Inner navigation

the long version

"Why are we so often disoriented when we come up from the subway? Do we really walk in circles when we lose our bearings in the wilderness? How - and why - do we get lost at all?" "In this book, Erik Jonsson, a Swedish-born engineer who has spent a lifetime exploring navigation over every terrain, from the crowded cities of Europe to the emptiness of the desert, gives readers extraordinary new insights into the human way-finding system." "Written for the nonscientist, Inner Navigation explains the array of physical and psychological cues the brain uses to situate us in space and build its "cognitive maps" - the subconscious maps it employs to organize landmarks. Humans, Jonsson explains, also possess an intuitive direction frame - an internal compass - that keeps these maps oriented (when it functions properly) and a dead-reckoning system that constantly updates our location on the map as we move through the world. Even the most cynical city-dweller will be amazed to learn how much of this innate sense we use every day as we travel across town or around the world."--BOOK JACKET.