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Overview
Navigation is the key human skill. It's something we do everywhere, whether feeling our way through a bedroom in the dark, or charting a ship's course. But how does navigation affect our brains, our memory, ourselves? Blending scientific research and memoir, and written in beautiful prose, Finding North starts with a quest by the author to understand this most basic of human skills---and why it's in mortal peril.
In 1844, Foy's great-great grandfather, captain of a Norwegian cargo ship, perished at sea after getting lost in a snowstorm. Foy decides to unravel the mystery surrounding Halvor Michelsen's death---and the roots of his own obsession with navigation---by re-creating his ancestor's trip using only period instruments.
Beforehand, he meets a colorful cast of characters to learn whether men really have better directional skills than women, how cells, eels, and spaceships navigate; and how tragedy results from GPS glitches. He interviews a cabby who has memorized every street in London, sails on a Haitian cargo sloop, and visits the site of a secret navigational cult in Greece.
At the heart of Foy's story is this fact: navigation and the brain's memory centers are inextricably linked. As Foy unravels the secret behind Halvor's death, he also discovers why forsaking our navigation skills in favor of GPS may lead not only to Alzheimers and other diseases of memory, but to losing a key part of what makes us human.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781250053893 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Flatiron Books |
| Publication date: | 05/10/2016 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 818 KB |
About the Author
GEORGE MICHELSEN FOY is the author of Zero Decibels: The Quest for Absolute Silence, and twelve critically acclaimed novels. He is the recipient of a National Endowment of the Art fellowship in fiction. His novel Art&Practice of Explosion came second in Foreword magazine's 2001 Novel of the Year contest, andThe Shift was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick prize. His articles, reviews, and stories have been published by Rolling Stone, The Boston Globe, Harper's, The New York Times, and Men's Journal, among others, and has been an investigative reporter, writer, and/or editor for BusinessWeek, The International Herald Tribune, and The Cape Cod Register. He was educated at the Sorbonne, the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Bennington College. He teaches creative writing at New York University. He is married with two children, and divides his time between coastal Massachusetts and New York.
Read an Excerpt
Finding North
How Navigation Makes Us Human
By George Michelsen Foy
Flatiron Books
Copyright © 2016 George Michelsen FoyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-250-05389-3
CHAPTER 1
Fear
This story starts with fear, as so many stories do, harking back forever to that moment when, confused by light, we are dragged out of our mothers into an unknown space and must sort out, among these alien forms, where we are.
"Where" is the primal question, rather than "when," "how," or "who" because for any animal, figuring out where to move in defense or attack relative to the forces around us has always been the first step to survival. From the start, staying alive has depended on navigation: the art of figuring out our position and in what direction to travel.
* * *
I HAVE A HISTORY OF not knowing true position. Recently, near the end of a long late-night drive that took me from New York City to Route 195 in southeastern Massachusetts, I grew drowsy; pulling over at a rest area, I switched off the engine and quickly fell asleep. When I awoke I had not the slightest idea of where I was or how I had gotten there, to slouch in this tight, cold space in darkness. In that instant I could have been anywhere, I might have been kidnapped by aliens, I could have lost my memory and been shipped to Turkmenistan. In some ways, I was as helpless as a newborn once more. A strange terror gripped me then, and held me back from moving or calling out for what seemed like minutes, though it was probably only a few seconds. It was a panic somehow augmented by the emotional memory of similar situations, whose outcomes lay beyond the haze of fatigue, in a place I could not quite recall.
That feeling was matched by the desperation with which, as soon as panic furloughed my motor centers, I catalogued as quickly as possible what I could see or touch: steering wheel, windshield; and beyond the glass, a tall, highway-style lamppost, a dark stand of white pines. I remember the relief that washed over me when geophysical clues crossed lines on a mental map, suggesting a solid position and memories connected to them: car, rest area, highway. It was country that looked close to home, which as it turned out lay forty minutes to the east: home, where my brother, who was gravely ill, waited to see me.
* * *
LIVING IMPLIES CHANGE AND THUS movement, and since navigation is the art of computing where we are, where we've been, and where we are going, it's not an exaggeration to say that navigation in its myriad forms is not only a crucial survival tool but the prime expression of living. Of the generally accepted criteria for life, most imply knowing our current position and moving where we must to fulfill a particular goal. "We have a brain for one reason and one reason only," a Cambridge neuroscientist named Daniel Wolpert once stated, "to produce adaptable and complex movements." Producing movement means finding position and a direction in which to move. Our brains evolved by navigating.
Navigation is so basic, so present at all levels of our lives that, like the proverbial company of blind men touching various sectors of an elephant and coming up with different definitions — it's an archway, a wall, a fire hose — we rarely recognize the whole for what it is. We navigate when we search for Smith's office in a part of our workplace we've not visited before; we navigate when, on the East Coast, we think of e-mailing a friend in San Francisco, situating him mentally three thousand miles away in SoMa, in the darkness before dawn. Even waking up in a space we know well, requiring a glass of water at 3:00 A.M., we automatically use navigational skills to plot our journey: roll off the bed, stagger around the chest of drawers, the scattered jogging shoes, through a door, then turn left (fingers outstretched, touching a wall to guide us) down an unlit hallway to the kitchen tap. The process is so unconscious that if someone were to insist we were navigating within our own house we would probably scoff.
And yet, during our short voyage from bed to faucet, the navigation and memory centers in our brains perform a suite of calculations: of distance, course, time in relation to known landmarks; whose complexity is not watered down by the fact that we're not aware of them. These calculations are the same in kind — and performed, relatively speaking, with similar efficiency — as those employed by a World War II navigator using parallel rulers, pencil, and map to chart a bomber's journey from southern England to Berlin and back.
* * *
THE INCIDENT ON ROUTE 195 has shaken me. Over my thirty-plus years of adult life, I have traveled frequently and awoken in many odd places: a cornfield in southwestern France, a brothel in Indonesia, a rooftop in Damascus, a subway train (after a night of imprudent celebration) in the Bronx; but as a rule I've always been certain of what, and who, I would see when my eyes opened.
As I think back, I decide it was not the waking-up part that shook me as much as the particular flavor of associated terror and its familiarity. For I have known such extreme and debilitating panic twice before, and both times it was linked to losing track of where I was.
* * *
THE MONTHS THAT FOLLOW ARE full of turmoil and loss. My brother dies, and my wife and children and I have to absorb the emotional shock, as well as legal and financial fallout, from his death. At times, waking from the day-to-day routine that absorbs our lives, remembering Louis is no longer here, I feel I have lost track of myself in a fashion similar to what happened on Route 195. Is it despite or because of this that I become increasingly determined to examine not only the origins of my own propensity for navigational breakdown but everything else about this skill that so defines us?
I am not overly thrilled with the idea of exploring such personal navigational panic. I decide, therefore, to start my research at the furthest remove from the consciousness spectrum, at the level of a developing cell and how it knows which part of the body it's meant to reside in. I learn, after sifting through scientific papers from Germany, Israel, Taiwan, that one of the top researchers in the field works in the same college at which I teach; and I make an appointment, therefore, with Dr. Stephen Small at New York University in Manhattan.
To meet Small I must travel and therefore navigate. Driving from our house in southeastern Massachusetts I follow Route 195 west and then, in Providence, Rhode Island, alter course toward New York City. My car is not fitted with a Global Positioning System receiver, or GPS, so I match the Jeep's compass readout to the sun as our star swings southwest. Once in Manhattan I recognize the landscape and have little trouble finding my way to a street near the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village; parking there, I walk south and east to NYU's campus in Washington Square. This process of recognizing landmarks and geographical patterns and matching them to a map in the head is known to scientists as "path integration." It's the basis of a skill we usually refer to as sense of direction.
Stephen Small's work focuses on the sense of direction as well, though at a more primal level. As chair of NYU's department of biology he runs a laboratory that seeks to understand how a given cell in a fetus navigates its way to become part of the left eye, the liver, a right toe.
Small is six foot three, lean, full of energy. He has an engaging grin, an easy manner, and close-cropped gray hair. He greets me in a corner office on the top floor of NYU's Silver Building. From this godlike vantage point over the West Village I observe the tourists in Washington Square wandering small as lice. Small leads me to his laboratory, the Center for Developmental Biology, on an adjoining floor of the Brown Building.
The lab is sealed behind thick metal doors. The space inside, defined by institutional walls painted gray and white, contains stacks of shelves laden with glass jars, tubes, vials, all numbered and color coded; workbenches below bear microscopes, computers, more vials. The monitor lights of diminutive machines blink in broken rhythm. Dozens of grad students labor at adjusting things I can't make out.
Small performs many of his experiments on drosophila, the common fruit fly, because they grow out of large embryos that are easy to mess with physically. Millions of drosophila participate, unconscious conscripts, in the lab's work at any given time. A room chilled to sixty-four degrees Fahrenheit slows the average life cycle of test insects. From one of that room's shelves, Small takes down a glass vial roughly two and a half inches long.
Inside are the formative years of a fruit fly's life. Drosophila teenagers, brown dashes barely a millimeter in length, crawl rebelliously around the top. "Can you see those tiny white dots?" he asks, pointing toward the bottom. "Those are embryos. Do you have a good slide?" he asks an assistant who, after much flipping through boxes, hands him a thin glass rectangle. Small places this slide under the light of a nearby microscope and motions me over. "Look at this," he says. "It's beautiful."
It is, indeed, lovely. Several hundred fruit-fly embryos swim in the empty ocean of magnified glass. Each embryo is an oval containing thousands of tiny dots, and every dot is a nucleus. Each nucleus is filled with a specific amount of a protein called Bicoid. The nuclei at one end have accumulated so much Bicoid that they appear almost black, but the concentration in each nucleus thins progressively toward the embryo's other pole, forming a remarkably even gradient of light to dark. The effect resembles a winter's sunset when snow clouds are so thick that the sky changes smoothly from light silver above, where the sun's rays still strike, to an increasing darkness where night gathers at the horizon. But this is a winterscape painted by Seurat, and every dot has a crucial job.
"You're looking at a morphogen gradient," Small tells me. It's the most visually striking expression of a position-finding mechanism based on recognizing varying levels of protein concentration. The developing cell, following a route-map written into its DNA, will navigate to the embryo's periphery, where different levels of Bicoid: higher near the source, lower farther away; already exist. It's as if the cell were a saloon patron, trying to find a place at the counter with a crowd at one end that thins progressively toward the other; his experience will depend on the number of people interacting at the section of bar where he happens to wind up. In the same way, the position the cell finds on the periphery — and thus, the precise concentration of morphogen — will determine which structure of the growing insect is formed at that exact point in space.
Another microscope illuminates embryos at a more advanced stage of development. Here every embryo contains a series of dark stripes aligned at right angles to the embryo's long axis. The striped patterns resemble a bar code trapped in a clear balloon; they are composed of cells that, having navigated to a particular position on the gradient, will develop into wing, or eye, or feeler, accordingly.
The work of Small and others like him is vitally important to the same extent that navigation is essential to normal life. If developing cells travel as they're supposed to, toward the various sectors of a morphogen gradient, the embryo will develop into a normal fruit fly or dog or human. If not, monsters result. At this early stage of life, bad navigation in the form of a wayward cell, a skewed gradient, can cause grave genetic defects in the fetus. Small's research, in the long run, should enable us to understand how those defects come to be and how to prevent them.
But normal embryo or monster, the cell won't care. It has zero consciousness and no choice in what happens.
* * *
I GET LOST, IN A casual sort of way, as I leave Small's lab. The Silver and Brown Buildings were originally separate, and though now conjoined they retain different floor levels so that the uppermost floor of Silver stands six feet higher than the top floor of Brown. Out of sheer laziness I opt not to climb back to Silver and descend to the next level, only to find the exit there locked. An open door on the floor below leads to a confusing array of hallways and locked doors, and soon I lose all sense of direction.
I remember now that, before NYU took them over, the uppermost floors of Brown were home to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. The fact carries with it a buzz of shock. If I were trying to find a place that epitomizes how dangerous it is to lose the ability to navigate, I could not have chosen one more appropriate.
Triangle Shirtwaist was a sweatshop that employed almost five hundred workers, mostly young women and girls, some as young as thirteen, in the manufacture of men's clothes. When fire broke out in the sweatshop at 4:15 P.M. on March 25, 1911, the flames spread at terrifying speed, gorging themselves on heaps of scrap cotton, through the top three floors of what is now the Brown Building.
The sweatshop's owners, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, knew the factory well enough to find their way to the roof, with kids, governess, and foreman in tow, and from there they fled to an adjoining building to safety. It appears, based on survivors' testimony, that a number of workers could also have climbed to the roof ahead of the flames and smoke, but they had never been shown anything beyond their work stations and few of them knew the territory well enough to find their way out. The location of two emergency exits was obvious; those doors had been locked to prevent workers from taking unauthorized breaks or pilfering. Unable to navigate their way around the fire, 146 died, either burned to death inside the building or killed when they jumped to escape the flames: crushed on the sidewalk below or gruesomely impaled on the spikes of a wrought-iron fence that surrounded Brown at the time.
Eventually I find my way back to the stairs, to Silver, and take the elevator down. I am not psychic, nor do I believe in ghosts or spirits, but the memory of that fire, the screams of terrified girls it brings back, echo in my brain as I walk into the honking, in-ya-face, buttery, breezy, hot-dog- smelling sunlight of a late-summer afternoon in New York. In Washington Square I find a bench where I can sit and read the notes I scrawled while interviewing Small and think about what they imply.
Morphogens have no concept of whether they've navigated well or badly or what the consequences of poor navigation will be. Cells, lacking consciousness, have no choice in what they do, and therefore cannot know the fear, however latent, that comes when faced with a decision: sprint right or left to escape the flames? Assume, or not, a strong north wind drifting the aircraft southward as the pilot charts a course for Berlin?
Humans, on the other hand, have always defined themselves to a large extent by the knowledge required to fix position and venture farther afield, whether in exploration, trade, or war. This skill was acquired, often at great cost, by people who discovered new lands or figured out novel ways of observing the stars. They then added their knowledge to a body of navigational lore, oral or written, which enabled the next generation to make fresh discoveries. Although this conscious, venturesome aspect of human navigation might seem self-evident, it highlights the great difference between the French mother ten feet away from me examining her smartphone's GPS function and the pigeons her three-year-old is chasing.
The navigational tools employed by certain pigeons, as well as by myriad other creatures such as the Arctic tern or American eel, are elegant, precise. And all are instinctive, as mechanical and hardwired as the morphogen's; they guide life-forms having no idea of why, whether, or how they are guided. Whereas humans, with our weighty brains and fine reasoning skills, have lost our instinctive ability to navigate, which surely we possessed at some earlier stage of evolution.
I wonder if the price our species paid for becoming conscious was the loss of an ability to navigate instinctively. Or else, flipping the causal equation, was losing our instinctive skills, and the consequent need to invent navigational tools, what caused us to become conscious in the first place? Could it be that the fear attendant on judging where to go is not merely an awkward side effect but an important component of our need to move?
If that's the case, I think, it might be important to reassess the impact of such devices as the GPS-enabled cell phone with which the French maman is still obsessed. GPS and similar technologies over the last twenty years have rendered the hard-won navigational skills of individual humans obsolete. Every one of us has, with little notice and no training, become the navigational superior of Ferdinand Magellan, James Cook, Sacagawea. For the price of a smartphone or an Internet connection, we can be led with astonishing precision to any point on the globe, and we don't need to know a single detail about how it's done.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Finding North by George Michelsen Foy. Copyright © 2016 George Michelsen Foy. Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
fear
the Stavanger Paquet
Birds, memory, and London taxis
modeling Halvor
at the shrine of the navigation gods
the "exploration" gene
adventures in the GPS trade
stellar screw-up
sex and navigation
horse latitude
a journey to the dark heart of GPS
searching the chart
Odysseus in Haiti
launch
the downside of cybernav
at sea
navigate or die
the sail, and the story of the sail
the politics of navigation
Norway
finding north