Testing 1,2,3

In a few days, I leave for Philadelphia where some navigation researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and Temple University will do their best to diagnose my sense of direction. The tricky part is that most labs investigating human wayfinding aren't set up to evaluate individuals. They focus on how the mind reacts to certain navigational cues, what brain areas are activated, and what benefits or impedes our spatial ability generally, and research into the how and why of individual sense-of-direction differences is in its infancy.

But these folks in Philly have agreed to run various tests on me (some real-world navigation, a bit of virtual reality, some paper and pencil stuff, and an fMRI) and to compare my performance and my brain activation to the rest of their study subjects. I also have more lab-rat dates lined up for later this spring. Can't wait.