Wayfinding: The Art and Science of How We Find and Lose Our Way

I love the subtitle of the book, Wayfinding: The Art and Science of How We Find and Lose Our Way, by Michael Bond, 2020, referring to wayfinding as both an art and a science. And that is what Bond covers in this book. There is information about how people and animals navigate, with interesting examples, as well as different reasons people walk, get lost and find – or don’t find – their way back.

This book also gave me a better idea of what it is to be lost – both geographically and psychologically. The introduction starts:

“If you have ever wondered what it feels like to be lost, my advice is, don’t try it. The experience is terrifying and often traumatizing. People who are truly lost are usually incapable of making decisions that could save their lives, and they may even think they are going to die. They lose their minds as well as their bearings.

It is something of a miracle that we don’t get lost more often. The physical world is infinitely complex, yet most of us are able to find our way around it. We can walk through unfamiliar streets while maintaining a sense of direction, take shortcuts along paths we have never used and remember for many years places we have visited only once. These are pretty remarkable achievements.

One of the purposes of this book is to explain how we do it …”

That opening was enough for me to want to continue reading and I was glad I did. The information was not only fascinating, but I also learned a lot about ways of getting lost and how to deal with it (big tip: stay put, don’t start wandering around).

Bond begins with the path Homo sapiens took out of Africa around 75,000 years ago and the paths they created throughout Europe and Asia. He continues with how the spatial skills develop and how the brain forms cognitive maps. This leads to how these maps relate to memory and other cognitive functions. The following sections were particularly interesting to me in examining how we find – or try to find – our way and what makes some people better navigators than others.

Bond includes stories of various great navigators in history as well as that of a hiker who got lost (and died) on the Appalachian Trail in Maine and was the subject of the biggest search and rescue operation in the state’s history. The book ends with chapters on how and why people get lost (eg, hikers, dementia patients, children), and what they usually do in the situation (whether good or bad).

A lot of information is covered, but in a way that doesn’t overwhelm the reader with unnecessary detail. Instead, the writing style made me want to keep reading.