Colin Ellard - You Are Here

Topophobia

I'm staring into the abyss of Google maps tonight trying to plan carefully for a complicated multi-leg car journey I'm going to have to take tomorrow.  I'm zooming in and out of the map, trying to imagine how some of the different critical choices I will need to make will look from the ground.  It's something we struggle with -- the conversion from an overhead or plan view to an on-the-ground street view.  But I'm struggling with a greater problem as well, and its one that has come up a few times in recent interviews -- our primal fear of disorientation.  There's no doubt at all that there are times when this fear is completely justified.  If you're hiking the Appalachian Trail and you find yourself off the beaten path, your concern for your well-being is justified.  Similarly, if you've just landed at O'Hare Airport for the first time and you have to make your way from Gate C16 to Gate M5 in 15 minutes to make a flight, you'd better have a good pair of running shoes and a keen eye for signs.  But there are some parts of our lives where we don't have those kinds of severe constraints.  Tomorrow I have to find myself at a particular latitude and longitude at one particular point in the day (else there's going to be one p.o.'d radio producer who won't speak to me again).  After that, what I plan to do is to seek out some refreshing green vistas so that I can grab myself a few hours of restoration.  This isn't quite as easy as it sounds in a built-up area like Southern Ontario, but I'm not looking for the Adirondacks here -- a few acres of woods and, if I'm lucky, some water will do nicely.  So what I could do is just point myself west after my radio gig and follow my nose and my instincts.  Instead what I'm doing is scrutinizing aerial maps for likely looking clumps of vegetation and water. Maybe I'm an outlier, but I think that as we have more and more aids to navigation, more and more of us are finding it a little difficult to let go of that primal fear of being lost.  Maybe that's what's going on here.  For thousands of years our DNA has grown up with these protective mechanisms that equate disorientation with death, so it seems unavoidable that we have this little frisson of fear when we realize we don't know exactly where we are.  And technology feeds that need.  I argue all the time for the adoption of a more playful relationship with space.  I want people to just let themselves be led by those deep hidden impulses whenever they can be, because I think that's the way we can all begin to understand not only how spaces affect how we think and feel, but what kinds of spaces we actually want in our built world.  What feels good?  What works?  Yet her I am sitting up a bit past my bedtime plotting routes and worrying about where I'll be and when I'll be there.  I think what I'd like to have is a GPS with a sense of humour.  "Oh, did I say left back there?" she'd chuckle with a wry little silicon smirk on her smooth face.  "Oops.  Sorry.  I'll try to get it right next time.  I just get so distracted with all these satellites chattering at me, ya know? Why don't we just roll down the window and breath together."  I need a subversive machine to derail my obsessive need to be here right now.  I'm sure it'll all be just fine.  And if none of you ever hear from me again, just imagine me wandering off into a lovely green vista somewhere west of Toronto.  It'll all work out.

Gender differences in spatial navigation

I've noticed that there have been some commentaries (and I've received a few emails recently) connected with some of my statements about gender differences in spatial navigation.  It can be incredibly hard to convey what I think is a subtle and nuanced story in a brief sound bite for media, and the fact that there's room for some misconstrual of my meaning is really nobody's fault.  It's how all of this works.  But here on my blog I have the leisure of laying things out a little and trying to convey the bigger picture as I see it.

I should probably begin by saying that the work I do in my laboratory never focuses on gender differences in the navigation tasks that we use.  Yet my students and I know the literature well enough to know that when we look for differences, we are likely to find some.  We have many discussions at our lab meetings about this.  Sometimes we decide to downplay the differences as much as possible because they are not the focus of our study.  At other times though, we (and often that 'we' is just 'me') argue that these differences are an important component of the variability in human behaviour that we want to describe, and so we should muster the bravery to wade in and to try to understand what's going on.  When we do compare the genders, the differences that we identify are often nothing like those that might be predicted on a simple-minded dichotomy of gender a=good and gender b=not so good.  In fact, the differences often come out in complicated higher-order interactions between our variables (and I'll admit freely that we most often find these interactions very difficult or impossible to explain and, because they are not the prime focus of our research, we don't often pursue them in any kind of determined way).  So that's me and how gender influences my own work in spatial navigation.  What about the rest of the field?

Here's the canonical view of the field as I understand it.  In simulations of real world tasks using either laboratory situations, or virtual reality, or sometimes even in field studies of human beings doing real world tasks, a difference that often seems to arise is that women appear to rely more on a strategy based on keen observation of landmarks and men appear to rely more on a strategy based on an understanding of Euclidean geometry.  This distinction has been observed repeatedly and it also has an interesting analog in non-humans.  Even laboratory rats show some signs of a similar difference in spatial strategies between the sexes.  As with all aspects of human behavior, there are some modifiers that we need to attach to this basic finding.  The main one is that there is a tremendous amount of variability in performance on these behavioral tasks and that there is a great deal of overlap between the genders in the distribution of that variability.  What this means is that it isn't too hard to find men who do better with landmarks than geometry, nor is it hard to find women who do better with geometry than with landmarks -- I hear from such individuals all the time and I see them in some of my studies.  However, the averages suggest a difference between the genders, and a pretty good sized one at that.

I find this difference fascinating.  I don't understand entirely what it means.  Most accounts try to put together some kind of arm-waving argument that the differences are related to differences in lifestyle of our ancient forebears.  Put simply, males were more likely to explore larger ranges while females were more likely to stay closer to home territory but to know that territory and both what it had to offer and the risks it engendered in fine detail.  Males had an eye for distance and females for detail.  I can see the logic of the argument but it's one of those things that is very hard to bring from the realm of amusing speculation to hard science.  

The implications for modern human wayfinding are very interesting as well.  I think one of the main implications of such strategic differences, whether they're gender based or not, is that the two strategies that I've described -- landmark-based or Euclidean, are more or less likely to work well in different kinds of situations.  In a grid city like Manhattan, Toronto, Calgary, or countless others, a strategy based on Euclidean geometry might work well, but so might a landmark based strategy.  In a city with a more tortuous and winding street pattern with lots of irregular intersections, a Euclidean strategy will not work as well because it will be more prone to error, but landmark navigation could work very well indeed.  Think of trying to find your way in Venice by keeping track of where North was.  You might be able to do it, but I think it would take a tremendous focus of attention to pull it off.

For those who might like to delve deeper, here are some references.

Calling expert wayfinders

I really enjoyed my stint on CBC's Ontario Today yesterday.  I have to confess I was a little taken aback when I realized that EVERYONE other than me was in Ottawa and I had this big comfy recording studio in Toronto to myself, but when the sound engineer explained that this meant I could pretty much do whatever I wanted -- kick back, put my feet up, dance around the room, I quickly recognized the possibilities (but then became so engrossed in the conversation that I soon forgot to take advantage of the solitude.  I don't think I even made any funny faces.  Opportunity lost....).

What I found most fun about the callers' stories was that we heard overwhelmingly from expert wayfinders.  With this kind of thing, one expects to hear from the tails of the distribution, so in a way this was not surprising.  I could also understand the reluctance of listeners from the other tail to chime in as readily.  Who wants to call in and say "I can't find my way out of paper bag", though one stalwart listener called in to tell me pretty much that and I'm grateful for him for carrying the mantle of the lost generation yesterday.

But on the drive home (yes, the eco-nut DROVE as this was the only way to both do a decent job of the interview AND attend my daughter's graduation ceremonies in the evening.  There really isn't a proper commuter train system in Southern Ontario -- the most heavily populated region in the country) I thought quite a lot about the comments of the callers.  It was certainly true that one common strand among the experts was that they felt that they paid close attention to their surroundings and maintained some level of awareness of their place at all times, but there were also listeners who told me that they never ever ever got lost and they didn't really know why that had this special ability.  They just always knew where North was, or home was, or the water was, or where SOMETHING was.  This fascinates me.

I'm thinking of starting a little research project on sense of direction in expert navigators.  I'm not quite ready to set things up in a formal way yet, but if you think you qualify as an expert, if you're one of those lucky people who never get lost whether in the woods, in the confusing labyrinth of Venice, or in the most byzantine corridors of a confusing government complex, I'd like to hear from you.

I've got a big box of books to give away and I'll let one or two fly away in exchange for a little Canadian wayfinding savvy.

Another radio interview coming up soon for the NPR network.  I suspect I'll be by myself for this one as well.  I'll be pulling faces this time.  And maybe I'll have my feet up on the table too.  If you listen in and hear a giant crash, that'll be me tipped over on the floor.  Details closer to the date.

Chimpanzee spatial memory

This really interesting article suggests that forest chimpanzees are capable of prodigious feats of spatial memory in which they remember the exact locations of thousands of trees, and factor into their searches for them how their fruit abundance varies from month to month. I'm impressed by the methods -- the authors needed to follow individual apes for days at a time in a forest in Cote d'Ivoire, notebook and GPS in hand, and they also had to map the locations of tens of thousands of trees.  To test the memory capabilities of the chimps,they compared their observations of real animals to a number of simulations of 'virtual apes' that were carried out using a variety of different kinds of assumptions -- the baseline assumption being that chimpanzees just walk straight until they bump into a tree and then bounce off of it and move in another more or less random direction.  The chimp movements were far from random -- they showed nicely directed search patterns zeroing in on rare trees with abundant fruit.  I once spent a year doing field work in the wilds of Australia, so I have deep respect and awe for anyone who can wander into a thick forest for a year and wander back out again with a nice set of data.  Things don't always go so well.  In my own case, I came out of the field with a set of legs scarred up by gigantic burrowing tics, a deep fear of the Taipan, one of the world's deadliest snakes, and a basic understanding of how not to be eaten by a crocodile--always go into the bush with someone who can't run as fast as you can--which explains why I was such a popular bush-date that year...  But I digress.

What these wild chimpanzees are able to do is obviously a far cry from the abilities of the average urban human being, who not only is unlikely to be able to go back into the forest to find the same tree he found yesterday, but is also somewhat likely to die of exposure before finding his way back to his starting point.  I describe such differences in a fair bit of detail in my book.  But one of the things that interests me a lot about these findings is their contrast with the handful of studies conducted on spatial memory in captive primates who often show a tendency to get lost, especially when they're unleashed on anything like a natural setting.  A question that I've been asked a lot lately is whether I think the human spatial clumsiness results from an unavoidable missing chip of some kind -- that we're just missing a tool that other animals possess -- or whether our spatial skills have just languished through lack of use.  The ape comparison here suggests the latter.  So what would a human being, completely comfortable and at home in natural situations, look like?  How well would they stand up in the kinds of foraging tasks that these forest chimpanzees were challenged with?  Also, given the argument in the BBC writeup of these findings, and the suggestion that the extraordinary spatial memory of the wild chimpanzee can be thought of as a kind of signpost to advanced primate cognition, what do we make of the fact that modern human beings of the urban kind are generally as spatially slow-witted as a caged tamarin?

One final little sidenote.  The authors of the study found some interesting gender differences which did NOT support the standard story that Men are from Mars and Women don't know WHERE they're from -- just as I've been saying in talks and interviews -- there are gender differences but they're much more subtle and interesting than this standard tale.  In the chimpanzee study, females were generally more efficient and spatially savvy searchers.  

I'll be watching for updates from this really interesting group, though what they're doing is tough.  The going will be slow.

Getting lost in the woods

Ok, it's true.  I did get a little lost in the woods with Colin Hunter of The Record.  But in my defense, it was quite purposeful and it was only for a few seconds.  We were talking about cultivating a playful relationship with space.  Something I find interesting is that we have a deep primal fear of being lost, especially in wilderness.  Our little adventure last week was not exactly wilderness trekking.  We were in a suburban forest not much bigger than a Walmart, but it has lots of undulating criss-crossing trails, some dense wood, and some really nice changes in elevation.  If you become distracted, you can get nicely disoriented.  And I emphasize nicely.  The idea we were discussing was that it might be fun and possibly even useful for people to make themselves more attuned to the size and shape of physical space by deliberately taking themselves into unfamiliar terrain for a little while, purposefully losing their bearings and then doing a little self-monitoring.  In simple adventures like this one, we know we're not going to die of exposure or be mauled by bears.  Worst case is that we spend a little more time than we expected to in leisurely pursuits, and we end up finding things we weren't expecting to.  Not such a terrible fate, and very good for our minds.

The biology of public space

Whenever I'm lucky enough to have a chance to bend the ear of an architect about my crazy ideas, I come away with new enthusiasm for how much untapped potential there is to connect architecture and psychology, and new humility about how much I just don't know.  I've written a couple of posts about my slow and painful education in Le Corbusian architectural theory -- a work still very much in progress -- and I had another small lesson when I had lunch with a sharp, young architect named Vincent Hui on Friday.  I say 'lunch', though somehow things got a bit out of hand.  After planning about three years of research we discovered that much of the afternoon had vanished behind us.  Time well spent.

I couldn't possibly summarize all of the ideas Vincent set in motion, but one that interested me a lot had to do with understanding how public space works.  I'm here slogging into an area of huge interest and attention, of course.  There is a long history of academic and practical interest in how such spaces work (or don't).  One thinks first of people like William Whyte, Jan Gehl, and Jane Jacobs, perhaps.  As I've mentioned before, my own bias about Le Corb, and I know I'm not alone, is that he got things really wrong.  If you throw buildings up on pillars to create big wide open spaces underneath them, people hate them.  When I said something like this at our lunch, Vincent leaned forward in his chair, fixed me with a look of some urgency and suggested that this was not always true.  Cryptically, he promised pictures.  Here's one now:

 This is an HSBC bank in Hong Kong.  You can see enough to understand that it's an open space underneath a building, in a manner befitting LeCorb, but it is also obviously working as a public space.  Not only public, but exuding such comfort as a refuge that occupants are not only sitting on beautiful little blankets to enjoy picnics and conversations, but they're actually snuggling up and falling asleep.  This is nothing like the Pruitt-Igoe-high-crime-crack-pipe-shards-of-broken-glass images that we normally conjure up when we think of the failure of Radiant City.

So why does this happen here and not, for example, here?

Or here?

Well, where do we begin?  Density?  Maybe.  The Foster Bank in Hong Kong is in one of the most densely populated areas of the world.  Pruitt-Igoe was never even fully occupied in its heyday.

But there's much more to it than that.  We all know about public spaces that work and ones that don't.  Think of where you live.  Think of a warm, sunny Sunday afternoon in the core of your city.  What places are empty and which ones are teeming with people?  Much, you might argue, would have to do with what's around you.  But underneath a bank on Hong Kong?  What's there?  

What about biology?  In psychology, there's a classic old test called the "open field test".  It's hard to imagine anything simpler.  Plonk an animal into an open space of some kind and see what it does.  The first thing you'll discover is that any self-respecting animal has strong and quickly developing place preferences.  Other than some very simple things, though, such as that many animals prefer dark places and places where they are close to a wall, we know very little about how such preferences develop.  We assume (and make the argument sometimes) that these kinds of preferences must relate to survival.  Animals probably prefer the spaces that are most likely to be safe from predators, aggressive neighbours, the environment.  

When Filipino domestics in Hong Kong go out for an urban Sunday picnic, they're probably not worrying about predators or typhoons, but they're still led to make choices about where to spread those colourful blankets by deeply in-built impulses that propel them towards comfort.  So one of the differences between public spaces that work and those that fail seems likely to me to have to do with preferences for size, shape and appearances of spaces.  Understanding how to tap into those preferences to build successful public spaces might be helped along by adopting a more biological approach to how we apprehend spaces, and then doing the experiments to establish the general principles.  Time to get busy.

Canada's new minister of science and technology?

Overheard conversation between my five year old son and his five year old sister on the drive home from pre-school today:

Boy:  "Did you know that the dinosaurs and Einstein lived at the same time?"

Girl: "Einstein?  Who's that?"

Boy: "He's that big turtle."

I learn new stuff every day.

Rats of Manhattan

This is a quirky idea, but one that has also occurred to me, and connects with the work of one of my graduate students:

 

The image comes from a report by David Eilam of Tel Aviv University in which he unleashed rats in different kinds of "urban plans".  The one on the left is a Manhattan grid and the one on the right, as he describes it, resembles the layout of an irregular city like New Orleans.  Eilam shows that rats in both cities do the same amount of walking, but the Manhattan rats cover more territory.  I'm not sure how seriously to take his argument that this kind of setup could be used by urban planners as a design tool, though some similar work in our lab is motivated by our desire to show that certain types of principles used in architecture and planning are so deeply rooted in our biology that one can show them in different kinds of animals (with key differences related to the lifestyle of the animal involved).

Now what Eilam needs to do is to build some nice little subways and LRTs to see how movement at a wide range of speeds influences the mix.  You think I'm kidding.  You should see my lab.

This is no vacation

Just in case regular readers might be concerned that I've gone on permanent vacation, some reassurance that just the opposite is happening.  This is my busiest time of year by far.  Not only are courses just getting underway, but many new research grants are in the works (of which more will you hear (says Yoda) when there is more to tell).  As if all of this weren't enough, I've been going through the copyedited version of my book,which is now closely approaching the stage where the words leave my hands for the last time.  Funny thing:  last night I was telling my wife that I was finding it hard to resonate to the thought expressed by other writers about their reluctance to let go of their "baby" and to send it out into the world.  In contrast, I told her, I was long past ready to relinquish this book and was having a momentary struggle thinking about mustering the enthusiasm to promote it.  An hour later, copy-edit inspection completed, I found it ridiculously hard to stuff into the envelope to say 'goodbye'.  The caprices of the human heart.  Even funnier was that as soon as the book had gone under cover, I began thinking about the next book.  Fickle heart.

Recursion in nature

I've spent a lot of time this summer looking for recursive patterns in nature.  These patterns, repeating but not quite repeating, bursting with shape and colour at different scales of space, are both incredibly attractive, interesting, but also soothing.  The word that keeps occurring to me is resonance.  There's something out there that plays a nice tune using some ancient brain circuits of mine as an instrument.
This kind of recursion can take place at a wide range of sizes, from little blossoms in the forest, to sweeping rays of light and contours of clouds encompassing half the sky.  This particular combination of colour and pattern in both the sky and the lake was difficult to tear my eyes away from.

Ferns are great places to find these recursive patterns.  If you click on the fern picture, you should be able to see a larger image--large enough to see how the patterns of the leaves repeat themselves at multiple scales.  Evidence is beginning to accumulate that looking at these types of repeating patterns has a remarkable effect on how we feel--even our breathing patterns and heart rate are affected.