"Wisdom sits in places. It’s like water that never dries up. You need to drink water to stay alive, don’t you? Well, you also need to drink from places. You must remember everything about them."

☸️ From WAYFINDING: The Science and Mystery of How Humans Navigate the World by M.R. O'Connor, 2019.

#ScienceSeptember

One of those books that changes the way you think about the world and our relationship to it. Really amazing mix of empirical and experientiental reporting. Fantastically written and observed.

4.5, really, because I had no hesitation reading this through to the end and relating to it the entire way, and that can't be said of all nonfiction. I feel motivated to go take a walk now and see if I can learn my world a little differently.

I thought this was a very interesting book. Wayfinding is considered the ability to navigate your way without use of technologies. The book starts off with an interesting discussion of the brain regions involved with these processes and unpacks the experiences of the author as she learns about the wayfinding skills that peoples in the Arctic, Australia and Oceania employ in finding their way through what appears to us to be nothing but unremarkable land- and sea-scapes. I was fascinated by the idea that we have an absolute and relative way to consider space and that this consideration of space may have to do with the way we construct narratives that guide us through the spatial world, but also more abstract worlds of myth and storytelling. The final chapters of the book look at how using less technology could allow us to flex our navigating skills without reliance on GPSs and technologies by noticing more of the hints around us everyday. However, there was a sense that this might be useful in the parts of the world which are not built up with roads and other people around every corner - not so much in cities or suburbia. Overall, an enjoyable read.

There's a lot of fascinating neurology and anthropology and linguistics and history in this book, but the meta-story is what really affected me, in reading. It's a story about how immensely capable humans are of creating and destroying knowledge. A dramatic advance in understanding brain functions followed by the revelation of how smartphone and GPS use degrade those functions. Incredible engineering of transportation technology like planes and automobiles, and how the burning of fuel to move them is destroying the homes and culture of Pacific island canoe builders. Progress in Western science and how racism narrowed those scientists' concept of "science" so tightly that they wrote off the empirical methods of indigenous peoples as animalistic instinct. Above all the story of tens of thousands of years of knowledge obliterated by colonial violence, one culture's deep understanding of their environment destroyed within a couple generations by another culture's self-righteous idea of progress.

And on a purely individual level, our capacity to learn wayfinding but forget it when we give ourselves mental shortcuts. If you spend a lot of time on a phone or computer (or with your face in a book such that you have to glance up disoriented and search for landmarks to tell you what bus stop you're at, because you've tuned out the stop announcing voice) but didn't grow up with them, you've probably had some moments of noticing your diminished capacity to wander aimlessly or figure things out on your own, and it's validating to read about that without a scolding tone.

It's a lot to take in, and it says a lot about how our relationship to the earth we live on makes us human. Excellent balance of typical science reporting and a generous extension of "science" to those whose wisdom has only recently been recognized as such by the Western establishment. It's a book with a lot of human ingenuity to marvel at and a lot of cruel losses to mourn and rage at.

This was excellent.

ETA (07/2020): I think I liked this book even more the second time around. It’s packed with so many brain-fizzing ideas that completely different things resonated than did in my first reading. For the weird liminal spaces so many of us find ourselves in during quarantine, Wayfinding has a lot to say about how humans locate ourselves in space, the embodied, relational nature of that knowledge, and about the value—for mind and for body—in paying deeper attention to our surroundings.

(05/2019)
When’s the last time you meandered through space—anywhere vaguely unknown to you—without that magical Marauder’s Map in your pocket? Can you remember being lost & not reaching for a phone-GPS?

I really liked this book! It was kind of a slow read and had sections that seemed to get bogged down in a lot of details. My only complaints are about the last 1.5 chapters of the book which started to take on a kind of preachy tone. But the rest of the book was great and made me think about navigation and the way we interact with the world a little more deeply.