navigation and genetics
 

It has always amazed me how my wife cannot orient herself and she will
say "On your way home could you go by XYZ and pick up ABC when XYZ is
on the far side of the county from my way home. She has no sense of
where things are in relation to each other.
This amazes me because I always had a very good sense of direction
until I got older and could orient myself to north no matter what.
That sense is now gone but I can still visualize where things are even
in a cave.
My eldest daughter is just like my wife.
My son is even worse
My younger daughter is like me but even more so. Her sense of
direction is phenomenal. Her ability to find her way in caves amazes
everyone so that after only a single trip into a complex cave she
knows exactly where to go. Last trip, while were puzzling out which
way to go, she sat next to us mumbling "You go up over the Wildcat
Rock pile in the next room and then down through the small hole to the
lower left, go right and follow the wall till you get to the crack
that goes into the Hall of Mysteries". We thought she was BSing us
but it turned out she was right. This was from a single trip into the
cave a year before. She had the place memorized. She is like this
everywhere and can describe exactly how to get somehwere she last went
when she was 2 years old (she is now 13). She has an unerring sense
of where constellations are in the sky. When I explained how to use
the compass on the boat in conjunction with the charts, she thought it
was obvious. With my own sense of direction failing me, I rely on
hers.
This difference in navigation ability always puzzled me but I found
this article about a genetic link:
http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/201...runc_sys.shtml
However, there is a price for everything. Whereas younger daughter is
very good at navigation, she has trouble making and keeping friends
preferring her own company (like father-like daughter, sometimes)
whereas my older daughter is much more sociable and my son who would
literally get lost in his own room is Mr Sociable who seems to attract
people.