Body & Soul - Directionally Challenged

Sarah Ryder is directionally challenged


I am one of those people who can still get lost in my hometown of Motueka. Well not lost exactly, just not able to find my way back to a house that I’ve been to before, maybe more than once. When I lived overseas I was permanently lost, especially in Dublin.

I’ve been lost in large cities, small towns, mazes, malls, on buses, trains, and deserted country roads. I’ve been lost in New Zealand and overseas. I’ve been lost going back to places I’ve been to five times before.

When I worked as a reporter in North Canterbury, people I was interviewing would give me the sort of directions that would be fine for most people. You know: ‘Go down Back Track Road, take the first right, second left, follow your nose, and it’s the second house with the green roof’. An hour late and three phone calls later, I would sometimes arrive.

I can’t wait to buy a vehicle with one of those magical GPS systems so I never have to try and navigate while driving again. Although I can imagine I’ll be one of those people that ends up getting stuck in snow trying to drive through the Molesworth in the middle of winter because the GPS tells me it’s the shortest route.

But here’s the scary thing … I have been nominated as team navigator for the Spring Challenge Women’s Adventure Race at St Arnaud. Well, not nominated exactly, it’s kind of happened by default because the other two can’t (or won’t).

And one of my fellow team members is my old boss who is not exactly renowned for her tact and patience. I’m getting the shivers just thinking about it … the team out in the bush, in pouring rain, after a gut-busting three-hour bike ride and two-hour raft trip; cold, tired, and hungry; and I’ll be there with a map trying desperately to orientate myself and figure out which direction we should head … no pressure!

So I’ve consulted Dr Google to see if he could offer any advice for directionally challenged individuals like myself and here’s some of what he had to say.

Research suggests that for people’s navigational systems to work well, they have to integrate two different directional or ‘heading’ systems: Egocentric, or personal, direction (where you are in relation to external objects such as a door or a building); and Allocentric, or external, direction (where you are in relation to fixed environmental points such as north, south, east, or west. This system is most closely linked to what’s generally referred to as a ‘sense of direction’.)

Basically the directionally challenged struggle with one or both of these navigational systems. We may also lack the ability to mentally rotate, which means that we always need to have the map facing in the direction we’re heading, struggle to reverse directions, and are hopeless at those spatial reasoning questions that ask you to choose which figure B looks like when it’s flipped 180 degrees.

So is there anything I can do, or are my team and I destined to spend at least one freezing night on the windswept mountains of St Arnaud? Well, according to the good Dr G, people’s beliefs about their sense of direction usually predict how well they navigate, so as of now, I am going to stop referring to myself as directionally challenged.

And of course there is that boring old ‘practice’ thing. Because all skills can be improved with repetition. And, failing that, there’s those handy little GPS devices which were invented for people like me … Molesworth, here I come!