The theory I've heard is that it's adaptive, supposing that our ancestors for eons divided labor between men and women such that men went out hunting large game or stealing stuff from their neighbors or whatever, while women foraged for smaller stuff - berries, grubs, water. You'd look for that stuff where you know you'll find it, in season, so you know your world in terms of routes to places, and people with that kind of sense of direction are the ones who insist on telling you how to get to their place in a turn-by-turn itinerary complete with landmarks. If you're out for antelope, you're going to have to head out cross country and just hope you can figure out how to get back, and you need a `sense of direction.'MaryAnn wrote: In my experience, there really are some people who lack the brain connectivity/function/whatever to have a sense of direction.
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I think this is more common in women but do not know why, since I'm not one who suffers from it. I have met men who get easily turned around, but it doesn't seem to be as common as it is with women.
Of course everyone has both facilities - it's not like sense of direction is encoded on the Y chromosome and therefore available solely to men - but it's an interesting theory about how differences in geographic reckoning could have been a selective advantage. Our world today might be easier for the `sense of direction' types, but I live in the west. Maps of the eastern US show a large scale road pattern that looks like more of a network to me, than the common spoke/hub pattern in the west, and maybe that uses more of that route memory.
