Oh that was absolutely fascinating!* The cardinal directions
thing was quite mindblowing to me.* I had always wondered, "Why
can't we just refer to things by their REAL direction?"** I find
I can't always tell you what street I'm on [I'm terrible with
street navigation] yet I always know whether I'm traveling
north, south, east or west and which direction home is, because
I have a dreadful fear of getting lost... and I know that, if I
know the cardinal direction where home is... I can always get
there, eventually, even if I have to traverse a number of
strange roads. I can't do what they do.... but I'd be curious to
try now.* I probably learned cardinal directions from Boy Scouts
and it sunk in for me - right now, I'm facing West - my house is
north of me - I'm on the porch that's on the south side of the
house.* In my mind, I know the trajectory of the sun, and I
always seek out the north side of buildings, because I like to
know where the shady spots are when I get out of the car. Yet, I
have trouble with my left and right.* Always did. Hm. I will
look more into these people.* I found an article that questioned
just how lacking their sense of relative direction is;
apparently they used hand-gestures to combine their sense of
relative space along with their absolute cardinal sense; which
makes a little more sense to me.* It means they are more aware
of their territory in terms of quandrants than we are, but they
do use a local frame of reference as well, but only as much as
they need to get the listener from where they are at present to
mentally envision the "over there".* In short, they can handle
relative and absolute positioning simultaneously, something we
would have more trouble with. Still, quite fascinating and I
will read up more on these people.* I enjoy embodied cognition
viewpoints; it's at an early stage, compared to computational
theories of mind and such, but it has great potential to expand
our way of looking at the world.
