Lost in space: Why city slickers are losing their spatial skills

If life is a journey, then some of us have a much harder time than others finding our way around its unexpected pathways. A global study of navigation abilities has found that people living in cities have a poorer sense of direction than those in the country, especially if they’re living in an urban area with a straightforward, grid-like street layout, such as Melbourne. It seems that because city slickers don’t need to test their brains as much as their country cousins, their spatial skills weaken or don’t develop as strongly.

Grid-like streets may be easier to navigate, but have been shown to weaken our sense of direction.Credit: Getty Images

The international study, led by researchers at University College London, gave more than 400,000 people access to a mobile phone video game called Sea Hero Quest, which has more than 4 million players worldwide. The game, which involves a son charting a nautical course around islands and across stormy seas to recover the memories his father has lost to dementia, was designed to test its players’ navigational skills. The contrast between city and country dwellers surprised even lead researcher Professor Hugo Spiers. “I wasn’t sure which way it would go, which made this an exciting study,” he tells Good Weekend.

That’s not all: the study confirmed that yes, our navigation abilities decline as we age. Yes, men tend to be better navigators than women, although Spiers chalks this up to unequal opportunity rather than any inherent superiority: the gender difference on spatial skills is smaller in countries where women enjoy greater freedom of movement. Interestingly, the world’s best navigators live in Scandinavia – Denmark, Finland and Norway – a product, perhaps, of their Viking ancestry.

Spiers acknowledges that some people are born with a superior sense of direction: “Navigating requires integrating lots of different types of information, understanding what you sense [see and hear] and making good decisions [in terms of which way to go],” he says.

Why is a study of navigational abilities important? Because any proneness to becoming disoriented or lost is one of the first indicators of dementia. “This skill is lost in the earliest stages of AD (advanced dementia), but there has been no standardised test for it,” notes Spiers.

If it’s any consolation to those of us with a less than stellar sense of direction, the navigational skills of humans, while they helped our ancient ancestors reach every corner of the globe from East Africa 70,000 years ago, pale in comparison to those of the rest of the animal kingdom. Scientists are still trying to fathom exactly how non-human animals, from Adélie penguins to humpback whales, are able to travel vast distances with great accuracy during seasonal migrations.

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