Wayfinding: The Science and Mystery of How Humans Navigate the World
Apr 2019 · Macmillan + ORM
Ebook
354
Pages
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Eligible
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About this ebook
In this “marvel of storytelling,” a journalist pursues the mysteries of human navigation across continents and deep within the brain (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).
Biologists have been trying to solve the mystery of how organisms have the ability to migrate and orient with such precision—especially since our own adventurous ancestors spread across the world without maps or instruments. In Wayfinding, M.R. O’Connor goes to the Arctic, the Australian bush, and the South Pacific to talk to masters of their environment who seek to preserve their traditions at a time when anyone can use a GPS to navigate.
O’Connor explores the neurological basis of spatial orientation within the brain, and how exercising our cognitive mapping skills can improve the health of our hippocampus. She also talks to scientists studying how atrophy in the hippocampus is associated with afflictions such as impaired memory, dementia, Alzheimer’s Disease, depression, and PTSD.
Wayfinding is a captivating book that charts how our species’ profound capacity for exploration, memory, and storytelling results in topophilia, the love of place.
Biologists have been trying to solve the mystery of how organisms have the ability to migrate and orient with such precision—especially since our own adventurous ancestors spread across the world without maps or instruments. In Wayfinding, M.R. O’Connor goes to the Arctic, the Australian bush, and the South Pacific to talk to masters of their environment who seek to preserve their traditions at a time when anyone can use a GPS to navigate.
O’Connor explores the neurological basis of spatial orientation within the brain, and how exercising our cognitive mapping skills can improve the health of our hippocampus. She also talks to scientists studying how atrophy in the hippocampus is associated with afflictions such as impaired memory, dementia, Alzheimer’s Disease, depression, and PTSD.
Wayfinding is a captivating book that charts how our species’ profound capacity for exploration, memory, and storytelling results in topophilia, the love of place.
About the author
M.R. O'CONNOR’s reporting has appeared in Foreign Policy, Slate, The Atlantic, Nautilus and The New Yorker. Her work has received support from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, The Nation Institute's Investigative Fund, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. In 2016 she was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT. She is the author of Resurrection Science. A graduate of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, she lives in Flatbush, Brooklyn.
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