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I'm the absolute opposite way. One of the stories my parents usually like to tell is when I was like 5 we were in unfamiliar city, they got lost and could not find the car for over an hour ignoring me, and when they finally listened to me I've managed to get them back to the car in 5 minutes. I can easily recollect how to get from points A to B in cities I've been once 5 years ago.

I'm like you - my mum and her sister were both infamously bad at navigation, and family stories tell how they got lost driving home from the city centre. Eventually they paid attention to two-year old me standing up in the back seat (this was before cars had seat belts in the back) saying "it's that way!". Apparently I navigated them all the way home across the city at the age of two. Now I don't know how much this was exaggerated, but as long as I can remember, I've always had near-perfect navigational skills while my mum is hopeless, so there's probably some truth to it.

Given my mum was so bad, even when I was very small, my parents would give me the map to navigate from the back seat whenever we went anywhere new. My father would usually drive, and he was a good navigator so may not have needed me, but sometimes my mother would drive. Either way, I would navigate across the country. I don't know how young I was when we started this, but probably about seven. I always loved maps.

Only when I was an adult did I discover that different people thought about navigation in different ways. Most people, it seems, navigate by waypoints. "Turn left at the Red Lion pub" and so on. Some people, including me, can navigate by absolute directions - "go north east, then west" and so on, and actually think this way. If you ask me which way is north, in the daytime I'm pretty much perfect, no matter the weather. At night or indoors, I'm good, but sometimes can be a bit off - maybe up to 45 degrees. Not sure exactly what I'm picking up from outdoors, even when it's cloudy, but I know I'm completely reversed if I visit Australia, so likely something to do with polarised light.

So is it learned? Sure, I got a huge amount of practice when I was young in pre-GPS days. But I could do it at the age of two, so probably there was some capability there from the start. Now I'm in my fifties and use GPS everywhere, mostly for traffic guidance. But I do feel I'm not as good at raw navigation as I used to be. But in the 1980s when I was first driving long distance, I'd stare at a map for a few minutes, and then drive 200 miles across England without needing to look at a map again. For those from the US, in England, 200 miles is long way and a lot of junctions! Not sure I could do that these days, so maybe it is practice. Or maybe I'm just getting old.

I have a map in my head of all the roads I've ever been down. Adding to it is a treat, I love adding new roads to it.

The limits are that I don't remember all the hundreds of Craigslist pickups I've done.

Also, I navigate by always knowing which way the CN tower is relative to my current location, I live within 100kms of it. If we go on vacation the reference location switches to wherever we're staying.

It's hard to do that - navigate by reference - if you're in the middle of medieval town with narrow streets and low visibility :)

Kids are dumb fallacy right there. Kids are gonna be better at you at some things even from 4 yo!

> But when people talk about "mental maps," I'm not entirely sure what they're talking about.

In the visual theater of my mind I can literally construct a top down view map and place myself in it dynamically. When I want to determine which exit to use, I use this mechanism and then route myself through it. It's something that /seems/ to turn on and off when I need to make the next turn decision, but if I've used it recently, it's easier to recall than it is the first time.

For a building, it's typically nailing down the elevator lobby's orientation with respect to the rest of the city around it, then building a smaller mental map from an individual floor that is also referenced to the lobby. If I need to think about how my desk is oriented to larger features in the city, I have to do two orientation and projection steps in my mind.

Anyways.. do you think visually or textually?

> Anyways.. do you think visually or textually?

What about verbally?

I can't speak to that. I guess that might be owing to how visual my thinking is, I perceive verbal thinkers as reading a book in their mind, which I only now realize is a terrible metaphor.

One maybe a stupid question. If your thinking is visual, wouldn't you have to close your eyes to be able to think? Or how can you still see? Is it like augmented reality?

Actually since I think, I think by hearing a continous record of text, when I do that, it does make it hard to listen to people. I have to attune that record exactly to what people are saying and it is something I have had challenges doing my whole life. Then I have to fight, put effort in, to be able to keep it on track. I prefer watching films with same language subtitles for that reason. Then I read the subtitles and doing that my thought track is somehow in sync. But it is impossible to keep the thought track in sync with realtime voice. I could only repeat it out of sync.

If people had subtitles, on top of their heads as they were talking I could pay attention much better in social situations.

> One maybe a stupid question. If your thinking is visual, wouldn't you have to close your eyes to be able to think?

Kinda like multiple monitors on a computer. It's possible to see both at once. I do often do my best sleeping in bed at night with my eyes closed however.

But with multiple monitors you have to look at one at a time, and if you do that you won't see the others? So if you are focusing on a visual thought shouldn't you be unable to see the real world? Or you are kind of zoomed out far enough that you do, but then you are seeing it side by side with real world? But still then are one of those things more blurry depending on where you focus exactly?

It is fascinating to try and understand it. It doesn't feel like I can relate to it at all or see how it is possible.

People have talked about a disorder? where folks can’t picture things in their mind. Believe called aphantasia.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia

> If your thinking is visual, wouldn't you have to close your eyes to be able to think?

When I think verbally, I don't have to use ear plugs to think. Though very noisy environments make it harder. When I think visually, I don't have to close my eyes to think. But visually noisy environments make it harder. I guess that's (part of) why people sometimes stare off into space when deep in thought?

Data point from me. I also think I have terrible ability to remember places or directions. I feel like it is maybe because I am not paying attention to all the details. I would think I am at the very least bottom 5 percent performer.

People say something like "oh we turned from here, I remember this building". I wonder how they are remembering something like that and why I never do.

I feel many of my anxious situations in life have been where I was asked to do something where people expected me to know where to go and I just had no idea.

I think textually, but not seeing text, rather hearing it as one continous line of thought and maybe some odd less focused lines of thought in parallel.

I had a cognitive abilities test done by a psychologist. Visual memory was one of the worst percentually.

The test included I think some sort of drawing with lines and recreating it later in the test after doing some other activities inbetween.

Strongest area was abstract logical reasoning. Which was top 1 percent.

But my main concerns were memory and why I did the test in the first place.

> oh we turned from here, I remember this building". I wonder how they are remembering something like that and why I never do.

My memory is primarily visual such that I can replay a video like experience in my head of a lot of events. This extends to things like spellings which I will recall as a visual representation of the word.

How would you even have the storage room for a video. Not doubting, but just crazy to think for me. It probably must be some very deeply compressed video that gets reconstructed from objects from the internal structure somehow and then perhaps constructed runtime, meaning it won't be the same everytime.

Not like a recorded video, more like a video game, drawn on demand with vectors ;-).

For me it’s very similar to the 3D maps in games like Doom (the one from 2016) or Deep Rock Galactic.

I am also like this. I had a fight once with my SO where they were upset with me for not trying to level up my navigation skills. I have a growth mindset about many other things, but I've just absolutely given up on navigation without a smartphone.

I also have a hard time recognizing faces of celebrities, but not people I know in real life.

From reading about prosopagnosia and other agnosias, I suspect there's something funny with my fusiform gyrus.

I've always linked my inability to navigate to my inability to visualize things in my head. Even in the area where I've been living for about 15 years now, I still struggle to determine routes if I don't travel them very regularly.

This afternoon, we drove to a place in the city nearby. By now, after so many years, I can guess which exit to take, but I don't know whether to turn left or right at the end of the exit until I'm at the end and recognise it from previous times I've been there. But I can't picture it in my head beforehand.

I also have aphantasia but can navigate just fine. I read a comment on here once from someone with aphantasia that couldn't navigate in the real world, but they worked in network admin and knew that layout just fine (knew where everything routed and what it connected to etc). I pondered that if they could remember cable routes, why don't they apply the same mental map to roads? Roads are fixed and have a beginning and end too! But they reckon they could not. So it's a strange problem.

I think the challenge is relating your current locatiom in a 3d environment to a top down 2d map?

The 3d environment is full of noise and info which is a lot to take in while something like routing is very simple, and you don't have to convert your own placement in 3d map to 2d.

Also routing likely has good intentional reasons why something follows the other. While roads have evolved more naturally throughout history.

Are you me? If I had been born 15 years earlier, before GPS nav, you would not be reading this because I would be dead in a ditch somewhere.

I have a hard time visualizing things when I'm fully awake. Ask me to picture my wife or my kids' faces, and I can't do it. I feel I can subconsiously visualize them with no problem, but as soon as a try to consciously do it, the picture disolves. Same with any fully awake visualization - can't quite see the image in my head - it's like it's in my peripheral vision but scoots away as soon as I look. But I can lucid dream, and do things like complex 3D mechanism design while lucid dreaming (that I can later turn concrete using CAD).

Anyway, I have no problem with navigation - I can look at a map, and navigate from the (non visualizable!) memory for ages (an hour if hiking, maybe several hours if driving), and pretty much always tell you where north is. But I still cannot bring the image of the map back into my conscious mind. The brain is a very weird thing indeed.

What does visualisation of someone face even mean. If I have to ask that does it mean I have aphantasia?

I don't think I have it, but I don't know.

Like are you seeing colors in your mind eye, because surely visualization should require it.

I am definitely not seeing any colors.

I can’t remember faces of people I see say 4 times a year and who are not friends. A random parent at the school for example.

Counter data point:

I am an excellent navigator but can't recognise people I know on the street, even if I know them reasonably well. If I know I will be meeting them, and I know them well I mostly recognise them but even then I am sometimes surprised when they show up and say hello to me.

Celebrities is even worse...

Counter data point:

I am an excellent navigator but can't recognise people I know on the street, even if I know them reasonably well. If I know I will be meeting them, and I know them well I mostly recognise them but even then I am sometimes surprised when they show up and say hello to me.

Celebrities is even worse...

(Good) navigation is not really about recognising landmarks (although that helps) but about having a mental version of the map of the place you are in, with you in the centre. Think of it like the GTA mini-map that live updates as you walk around. I think that comes naturally to some people and just does not exist for many others.

'But when people talk about "mental maps," I'm not entirely sure what they're talking about. '

For me, knowing where things are in the space around me or in the larger navigation zone is like knowing where the parts of my body are. After spending just a little time in a space, it all feels like one thing and I can mentally point to various places within that space.

I can still get turned around if I have been going through multiple corridors inside with no visibility outside, particularly underground and particularly if some of the corridors are slightly off of rectilinear. Then I can come out thinking I am facing south and it turns out to be east. However, the next time I move though that space, chances are it will all connect up in my mind and then I will know where I am and which direction is which.

My husband is a little more like you. When we exit a building, he will seemingly choose a direction at random. It almost seems like he kind of gets it but backwards and almost always goes the opposite direction. He is not as far off as you. He can learn to navigate familiar spaces but it takes him a long time.

Well, people with Aphantasia [1] don't have to have poor navigation sense.

You could try to study a map of an area you want to be in and think about where you were on it one day and where you wanted to go to.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia

I'm not quite as bad, but I'm still pretty damn bad. If you're a 10/10 on the bad-at-directions scale, I'm probably at a 7- 7.5. Any chance you have ADHD or anything along those lines?