You Are Here: Why We Can Find Our Way to the Moon, But Get Lost in the Mall - Couverture rigide

Ellard, Colin

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 038552806X ISBN 13 : 9780385528061

Editeur : Doubleday, 2009

Synopsis

Book by Ellard Colin

A propos du livre

Extrait

Chapter 1
Looking For Targets
Simple Tactics for Finding Our Way
That We Share With All Other Animals

Following the light of the sun, we left the Old World

We’ve all done it. At a meeting, a conference, a wedding, or a simple potluck gathering with friends, the food appears. Though manners may prompt us to restrain ourselves for a few minutes, our antennae wave, our restless feet shuffle, and we make a beeline for the tables. If a scientist were to hover above us and measure our movements, it would be easy to show the average guest-to-plate distance as a steadily decreasing mathematical function. This class of behavior, called taxis, is the simplest kind of spatial behavior that can be imagined. All that is required is a target (that magnificent roast of beef), a sensor or two (our well-tuned nostrils and eyes), and some kind of motive force (sore feet squeezed into formal shoes will do nicely).

Life does not always treat us so kindly, though. On our way to the table, Longtalker Larry makes a perfect intercept course. How to rearrange the missile trajectory so as to home in on the canapés while avoiding verbal entanglement with Larry? The buffet table has two rows of food. On the closest side is Aunt Betty’s famous potato salad, but it looks a little bland. The better bet is Sarah’s Spicy Potatoes, but they’re just out of reach. We’ll need to thread our way through a crowd, momentarily losing sight of the target completely, in order to plan the return foray to starch Valhalla on the distal side of the room. What’s the quickest way? Perhaps the party is in a building we’ve never seen before. The sweet aromas are everywhere, but compared to what vision gives us, they don’t make much of a spatial cue. Which way do we go first? How do we conduct an efficient search?

Compared with many of the stories of feats of navigation that I will relate to you, finding your way to and then around a table full of food is small potatoes (Sarah’s if you’re lucky). Nevertheless, all such behaviors, ranging from the trivially simple taxis to the complex wayfinding task, point to one basic truth of biology. Unlike the potted geranium sitting in my window, you and I, like all other animate beings, need to be able to move from one place to another to survive. In order to remain nourished, I must get up from my chair and go to the fridge to find food. In order to avoid a premature demise, I need to leap out of the way of the bus that hurtles down the road toward me. The whole raw biological point of my individual survival is to reproduce. But this, too, requires movement. In order to pass my genes on, I need to be able to get up and walk around until I find a mate. (This, you may argue, is something of an oversimplification.) To survive, we must come to terms with space and time. Whatever the physicists and philosophers might say about these things, movement is defined as a change in place over some duration of time. Given this, it is not at all surprising that nature has produced a wide array of mechanical devices that produce movement (legs, wings, fins, and so on). In addition, we have evolved an even more impressive arsenal of tools that allow us to know where to move—that is, to find our way through space to important goals such as sustenance, warmth, safety, and sex.

The simplest tricks of navigation are perhaps so obvious that we don’t even think of them as being tricks. You are walking down the aisle in a grocery store when, just ahead of you, you see the box of spaghetti you’ve been seeking. With little or no conscious effort, the box is soon in your hand and then in your shopping cart. What’s to explain? This seemingly trivial piece of behavior—moving to a clearly visible target—is something that we do hundreds of times a day. Such behaviors are required of all animals that move, yet they are accomplished in a wide variety of ways.

The most primitive kinds of animals, one-celled creatures such as bacteria, though their needs may be simple, must still possess a basic toolkit that allows them to find their way to conditions that sustain life: light, heat, and sustenance. Sometimes these unicellular denizens of our soil, water, and even our own bodies can employ a search strategy much like a child playing a game of blind man’s bluff. Their rates of movement rise and fall with the activity of sensors tuned to the concentrations of heat, light, or chemicals that surround them, and these changes in movement bring them inexorably into contact with their goal. Other than the movement of a plant bending toward the light, it is difficult to imagine a simpler mechanism by which a living thing can deal with the problems of space.

In other cases, such tiny creatures as these may possess specialized equipment to help them guide their movements. In 1996, a group of scientists, headed by Dr. David McKay of NASA’s Johnson Space Center, claimed they had discovered fossil evidence for the existence of life on Mars in a lump of meteoric rock that had been collected from the Antarctic. Analysis of the chemical composition of the rock left little doubt that it was of Martian origin, and the peculiar formations inside the rock looked suspiciously biological. Researchers thought they could see tiny cell bodies, reminiscent of our own earthly bacteria.

As some of McKay’s early evidence has been disputed by others, the initial excitement has died down, but he remains convinced that the particles of magnetite that were found in the sample once constituted a part of a Martian life form. Magnetite is found in various places on our planet, but one of the most interesting homes for this magnetic mineral is inside single-celled organisms that employ a unique style of navigation. So-called magnetotaxic animals use particles of magnetite as tiny compasses that orient their bodies with planetary geography. Though these magnetite bodies take advantage of the earth’s magnetic field in exactly the same way that makes the Boy Scout compass face north, in this case it is not to help them to read maps correctly but to do something much simpler: the magnetite pulls these tiny aquatic animals downward into the lakebeds lining their watery homes, where they find food, safety, and comfortable temperatures. The origin of the magnetite found in McKay’s samples is a matter that still swirls in controversy, but if he is correct, not only will his discovery constitute the first evidence of extraterrestrial life but his claim will be based on an elementary form of navigation.

Revue de presse

"Delightfully lucid....[Ellard writes with] charm and confidence....Ellard has a knack for distilling obscure scientific theories into practical wisdom."--Jonah Lehrer, The Times Book Review

"[O]ne of the finest science writers I've ever read....mind-expanding book....thoroughly digestible....You know you are in the hands of a good teacher when you look up from a book and your own ideas spill out like winnings from a slot machine. It's fun, pure fun."--The Los Angeles Times

“[A] smart, deeply satisfying exploration of how creatures from insects to humans handle the complexities of physical space.....his message is well-reasoned and important.” -- The Cleveland Plain Dealer

"This delightful, dense and illuminating book by Ellard, an experimental psychologist, explores how we navigate space and hone our sense of direction, despite being paradoxically spatially primitive and overly evolved. All animals, monocellular and multicellular alike, find their way to their basic needs–heat, light and nourishment–but while ants, for example, don't get lost and amoebas are guided by an “internal toolkit,” most human beings face unique difficulties. Unlike the Inuit, who have a superb sense of direction, most people find that the more sophisticated their environments, the weaker their grasp of space and direction. Ellard offers insights into how humans navigate their own homes and why they select certain spots for refuge–preferences influenced by gender, culture and history. He emphasizes the importance of orienting children to natural space as well as “virtual spaces,” and his chapter on cities serves as an excellent primer on urban planning and psychogeography, the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographic environment on the emotions." (July)-- Publishers Weekly
“Colin Ellard’s new book, You Are Here, is a powerful inquiry into how we humans orient ourselves in space and identify places both familiar and new.  As an architect, and someone who loves the experiential qualities of three dimensional space, this book took me on a journey to places I’d never even considered before–such as how other creatures on this planet orient themselves, and why it is that our prodigious brain can invent worlds that far outstrip the abilities of our more primitive orienting sensory apparatus.  It’s a stimulating and provocative read for anyone who’s looking for a better understanding of how we process the world around us and orient ourselves within our habitations and living environments.” 
--Sarah Susanka, architect and author of The Not So Big House series and The Not So Big Life
“Ants find their way back to their nest and bees to their hives with remarkable ease, and homing pigeons follow flight paths over incredible distances with uncanny accuracy, but humans seem to need a GPS to keep from getting lost in a mall. Colin Ellard not only delves into such phenomena with élan, he also introduces us to the world of navigational research, a world most of us don't even know exists. You Are Here is sure to direct you down some paths you've never explored before, and no, you won't get lost.”
 –Joe Schwarcz, PhD, author of An Apple a Day
“In this fascinating journey to the wild frontiers of human navigation, Colin Ellard makes it clear that the space around us has made us the species we are. As Ellard pulls together his research into Inuit hunting parties, search and rescue teams, deep sea fishermen and the problems of the modern city dweller, he reveals how our sense of space and direction — and its limitations — has affected every civilisation on Earth. You Are Here is witty and engaging and crammed with profound insights. What’s more, it’s useful too: if you, or your keys, have ever got lost, Ellard can tell you how it happened — and how to stop it happening again.”
–Michael Brooks, PhD, author of Thirteen Things That Don’t Make Sense

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Doubleday
• Date d'édition: 2009
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 038552806X
• ISBN 13: 9780385528061
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 328
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible