Like many of the researchers who study how people find their way from place to place, David Uttal is a poor navigator. The cognitive scientist says, “When I was 13 years old, I got lost on a Boy Scout hike, and I was lost for two and a half days.” And he’s still bad at finding his way around.

The world is full of people like Uttal—and their opposites, the folks who always seem to know exactly where they are and how to get where they want to go. Scientists sometimes measure navigational ability by asking someone to point toward an out-of-sight location and it’s immediately obvious that some people are better at it than others.

Cognitive psychologist Nora Newcombe says, “People are never perfect, but they can be as accurate as single-digit degrees off, which is incredibly accurate.” But others, when asked to indicate the target’s direction, seem to point at random. “They have literally no idea where it is.”

Several cultural factors were associated with wayfinding skills. Country folk did better, on average, than people from cities. And among city-dwellers, those from cities with more chaotic street networks did better than those from cities like Chicago, where the streets form a regular grid. This is perhaps because residents of grid cities don’t need to build such complex mental maps.

Results like these suggest that an individual’s life experience may be one of the biggest determinants of how well they navigate. Support for the notion that people might improve with practice also comes from studies of what happens when people stop using their navigation skills. Researchers recruited 50 young adults and questioned them about their lifetime experience of driving with GPS. Then they tested the volunteers in a virtual world that required them to navigate without GPS. The heaviest GPS users did worse, they found. This strongly suggests that GPS reliance causes diminished skills, rather than poor skills leading to greater GPS use.

Possible Preaching Angles:

1) Guidance; Lostness - Some people are better at staying on course than others. However, in the spiritual realm, we are all hopelessly lost until Jesus came to our rescue (Isa. 53:6; Luke 19:10); 2) Believers; Direction; Sin, consequences of – Believers sometimes wander away from the truth and need the rod and the staff of the shepherd (Ps. 23:4; Ps. 119:176; Jam. 5:19).