Book review: "You Are Here"

THE BOOK — You Are Here: Why we Can Find Our Way to the Moo and Get lost in the Mall by Colin Ellard. Illustrated. 328 pp. Doubleday. $25.

TITLE OF REVIEW — "Where Am I?" — "People have become disconnected from their settings, requiring a GPS to get anywhere."

REVIEWER — Jonah Lehrer, author of How We Decide and a contributing editor at Wired.

SOURCE — The New York Times, Book Reviews, 12 July 2009.

LINK TO REVIEW — You Are Here

KEY CONCEPTS OF THE REVIEW:

"Colin Ellard, a behavorial neuroscientist at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, probes . . . [the] shortcomings of human spatial intelligence in his delightfully lucid book 'You are Here'."

"We’ve become hopelessly disconnected from out setting, burdened with a brain that needs a GPS satellite just to get across town.

"Ellard argues that the human talent for abstraction — we can easily imagine places and spaces that don’t exist — comes with a hidden cost, which is that our mental maps of the physical world have become sparser over the course of human evolution."

"Unlike insects, we can’t keep track of the patterns of polarized light; unlike loggerhead turtles, we don’t pay attention to magnetic fields; unlike geese, we’re not very good at path integration, which is why we have to write down directions that involve multiple turns."

"And yet, just when I started to get really jealous of desert ants, Ellard points out that it’s possible to improve our feeble spatial brain."

"The second half of “You Are Here” bears only a tangential relation to the first, shifting focus from feats of navigation to the design of public spaces."

"Why, for example, do we gravitate to certain places inside the house? The answer, it turns out, has a lot to with what architects call isovists, the region of visibility from particular vantage points."

"Because our spatial instincts follow a few simple rules, scientists who use “space syntax analyses” are able to envision how a place will be used before it exists.

To read the entire review, click You Are Here.

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