Inner Navigation

By: Erik Jonsson

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Synopsis: A fascinating investigation of how we navigate the physical world, "Inner Imagination is a lively, engaging account of subconscious map-making. Why are we so often disoriented when we come up from the subway? Do we really walk in circles when we lose our bearings in the wilderness?How -- and why -- do we get lost at all? In this surprising, stimulating book, Erik Jonsson, a Swedish-born engineer who has spent a lifetime exploring navigation over every terrain, from the crowded cities of Europe to the emptiness of the desert, gives readers extraordinary new insights into the human way-finding system. Written for the non-scientist, "Inner Navigation" explains the astonishing array of physical and psychological cues the brain uses to situate us in space and build its "cognitive maps" -- the subconscious maps it employs to organize landmarks. Humans, Jonsson explains, also possess an intuitive direction frame -- an internal compass -- that keeps these maps oriented (when it functions properly) and a dead-reckoning system that constantly updates our location on the map as we move through the world.