Inner navigation

"Why are we so often disoriented when we come up from the subway? Do we really walk in circles when we lose our bearings in the wilderness? How - and why - do we get lost at all?" "In this book, Erik Jonsson, a Swedish-born engineer who has spent a lifetime exploring navigation over every terrain, from the crowded cities of Europe to the emptiness of the desert, gives readers extraordinary new insights into the human way-finding system." "Written for the nonscientist, Inner Navigation explains the array of physical and psychological cues the brain uses to situate us in space and build its "cognitive maps" - the subconscious maps it employs to organize landmarks. Humans, Jonsson explains, also possess an intuitive direction frame - an internal compass - that keeps these maps oriented (when it functions properly) and a dead-reckoning system that constantly updates our location on the map as we move through the world. Even the most cynical city-dweller will be amazed to learn how much of this innate sense we use every day as we travel across town or around the world."--BOOK JACKET.