Scientists have always assumed that some people are just wired to navigate better than others — that sense of direction is something you’re born with. This assumption, however, is missing the bigger picture.
The reason why some people so often lose their way, while others glide through the world as if born with an inner compass, it turns out, lies not in your DNA, but in the life you lead.
The Map in Your Mind
One of the most revealing ways researchers study navigation is by watching what people do when they’re well outside sight of their starting point. These are known as “out-of-sight” tests — simple in appearance, but surprisingly rich in what they reveal about the hidden maps we carry in our heads.
In the most common version, a person is guided through an environment — sometimes a real place, sometimes a virtual world. Once they reach a stopping point, they’re asked to do something deceptively difficult: point toward the location they visited earlier but can no longer see. Some people point with uncanny precision. Others seem to guess at random.
In 2020, a team led by psychologist Margherita Malanchini tested over 2,600 pairs of twins as they played through virtual mazes. Identical twins weren’t much more similar in navigational performance than fraternal twins. Instead, what mattered most was experience — what geneticists call the “nonshared environment,” the unique things a person encounters in life.
In other words, good navigators are mostly made, not born.
This idea gained support from an unusual experiment: a mobile game called Sea Hero Quest, developed by neuroscientist Hugo Spiers and his collaborators. The game asked players to steer boats through virtual environments, then shoot flares back toward their starting points — a test known as “dead reckoning.”
Nearly four million people around the world played the game. The findings were eye-opening.
People from Nordic countries consistently performed better. That may be due in part to orienteering — a sport blending cross-country running with navigation — which is widely practiced in those countries.
People who grew up in the countryside, or in cities with irregular street layouts like Prague, also did better than those from gridded metropolises like Chicago. Why? Because complex or unfamiliar environments force people to form mental maps. In grid-like cities, the same skills may simply never get exercised.
Culture, Gender, and the Price of Safety
If experience is so crucial, why does the stereotype persist that men are better navigators than women?
Because in many parts of the world, boys have far more freedom to roam.
In Nordic nations, where gender equality is among the highest globally, men and women show almost no difference in wayfinding ability. But in parts of the Middle East and elsewhere where women face cultural restrictions on independent movement, men outperform women on navigation tasks.
Similar patterns appear in Indigenous communities that encourage both genders to explore. In the Bolivian Amazon, anthropologist Helen Elizabeth Davis found that men and women of the Tsimane people moved equal distances through the forest and performed equally well at pointing to out-of-sight locations.
In most places across the world, however, girls explore less. And when they do travel to unfamiliar surroundings, they may be worried about their security or getting lost. Anxiety gets in the way of good navigation, psychologists say. If you feel unsafe exploring your surroundings, you gather less experience — and your skills don’t develop.
There’s another factor at play: confidence. Studies show women often underestimate their navigation abilities, even when they perform just as well as men. Older men, meanwhile, are the most likely to overestimate themselves.
The Making of a Mental Map
Navigation isn’t one skill — it’s a bundle of them.
Some people are great at following routes: turn left at the bakery, go three blocks, right at the gas station. Others are good at “survey knowledge”, forming an internal map of the environment and understanding how places relate to one another even when out of sight.
In classic studies, volunteers driven repeatedly through unfamiliar neighborhoods could remember the order of landmarks and the distances between them. But only a few could accurately sketch a map or point to unseen places. Those with good survey knowledge were far better at finding shortcuts or rerouting when a familiar path was blocked.
In a 2018 study, psychologists Nora Newcombe and colleague Steven Weisberg identified three types of navigators:
- Those with strong mental maps
- Those who rely on route knowledge
- And those who struggle with both
The first group could point to landmarks across different routes. The second could point only within the same route. The third often guessed randomly.
The GPS Trap
Today, many people navigate with smartphones. But studies suggest that GPS can erode your natural skills.
A 2020 study by neuroscientists Louisa Dahmani and Véronique Bohbot found that heavy GPS users performed worse at navigating a virtual world. When researchers followed up three years later, those same users had declined even more — suggesting that reliance on GPS may cause skill loss, not just reflect it.
That makes sense. We’re offloading our cognitive abilities when we’re vacationing in new environments, with our heads buried in our phones. When you always depend on a map app, your brain does less work — and weakens.
But there are ways to push back. Use your GPS with the map oriented north, not “direction up,” to better understand your movements. Zoom in and out often. And don’t always follow the route it gives you — try to think about alternatives.
Exploration matters. So does risk.
Lots of adults have quite a lot of spatial anxiety. They’re afraid to get lost, afraid to waste time. But getting a little lost now and then is good for your brain.
What makes a good navigator?
Why do some people love to explore, while others stay close to home?
It all may start early. A child who enjoys wandering is more likely to gain navigation experience. That experience builds skill and confidence. The cycle repeats.
Personality plays a role. So do hobbies. Hikers and cyclists tend to be better navigators. So do gamers — especially those who play open-world games that require spatial reasoning.
Even career paths may be shaped by these early experiences. Another study by Newcombe has found that geologists, who work extensively in the field, show superior navigation skills compared to psychologists. Many top orienteers end up in STEM careers — perhaps because their early spatial training gives them a leg up.
Navigation also lives deep in the brain. The hippocampus, home of our “cognitive map,” grows larger in skilled navigators. The retrosplenial cortex, which helps recognize permanent landmarks, lights up during orientation tasks. And grid cells in the entorhinal cortex fire like a GPS, helping us calculate direction and distance.
But different cultures encode and pass on navigational knowledge in different ways. Western science tends to favor visual cues. Other traditions — like the wave pilots of the Marshall Islands or the foragers of the Congo — may rely more on smell, sound, or subtle shifts in the wind and waves.
That’s why one-size-fits-all tests can sometimes fail. Virtual mazes on a screen may not reflect how people actually move through space in their real environments.
How to Build a Better Sense of Direction
If you struggle to find your way, the good news is this: you can improve.
Practice matters. Attention matters. And so does curiosity.
Start walking a little farther. Notice the wind. Pay attention to where the Sun rises. Get familiar with landmarks. Use your GPS less. Let yourself get lost — in safe places, of course.
You don’t need to become a world-class orienteer or a London cabbie. But a better mental map is within reach.
And when your phone dies on a mountain trail or in a foreign city, that mental map might be the only thing that gets you home.
