Lost your sense of direction? Turn off your phone and you’ll soon reconnect

We’ve lost direction and our brains are shrinking – at least, our hippocampi are. These seahorse-shaped parts of the brain measure about 5cm, sit just above both ears and drive our spatial awareness and orientation. London taxi drivers, famed for taking the Knowledge, a test that involves memorising the central streets of the capital, have full-sized hippocampi. But in 2011, neuroscientists at University College London discovered that the cabbies’ hippocampi shrunk significantly after retirement.

The development of the hippocampus can also be stunted in childhood. Children living in urban environments rarely see the sun rise or set and cannot tell the difference between east and west. When I volunteered to go into my local school to teach kids about direction, I found they struggled to distinguish north from south and east from west – though they could do so if allowed to use their phones.

Since 2005, when Google Maps was launched claiming it would help users get from A to B and then, three years later, when the iPhone 3G was released featuring “live” location, the online tech giants stated that today’s digital native kids would be the first generation who would not know what it meant to get lost. But is that a good thing? Their horizons and orientation, like their hippocampi, are shrinking with the collusion of online providers. In four generations children have gone from roaming up to six miles from home to an average of just 300 yards. Even before Covid, surveys found that three-quarters of children spent less time outdoors than prison inmates. Many parents know the subsequent 50% rise in agoraphobia has profoundly affected children’s mental and physical health. But it also drives biophobia, an avoidance, even fear of the natural world. If we come to dread nature, the result is an indifference, even hostility, towards environmental conservation.

Wherever kids do travel they are probably following the blue dot on their phone screen, showing them the way without reference to the world around them. Maps have never been more accessible in the palm of our hands on our phones, but they are as much a tyranny as a liberation. Our phones now map us, harvesting our online likes and dislikes.

Current studies suggest a link between this so-called developmental topographical disorientation and mental health, as online experiences lead to a digitally poisoned awareness of space and place. We are becoming, quite literally, disoriented in a digital world where we have given up on tools that enhance our cognitive abilities, like paper maps and magnetic compasses that enabled us to navigate and orient ourselves in tandem with the physical world. We have retreated from using the spatial skills that sustained us for millennia. No wonder our sense of being lost is existential as much as directional.

To be disoriented means to be “lost to the east”: the word comes from Latin for the sun rising in the east. In ancient history, most societies were oriented with east as their prime direction, the source of light, heat and life-giving sun. West, where the sun sets, came next. North and south then followed, as people located them by the position of the sun at midday, and visual astronomical observation of Polaris, the North Star. Early polytheistic societies worshipped the sun rising in the east, a tradition inherited by monotheistic Judeo-Christian belief that put east at the top of their maps, as the location of the beginning of Creation and the place of Resurrection. In the Old Testament, Creation starts in the Garden of Eden in the east. The medieval Mappa Mundi in Hereford Cathedral has east at the top, showing Adam and Eve in Eden, and west at the bottom. This was an orientation that defined European Christianity for more than 1,000 years.

By contrast, early Islamic maps placed south at the top, because the people that first converted to the faith lived directly north of Mecca. The easiest way to understand their holy direction was to orient their maps so that Mecca was “up”. We still talk about going up north and down south in the UK, an old hangover from understanding the four points of the compass according to our bodies: up and down, front and back, or left and right. South does just as well as the cardinal direction, as it was for classical Chinese science, which had its magnetic compasses pointing south, not north. They are called luojing, “the thing that points south”. Australians know this: in 1979, Stuart McArthur published his Universal Corrective Map of the World, oriented southwards with Australia at the top.

The compass appeared in the 13th century on European maritime maps that allowed navigators to orientate themselves on a north-south axis. But it took another 400 years for these maps to agree on putting north at the top, which had always been an inauspicious direction in most societies as a place of cold and darkness. It was crowned cardinal direction by the Flemish mapmaker Gerardus Mercator. But Mercator was more interested in enabling pilots to sail accurately east to west. On his world map (1569), distortion was minimised either side of the equator, which was ideal for European maritime empires sailing east to west via Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope. The north and south poles were projected to infinity, as everyone presumed they were ice-bound and travelling there seemed pointless.

So north triumphed accidentally, because nobody wanted to go there. As Europe’s imperial mapmakers cemented north as the cardinal direction, other traditions prioritising different directions were dismissed and erased. The west succeeded in putting north on top at the expense of places it denigrated and labelled “southern” (America and Africa), or as part of the “Middle East”. When Nasa first saw the image of the Earth photographed by the Apollo 17 astronauts on 7 December 1972, they rotated the original photo 180 degrees to show north at the top rather than south. The famous “blue marble” photograph, one of the most reproduced images in human history, is actually upside down.

Historically no societies have put west at the top of world maps because of its associations with sunset and death. But as a political idea, the west has situated north on top after centuries of imperial domination. But will it stay there as India and China reorientate our global economy, and potentially turn it 180 degrees? Might the use of compasses disappear altogether – and with them the cardinal directions?

In my lifetime we have gone from looking up, aspiring to a shared global village inspired by Nasa’s blue marble photograph, to looking down, glued to the blue dot on our phones as our hippocampi shrink and many of us withdraw from nature. It probably isn’t the end of civilisation. After all, maps and compasses are cognitive artefacts, like the internet, and we’ve been using them for millennia. But for our sense of wellbeing, and that of the world that sustains us, we can take steps not just to appreciate nature, but understand how we are part of it, acknowledging that it will always be bigger than us, in a positive, not phobic way. Many share basic principles of psychotherapy: grounding, breathing, being “in the moment”, imagining ourselves from outside or “above” our bodies. It seems that, more than ever, we need to explain who we are by understanding where we are. Here are a few tips on how to do so.

Take your bearings. Use a compass (even on your phone!) to work out the four cardinal directions. Time and space are interrelated, so rethink your attitude to clock time by noticing the movement of the sun east to west from sunrise to sunset. As the sun sets, identify north by finding Polaris. We’re just a dot in the universe: accept it.

Use a paper map. It is a declining art, but using paper maps will make you more aware of your surroundings. An archaic English term for map is a plot, just like a story: turn your route into an adventure.

Feel the wind. Thousands of years before the invention of the compass, we understood and identified the four cardinal directions according to winds. Identify the wind’s direction according to your body: is it behind or in front of you? Look up, turn around. Acknowledge its force. This is a simple grounding exercise that reorients us according to the elements.

Get lost. Take a trip, turn off your phone and deliberately get lost. It’s a little scary, but it will heighten your senses and sharpen your appreciation of the world around you. If that is too daunting, read Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost, because as Solnit suggests, who knows what you might find when you deliberately get lost?

Four Points of the Compass: The Unexpected History of Direction by Jerry Brotton is published by Penguin at £20, or buy a copy for £17 at guardianbookshop.com. Jerry is also the presenter of the podcast What’s Your Map?