When I walk in my city (and is not lost), I know “when I am here, that way takes me towards home, that way is somewhat towards where I am going”.
But the way taken is more often shaped like a “C” than like a straight line!
and if i try to take an unknown “shortcut” it always ends with me LATE (as soon as I am in an unfamiliar place, I lose any bearings/directions to where I am or what directions i should take)….

The interresting thing, is give me a map, and I am very good in finding my way in any unfamiliar city, its just that I simply havent got any kind of “internal map”, my friends always thought I was not telling the truth when I am late walking to them, I printed out this article (and some comments) and they said “it certainly describes you perfectly!”
Its good to have something to show them!

(i dont have any idea “why” i lack orientation capacity, but its great to see I am not alone!)

As Jim notes, landmarks can be useful in towns which are not laid out on rectangular grids, and Cincinnati and WashDC are great examples of irregularly-gridded cities.

That’s how I navigate. It’s how I learned to get around Washington DC and Cincinnati Ohio, where the hills, forests and trees provided reliable, recognizable landmarks. But when I moved to flat, treeless Dallas where every freeway exit looked just like the other one, I was always missing my exit.

Mike/: There was a control group in this study called “straight men.”

And let’s give Rahman credit while it’s due. He’s not saying that women are worse at spacial reasoning at all. In fact, in 2003 he released a study which concluded that women and gay men were much better at remembering the locations of objects.

What this study was about was whether gay men navigate like women or like heterosexual men. What we do know from previous studies is that women tend to rely more on landmarks for navigation where men tend to use methods that are less reliant on surroundings.

From this we can extrapolate that it would take longer for a woman to be able to successfully navigate an previously unknown location than for men owing to the fact that she is more reliant on landmarks (which she doesn’t know yet).

Therefore, if we want to know if gay men navigate using more male or more female typical strategies a good benchmark would be to put them in an unfamiliar location and see how quickly they learn to find their way around.

PS: if anyone is interested, the studies that I have read find that men navigate much more using a distance + direction. For example, where the typical woman would navigate the highway by saying “entered the expressway, passed the statue, passed exit abc (almost there), exit xyz” a typical man would navigate by “entered the expressway, drove 10 minutes at 55mph, exit xyz.”

Neither strategy is the “better strategy” because each one is better depending on the circumstances. The typical man type navigation is much much better in unfamiliar territory where the typical woman navigation is much much better in familiar territory.

But on the other hand, my Dad had the same problems, and he was as straight as they come.

Perhaps Dr Rahman should have kept quiet about this. We already have some soi-disant Christian therapists prescribing abusive treatment for children who don’t conform to gender stereotypes, in order to “prevent” them from growing up gay. If we’re not careful we might find these CAUCs searching for children with “directional cognition deficit”, so that they can be subjected to similar abuse.

Could it be that the biological basis does tend to lean far more heavily toward gay men than for lesbians? I would have thought that lesbians would be in league with the straight men for processing skills. Or is this over analysis?

And I give my Sister wide latitude. She can look at a console at an organ and have no problem adapting to the multi-keyboards, ranks and ranks of stops and the pedals! THAT takes smarts! I only have this qwerty keyboard to master so, I’ll forgive her for not being a good co-pilot and a map reader.

Of course this means nothing about the specific abilities of an individual man or woman to navigate, just as the tendency of men to be taller than women tells you nothing about the height of a specific individual.

I travel often for work, and can typically tell when directions are written by a woman or a man. Women’s directions tend to be like “take a right at Main street – you’ll know it because of the Dunkin Donuts across from the car wash at the corner” whereas men’s directions tend to be like “Take route 50 S to route 145 E. 145 is also known as Main street.” Depending on where I am going, sometimes one type of direction works better, sometimes another, depending on the location (e.g., in New England, where streets tend not to be N/S or E/W, women’s directions can be much better). Of course, I now use a Garmin GPS, which takes all the guesswork out of it.

I had a roommate in college who had a computer monitor that had to be returned to the store. She was sitting on the floor with the box, monitor, and the stryofoam packing pieces and said, “Are you spatial? I can’t figure out how this all goes back in the box.” I figured it out in about 2 minutes. I’m good with that kind of spatial configuration. I can strategize in that tetris sort of way, but I have no sense of direction. And often my guess is opposite of what it really is — I attribute that, at least partially, to being a left-sided person. I’m left-handed, left-eyed, left-footed, and a liberal (ha!) so the entire world is backwards to me.