 5 times. and then, once i memorize a route, don't ask me to detour 'cause i will get lost. i have nothing in my head that lets me figure out a new route unless the areas is extremely familiar (and that's a very small series of areas which i've driven in for years where)

that's why the gps i got for christmas one year was pretty much the best gift ever!

and well, with my phone - the google navigator is fucking awesome! although i've never tried to talk to it!! i just click it, type in my destination and let it tell me where to turn. i've learned how to see the route info, and future steps and even how to ask for a detour or alternate route choices (like when there is construction or it's telling me to use the expressway and i want to take the streets)

although, the weirdest thing happened today. my friend and i were going to an address (it was 1600 s. oak park) and for some unknown reason the gps on her phone directed her to 13th & maple and declared that it was our destination despite displaying on the screen that it was 1600 s. oak park! we were completely puzzled. and yes! a picture of the destination popped up! it was so weird! i put the address in my phone's gps and it told me how to get to the correct location.

ok. i'd better get to bed now!! ttys!!

Do you feel like you lack of direction is a secret? I cover for mine all the time--kind of like someone who can't read covering that up constantly. So I'm only just now starting to think about its and discuss it as a real and valid problem.

Google maps aren't perfect yet, of course, and I know that Android apps will use cell towers and wifi signals for location when they can't get a GPS signal--maybe that's what happened too you?

Edited 2010-11-11 06:46 (UTC)

I also meant to say that the voice functionality is really fantastic. For one thing, I found it completely non-distracting while driving, and way more convenient than looking at the screen. I have a new Google alert for Voice Android Bike Navigation because so far it's only for driving. And I could really use it on my bike! I'm sure it's coming.

I'm the opposite, I can normally find anything I've been to once, and I know North from South where ever in the world I am - unless I get completely turned around.

There is ONE place on this planet, an area about 2 miles in diameter that I arrived at, in the dark, after the bus I was on had done a U turn and dropped a very sleepy me off. In that ONE place North is South and South is North and it hasn't changed over the years.

On the other hand I cannot tell right from left. Like you with direction I can eventually work it out on most days, but not always.

In a hunter-gatherer society a variety of skills are crucial to keeping the group alive. The person who has memorized the route will absolutely know the route year after year. The person like me, who operates on an instinctive level may get hit over the head one day and need to be dragged down the path!!

My bet is that you have some skills I completely lack, I might be able to guide you there, but you will be able to do other things that are just as valuable, or more so. We are all broken in some ways and very strong in others.

I didn't begin to understand my disorientation as a physical "handicap" until some instinct during my very first trauma therapy session made me mention that I had no sense of direction, and the therapist said that it's a common symptom of post-traumatic conditions. He said that after a car accident, victims may get out of the car and wander very vaguely, the shock having completely disoriented them. If the shock happens early enough in life and under certain circumstances, he said, the disorientation can become permanent.

So I'm wondering if something similar is working in the instance you mention: the disorienting and probably very disturbing event of literally waking to find yourself in a strange place continues to operate in that one place.

I mention it because of a weird, opposite effect I noticed yesterday. My destination was up near the neighborhood where I lived until age 11. I have no reason to go there in my adult life, and never do. But as I was kind of blindly following my Google Navigation instructions, I came to a street corner and suddenly knew exactly where I was. It was as if the map settled around me and I knew exactly where to turn to get to my old childhood house, the park, the houses of long-forgotten childhood friends.

Since I know that my disorienting trauma occurred about a year after my family moved to that house, I surmise that I'm pretty well oriented to the tiny orbit I traveled prior to the event, and foggy on most everything that came later.

Your two-mile circle sounds strangely similar.

As someone with the same disability, I do not have enough 'WORD' to express my agreement & understanding. Buying sat nav fir the car changed my life.

And what you say about people mocking and/or suggesting that you're just not trying hard enough...it's good to know that there are people out there who appreciate just how maddening and impossible this is.

Ooops. That was me.

It's taken me YEARS to come to grips with the simple fact that no amount of trying harder was ever going to improve my orientation in the world. Once I did that, though, I could finally start to assess it not only as a personal problem, but as a genuine handicap and the cause of a lot of emotional discomfort and bizarre prejudice.

And THEN I could start looking for solutions like this awesome GPS function on my phone, and actually using it.

Yes. That.

And I think the thing I've struggled most with is the feeling that I'm living up to gender stereotyping. Even though my father has the same problem.

(You're left-handed? I think I've mentioned that I'm mixed-handed? I believe my handedness, or rather lack thereof, my spatial difficulties, and my brother's & father's dyslexia are all associated with the same quirk of brain architecture.)

I feel sure you're right about brain architecture. Yes, I am left-handed--very strongly so--and am the only person in my family for three generations who is. I've long supposed that my extremely clear sense of left and right--of relative direction--arises from it, and have been frustrated by not being able to deal with absolute directions.

The counselor I've been visiting for work-related learning problems wondered yesterday if I might be slightly dyslexic. I don't think so, but there's something...something about visual-spatial perception that just doesn't work "normally" in my brain. I can't account for it by heredity--at least not in any direct way--and I'm impressed with the persistence of gender stereotyping in your situation, where two male family members had difficulties like yours, but in your case it tended to remain a gender-specific trait.

I was just googling "Never Eat Shredded Wheat" to see if there was a handy explanatory link (all the references I could find call it a mnemonic for remembering the compass points, and I became annoyed because [prejudice] who can't remember the names of the cardinal directions??? [/prejudice], and none explained the useful way in which, if you can figure out one direction and point at it with your right hand, you can turn towards the right and say the rest...::sigh::), and I came upon a British travel book by that title. The blurb said:

[The author] blames several factors for our collective cultural disorientation, including the fact that we're all in such a terrible rush to get somewhere that we no longer notice the journey (plus, of course, the infantilising effect of GPS and sat-nav).

Grrr. I don't want to get all up on some high horse of woe is me and my terrible handicap, but condemning GPS and sat-nav as "infantilising" does seem to come from the school of "you could do it if you tried, you lazy-minded loser."

It's also annoying and incomprehensible to people who don't suffer from it. They think I'm just not trying.

Oh, so much sympathy for this!

I'm not quite as badly off as you in the navigation department - I can learn routes and remember them if I travel them a few times - but I know so well the "but I can do that, It's easy! So of course you can do it too!' attitude.

Rob is like this with me about mechanical things. Her knows, apparently instinctively, which way to tighten bolts or move something so that it aligns properly with something else. I can't do that I have no concept of it whatever. And he cannot get this through his head.

He can do it, so of course, I must be able to. It's one of the most annoying things about him, and although I love him dearly, it drives me distracted.

There seems to be a real, possibly organic difference between left/right or relative orientation and absolute, north-south-east-west orientation. I've known people who need to use the
Left-hand-L gesture to remember left from right. And plenty of people need to use Lefty Loosey Righty Tighty for help in turning screws and taps. I think a lot of those people are perfectly well oriented in the world.

And, as you describe yourself, you're one of lots of people who are reasonably well oriented. That perfect sense of direction is rare enough that it's used as a heroic quality in adventure stories.

You've got me thinking about my own arrogance in areas of natural talent, and I am reflecting now with some shame on my inability to work with my mother on computer related things. Technology is a completely natural world to me. There, my sense of direction is unerring.

Any chance you could share this post with Rob and say, 'That's how I feel about mechanical things!'?

Any chance you could share this post with Rob and say, 'That's how I feel about mechanical things!'?

I think he sort of gets it on an intellectual level, but he just can't really fully get his head around it somehow, if you know what I mean. Rather like I know intellectually that there are people out there who don't find Terry Pratchett books funny, but I can't actually put myself in that position and fully understand where they're coming from.

Besides, he's been known to override our satnav and produce a better route himself on occasion (annoying but useful) so I suspect he might not empathise with your position in the same way I do.

The Trustee has no sense of direction either. I never know whether Point X is west or east of Point Y, but if I've been there I have a visual memory of how to get from X to Y.

However, I hope you will not emulate The Trustee's most maddening GPS-related behavior: when the pissed-off little voice says "Turn left!" sometimes he goes right JUST TO SEE WHAT HAPPENS. No wonder the little voice sounds pissed off.

LOL! I tried that yesterday. I knew from long experience where I was going and a good way for me to get there. It was not the stupid, traffic-filled way The Voice wanted me to go. With what I imagined too be a resigned sigh, when I missed a turn, The Voice simply have me the next option.

No clue what it would do if I just overshot my destination and kept going, but I can imagine something like 'If you meant San Francisco, please say so.'

Hmm, I think Androids will navigate you back to the destination. (

cleverthylacine has an Android, and I have a Pixi, and I don't always remember whose does what.) This behavior is useful if you overshoot, but less useful if you know perfectly well where you are and are trying to find a parking spot.

Today it said, "signal has been lost"--but that could have been owing to cloud cover, which is dense today.

I'll learn the ins and outs of it pretty soon. One thing's for sure: I need a car charger. The GPS drinks the battery down like a glass of juice.

Oh, I'm glad the GPS worked so well for you! (And I agree, I think the voice would be much better than the screen, I know I'd have an accident while trying to drive/navigate at the same time.)

I always print out little google maps to take with me if I'm going somewhere new.

That's the one place I can think of where I regret not having a printer

Mind you, map reading is not my best thing either. I understand maps prefectly well. I love maps in a very map geek way. But I have some difficulty translating the image on the flat piece of paper to the three dimensional reality in front of me, and it gets worse under the stress of, say, driving in an unfamiliar area.

So the Voice talking to me as I go might as well have been custom designed just for me.

I imagine it's like plenty of other inventions that started out as mere conveniencs for regular folks and turned out to be tremendous boons to people with disabilities.

Brilliant! I love a good gadget and this one seems particularly useful.

I was trying to count up the number of other single-function gadgets it has replaced--or potentially stands in for. An ebook reader, an iPod, a GPS unit, a flashlight, a kitchen timer, a netbook, a camera, a video recorder, a calendar, a notepad...oh, and a phone.

Needless to say, I'm really getting my money's worth.

Indeed you are!

I have to say, while I like my phone and wouldn't replace it until it no longer works and can't be repaired, I am looking forward to getting one of the new breed next time around.

I feel sure you'll love it when you do. I'm so glad I took the plunge.

PS Is this article on the best writing apps for Android of any interest to you?

Oh, cool! Thank you!

I am 100% like this with directions. I LOVE the map/directions feature on my iPhone. Sometimes I'll be able to get someplace without it thanks to the super easy grid system of the roads here (everything is numerical and most streets are North-South or East-West with no curves). If I'm anywhere outside of Salt Lake, this is a necessity. Welcome to the world of having directions! Also, I'm really glad that I'm not alone in having zero sense of direction. :)

oh right, alanna_liadon from Livejournal, cause I don't have a dreamwidth account.

Hi! You are totally not alone in having no sense of direction. I'm gleaning from other comments here that there's a whole range of oriented-ness, from not at all to perfectly. I've been to Salt Lake City, and I'd think there would be some real advantages there for the perpetually-disoriented: the straight-line grid system as you mention, plus, as I recall, the ever-visible wall o' mountains to the--it's to the east, right?

Portland--like most American cities--is also on a grid, and has handy quadrants and numbered streets and some sections of alphabetically named streets, but darned if there's not a river right down the middle of it, with a bend in it. Hee! Nature, huh?

I am so grateful for modern technology!

Oh wow, I hear you. I'm lucky in that I have half of it: if I have physically been over the route I will usually be able to do it again, and I do retain a sense of where things I know are in relation to each other, at least over a small area. But it bears no relation whatsoever to the map! My version of "up" and "down" are not North and South, they are determined by some arcane combination of actual hills and my sense of the social center of wherever I am. I have actually broken down crying when people tried to give me NSEW directions, because they /don't work/. Just tell me where to turn right, damn it!

Which, no doubt, contributes to my general terror of trying to find places I've never been. Me and Google Maps satellite view have become good friends, but even that only goes so far.

I've often joked that I can tell up from down, but that's about it.

my general terror of trying to find places I've never been

Yes! And no matter how good someone's directions were back in the days before Google Maps, there'd be mistakes, some little minor omission that would become an unrecoverable error for someone like me.

I find both satellite view and street view useful, but, as you suggest, not infallible, because of my difficulty relating what's on that screen to what's before my eyes. Things feel different on the ground.

Hence my falling in love with the voice directions. If you'd asked me a year ago, I'd have said, "Oh hell no, that would drive me crazy with annoyance," but in actual practice it's such a boon and relieves my mind of so much stress, that it's my new favorite thing in the whole wide world. No confusing, irreconcilable visuals. Just a navigator in your ear. It's AWESOME.

I can only extrapolate from my own terror one lovely New Year's Eve when I decided to drive to the Trader Joe's that I had gone to with my aunt a few times before, less than two weeks after having moved to San Francisco. I took a wrong turn in the fog, and while I knew where I was, and I have a very good sense of direction under most circumstances, I was completely lost. I had a map, and I had a friend who bailed me out with the cellphone and Google Maps, but I was entirely freaked out. LOST, and I couldn't find myself.

It was that very evening that I ordered a GPS.

I scoff at the concept that the GPS is likely to make it harder for people to learn where they are going. On the contrary -- it makes it easier for me, because I then rehearse driving to that place on exactly a workable route, and I don't waste time getting lost, and I don't waste brainpower learning the wrong route. Granted, there's less forced exploration of the territory surrounding, but still.

I have a strong kinesthetic sense (like

ranunculus, I tend to be able to find something I've been to before) and I used to never be able to tell the compass directions until I lived in an apartment where they were posted on the walls and I got in the habit of daily morning, noon, evening, (and midnight, if I was still up) prayers, pointed in the direction of the sun.

But the directions still mean very little to me without the map. If I don't have a map, I can't feel the directions on it. One day when my internet crapped out, before the smartphone, I didn't have the grid drawn out for the place I was going, and I called up a friend to ask them to relay stuff off Google Maps. And they started giving me directions. And I had to tell them to stop, and give me the information that I *actually* needed.

I'm very, very, very glad you've found this. It must be amazing. So much freedom!

Great story--and of course, if you imagine living in a world that feels like that foggy evening all the time, you can probably get some notion of what it's like inside my head.

Seriously, I wonder how I've managed! I guess I really haven't in a lot of instances, but we all get through life with our limitations.

And GPS is a boon to EVERYONE. I read somewhere recently that one of the many things the current young generation will never know is being lost. (Not an absolute, obviously, but in general, the concept of being lost on the face of the earth is drying up.) I'm all for that!

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