Review of DARK AND MAGICAL PLACES
What is going on in our brain when we’re navigating?
In our tech-enables lives, we rarely have to think about navigating. We simply open up our maps app on our phone and follow the directions until we magically end up at our desired destination. But navigation isn’t only for longer journeys, or even trips to the grocery store. It can be much more banal than that. Have you ever thought about how you get to the bathroom in your home?
Turns out that there is a ton of neural activity occurring in your brain for even the simplest of navigation, like going to our bathroom or to our fridge for a late-night snack. In Dark and Magical Places: The Neuroscience of Navigation, Christopher Kemp shares all the details.
Like much in neuroscience, we can learn a lot about how our brain functions from when it’s not functioning. That banal trip to your bathroom? For some people with brain injuries to key parts of our brains, they cannot figure out how to navigate to a familiar place in their own home. They’re frozen like a Sim waiting for instructions.
Navigation is highly complex, and requires several core components, including forming memories, identifying our current place, building a cognitive map, understanding the place of our destination, building a route, then executing on that route plan. And as you might now expect, a host of brain regions get involved. The hippocampus (which I learned means “seahorse”) is the star of the show, along with the caudate, the parahippocampal and occipital place area, the precuneus, prefrontal cortex, and more.
Although this all seems quite dense, the book is quite an accessible read. There is necessarily some neuro-jargon, but not much outside the technical names for brain structures. The book is written by an academic scientist at Michigan State University, but from what I gathered, Kemp doesn’t specialize in this area of research per se, so he is writing in a way that can be understood by a relatively educated non-expert.
Back to the seahorse in our brain – the hippocampus. We used to do medical procedures that would never be allowed today, but fortunately have given us a wealth of knowledge about brain function. After a surgeon sucked (literally) the hippocampi out of a man’s brain, we observed the function of this vital brain part. The hippocampus is the core of our episodic memory (all your experiences) and crucial for long-term memory. Without memories, one is in a constant state of confusion, and is useless to navigate around well.
We also have learned a lot from rodents in mazes. From mazes we know that we don’t memorize directions such as “turn left, turn right” like our navigation apps tell us, but we actually construct cognitive maps of environments. So if we move our starting position, we are still able to navigate to a set destination because we use our maps, not memorization of steps.
But sometimes counting steps works too. For insects like ants, they use a ‘dead reckoning’ process that they use to basically track how many steps they took from their next when traveling for food. Extend the ants legs or cut them shorter (this is an actual experiment), and the ants overshoot or undershoot their nest when traveling back.
One thing I thought was missing form this book was a developmental component. Kemp almost got there with sharing cross-cultural data from traditional societies where people navigate dense jungles with only their cognitive maps and not an iPhone. Unsurprisingly, these folks score much better than folks from, say the US, on navigation tasks. And over-reliance on map apps will depress your navigation skills. Is there a critical period of navigation development? How does practice help or hinder over time?
Overall, Dark and Magical Places was a good book on a topic I’ve read next to nothing about.
Published: January 2022
Format: Hardcover
If you think this sounds interesting, bookmark these other great reads:
Seven And A Half Lessons About The Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett (2020)
Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought by Barbara Tversky (2019)
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