Not just where, but why?

I'm five posts into this blog, and I haven't yet explained myself.

In my family, I'm known as the one who gets lost. My dad, who used to sell steel all over the world, would wander around Karachi, Dacca, and Mumbai the day he arrived and take shortcuts back to his hotel. My brother, separated from the rest of us in a mall at age two, found his way back to our car and sat on the hood to await his frantic family. My mom and sister have no such navigational boasts that I know of, but neither do they get lost the way I get lost (habitually, spectacularly). I won't waste time cataloguing the scenes of my woeful wayfinding but they range from the Mojave Desert to the stacks of my college library. And don't get me started on driving in Boston.

Here's the weirdest part. Despite all the wrong turns and misadventures, I suspect I might actually have a superb sense of direction that I haven't properly tapped. So, I'm on a mission to find out. Along the way, I'll dig into the mysteries of this curious cognitive skill--what it is, where it comes from, and why we feel its absence in our bones.