From Here to There: The Art and Science of Finding and Losing Our Way

Product Description How is it that we can walk unfamiliar streets while maintaining a sense of direction? How can we come up with shortcuts on the fly, in places we’ve never traveled? The answer is the complex mental map in our brains. This feature of our cognition is easily taken for granted, but it’s also critical to our species’ evolutionary success. In From Here to There, Michael Bond tells stories of the lost and found?Polynesian sailors, orienteering champions, early aviators?and surveys the science of human navigation.Navigation skills are deeply embedded in our biology. The ability to find our way over large distances in prehistoric times gave Homo sapiens an advantage, allowing us to explore the farthest regions of the planet. Wayfinding also shaped vital cognitive functions outside the realm of navigation, including abstract thinking, imagination, and memory. Bond brings a reporter’s curiosity and nose for narrative to the latest research from psychologists, neuroscientists, animal behaviorists, and anthropologists. He also turns to the people who design and expertly maneuver the world we navigate: search-and-rescue volunteers, cartographers, ordnance mappers, urban planners, and more. The result is a global expedition that furthers our understanding of human orienting in natural and built environments. About the Author Michael Bond is a science writer and former senior editor at New Scientist. His work has appeared in Nature, Aeon, Discover, The New York Times, Foreign Policy, Financial Times, and elsewhere. His book The Power of Others won the British Psychology Society Science Book of the Year Award. Pete Cross earned his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and has been narrating audiobooks since 2015. He received an Audie nomination for 2016's A Time to Die. In 2017, he garnered both an Earphones Award and a Parent's Choice Award for his narration of Openly Straight. An Ohio native, he spent eight years in Los Angeles where he coached actors, was lucky enough to work with French director Quentin Dupieux, and despised the traffic.