Since I began my lab-ratting, I've been filling out a lot of "rate your own sense of direction" or "rate your own spatial abilities" questionnaires. There are usually a series of statements, such as, "I very easily get lost in a new city" or "When I'm in a complex building, I can easily visualize what's outside the building in the direction I'm looking" and then you are asked to answer with varying levels of agreement ranging from strong agreement to strong disagreement.
Here's one of my favorites: "I always know if a chair will fit through my front door before buying it." Now, I've never bought a chair so large that there was any doubt that it would fit through my front door. But I do have experience trying to move a massive armoire into a second-floor apartment I was sharing with my sister. We had three people pushing and lifting, but the thing got stuck at a turn in the stairs. We managed to inch it up and forward through a series of twisting, lurching and cursing maneuvers, but after half an hour or so, we knew we were beaten. Then the real trouble started, because by this point we couldn't get it down the stairs either. It was pinned. We phoned an extra large friend for emergency help. He arrived just in time before my sister went to find an axe.
Here's another one: "It's not important to me to know where I am." It must be nice. But then again, aren't you curious?
And one more: "I enjoy reading maps." I do. I love maps. I like reading maps so much that I look at maps of places where I have no prospect of ever going. Likewise, I love historical maps (in the case of Boston, I like tracing the streets that once were bays, busy with merchant ships; I like to imagine the farm that was cut up in the late 1800s to create my neighborhood). Yet, I still get lost all the time. And my suspicion is that the assumption behind this question is that the more you enjoy maps, the more spatially oriented you are generally. So, it makes me wonder...
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I, too, question the assumption of a positive correlation between enjoyment of maps and spatial intelligence. I love maps but don't have a very strong natural sense of direction or visual-spatial quotient (at least, I'd guess I don't). For me, any leisure map viewing is about soaking in logical relationships, flows and patterns and integrating them into my sense of the world, or adding a geographic element to some textual knowledge I already have. But I don't think that says anything about my ability to complete the triangle in the desert. I think of it as a left brain / right brain issue, though I'm not sure that what I've said about maps is actually "left brained" (if those definitions even hold anymore).
ReplyDeleteAlso, if I study a map of an area I've never been to before, I'm much more successful making my way around, to the point where people I'm with think I must have a great sense of direction.