However, the exaggeration of the real road idiot still amazes many people. Is this real road idiot or pretend, is it that the brain is not good?
On the same road, walking in winter and summer feels completely different. Day and night are different, and walking along and against it is also different. Permutation and combination, one road can go out eight roads.
Didi or meet up with friends on weekends. When confirming the location, you can only rely on the names of nearby buildings to determine where you are. If there are no obvious buildings around, you can only say that you are beside a tree, under a cloud.
Zhang Ailing described her road idiot in “A Dream of Genius”: “After living in a room for two years, I was still at a loss to ask me where the electric bell was. I took a rickshaw to the hospital every day for injections. I still didn’t know each other for three months. That way.”
So, what’s the matter with Lu Chi? Is it born?
Since 1970, through experiments on mice, we have confirmed that mammals have three types of cells related to orientation. There are cells that distinguish the direction of north and south, the cells that are responsible for understanding the location of their own positioning, and the grid cells that are responsible for forming the concept of space.
In short, there is both a compass and a matching coordinate system. After the two are combined, it is necessary to have the comprehensive ability of “can you understand your own positioning?” Of course, a certain visual memory is required to remember the way.
After the three kinds of cells are combined, people with a particularly good sense of direction will build a virtual map that looks very advanced in their brains, and they can also rotate 90 degrees clockwise and counterclockwise, or flip it axisymmetrically.
One of these types of cells is not well developed, which may affect the overall way recognition ability.
However, even if it is due to genetics, growth environment and other reasons, some of these three types of cells do not develop well, but in order to identify the direction, everyone will develop their own strategies.
For example, if you can’t distinguish between North and South, you can improve your observation. In nature, the position of the sun and the growth of leaves can be used to judge the north and south. In the city, the north and south can also be judged by the orientation of the balcony in the residential area and the distance between the buildings.
If you can’t create a three-dimensional map of your brain, then memorize the mobile phone map and apply it directly when you need it. Or simply remember the specific coordinates, such as a duck neck shop and turn left.
Anyway, if there is really no sense of direction, and various cells related to direction are underdeveloped, you can still “remember” the matter of road recognition, and memory depends on the hippocampus.
The University of Michigan in the United States conducted a memory test on twins. Researchers recruited more than 500 pairs of twins, asked them to look at the faces, locations, objects and words on the screen, and then performed MRI scans of their brains.
As a result, when recalling faces and locations, the brain activities of identical twins showed a high degree of similarity, but when recalling words or common objects, they were different. This indicates that humans’ ability to recognize faces and places may be greatly affected by genetics.
So the sense of direction does have an innate element, and acquired training is only part of it.
For example, some children have been to the park or grandfather’s house once, and the adults can find them next time. There are many preschoolers with a good sense of direction.
In addition, the sense of direction may indeed be related to gender. Men have a better sense of direction and greater spatial ability than women.
Some people say that this is related to the evolution of Homo sapiens. In the fishing, hunting and gathering society, men need to travel long distances to hunt in places far away from the village, which requires them to be able to find a way home. Women are mainly responsible for collecting near home. But researchers have also studied other animals. It seems that whether it is mammals such as mice or molluscs such as squid, males always have a better sense of direction than females.
In addition, after a woman drops a drop of androgen under her tongue, her test scores for sense of direction and sense of space will also increase.
Based on this inference, the gender difference in the sense of direction may only be a harmless by-product of evolution, rather than through natural selection.
Although there are indeed more female lunatics in the real world, it is not ruled out that some people break the pot. Anyway, I don’t recognize the way, just follow the navigation! Or just walk with the people around you.
However, the majority of road idiots can understand the fact that if you really want to recognize the road, even if the sense of direction is inherently bad, it is completely okay. Because in addition to “bad sense of direction”, women also have a label of “good memory”, and road recognition has a lot to do with memory in addition to cells related to the three directions.
Compared with men, women prefer to mark landmarks when recognizing roads, such as hot pot restaurants, milk tea shops and various shopping malls. Living in the city, this may be a more practical way to find the way.
In short, the sense of direction may be innate, but it does not affect the acquired mastery of way recognition skills. Many road idiots may just be lazy.
