Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [7]
“I wish I had a dollar for every time a student has walked into my office and said, ‘I’ve always loved geography, and I’ve always loved maps, ever since I was young,’” says Keith Clarke, the University of California, Santa Barbara, geography professor who writes the “Ask Dr. Map” column for the American Congress on Surveying and Mapping’s Bulletin magazine. “My theory is that these are people who reason spatially.”
Good spatial skills are easy enough to measure; every intelligence test you’ve ever taken probably had a series of headache-inducing rotation and cross-section problems designed to test your spatial cognition. People with these abilities are far more likely than their peers to wind up in math- or science-heavy careers, even when general intelligence is controlled for. They might be engineers, geologists, architects—even dentists, since dental exams ask lots of spatial questions. You don’t want your dentist asking you, in the middle of a root canal, “Wait, which molar was that again? I can’t quite . . . can you turn your head the same direction as mine?”
Machines and molars may come easier to people with keen spatial sense, but maps really come alive for them. They engage with the map in a way that others don’t. They can project their viewpoint right into its dots and lines and vividly imagine what the territory will look like ahead. Christopher Columbus’s biographer Bartolomé de Las Casas wrote that the explorer’s first Atlantic voyage was inspired by a nautical chart that the Italian mathematician Paolo Toscanelli had sent him. “That map set Columbus’s mind ablaze,” wrote Las Casas. “He did not doubt he should find those lands that were marked upon it.” Columbus was clearly one of those people who could see a map once and enter its world immediately, and it changed the course of history.
Not everyone has the knack, of course. If you’ve ever stood in front of a shopping-mall map for ten minutes, craning your head at various angles in a vain attempt to visualize whether Sbarro’s is to your left or your right, you know it’s a frustrating experience.* People, especially kids, who have that experience over and over aren’t going to want to read maps for fun. They’re going to avoid them at all costs. When cartophiles trace the Zambezi River with one finger on a map of Africa, they can imagine rafting the river’s serpentine jungle curves, the roar of Victoria Falls growing to deafening proportions in the spray ahead . . . but it’s just not the same if the river stubbornly remains just a squiggly blue line on the map for you.
But you needn’t despair every time you get lost in the mall. “There’s tremendous evidence that we can learn these skills,” says David Uttal, a professor of psychology and education at Northwestern University. “People’s potential is grossly underutilized.”
In study after study, lousy mappers and lousy spatial thinkers have “responded well and quickly to relatively simple interventions,” Uttal tells me. This is academicspeak for “practice makes perfect.” Test the baseline spatial cognition of a group of college freshmen and then repeat the test after they’ve taken a short introductory course in engineering graphics. Their scores will improve markedly. A famous 2000 study showed that the brains of London cabbies who had passed “The Knowledge,” a licensing exam requiring encyclopedic expertise of the city’s streets, had a markedly larger hippocampus than those of normal Londoners. (The hippocampus, a sea horse–shaped structure in the brain’s temporal lobe, is the center of navigational function.) In fact, the cabbies’ hippocampi continued to grow the longer they spent on the job. Apparently size matters.
“When people say they can’t read maps, I just think they have a preference not to,” says Uttal. “There are a lot of things I can’t do right now, but I could if you gave me two weeks to study them.”
I decide to test Uttal’s two-week dictum on my wife, Mindy. Mindy, I hasten to add, is a wonderful woman in every respect. Songbirds fly in through our bedroom window every morning to help her dress,