Podcast Episode # 009 This is Verla Fortier of Your Outside Mindset Show where I shine a light on aging adults who may have a chronic disease, who are taking back their outside mindset by looking or going outside to spend time close to trees, shrubs, and plants. I started this podcast for 2 reasons 1) because I help people to recognize that going outside is not just a nice thing to do but it could save your life and 2) I want to give you outside mindset tips to live longer, prevent dementia, and control your chronic illness.
I first heard Micheal Bond on a CBC radio program here in Canada called Spark. He was talking about his new book From Here to There: The Art and Science of Finding and Losing Our Way.
I immediately ordered his book and introduced me to new ways of thinking about how we find our way around, and how we get lost, and how this affects us. He looks at brain function, memory, dementia, and our sense of space and place in forests and cities. And he was suggesting exercises had had not thought of – ever before – to improve all these things.
Michael Bond is a science writer and former Senior Editor at New Scientist. His work has appeared in Nature, Discover, the New York Times, Foreign Policy, the Financial Times. His book The Power of Others: Peer Pressure, Groupthink, and How the People Around Us Shape Everything We Do won the British Psychology Society Science Book of the Year award.
Welcome Micheal Bond to Your Outside Mindset.
Will you please start with your story and why you wrote From Here to There?
I am a behavorial science writer, particularly interested in how people interact with their surroundings and how our physical surroundings affect our mental well-being or our state of mind. I specifically honed in on this subject of navigation because in his family there is a great variety of abilities. I have a sister who gets lost all the time so GPS is a life saver, and a couple of cousins who are brilliant at finding their way and remembering places that they have only been to once.
Would you please talk to us about kids getting lost? And what perspectives we need to find them?
Children are interesting because they move through the world differently than adults. If you ask an adult to go from A to B, they tend to take the most direct route or the most efficient way possible. And it is all about getting there.
If you ask a child to go somewhere, will very quickly get distracted, take short cuts, follow an animal, children are natural explorers. This is how we all start off in the world and instinctively wanting to explore it and find out about new places. We lose that as we get older. As a result of this explorer instinct in children they can get lost without even knowing that they are lost. Psychologists, Academics, Search and Rescue volunteers – combined provide an idea of that state of mind of a lost child.
It is also about the children’s home range: where you grew up, how you grew up, free ranging childhood. Children are unblemished explorers and move in a different way. Adult go the most direct way. A child will start off – distracted, and destination least important.
Would you please talk to us about the early history of human way finding the drive to travel over large spaces of land for social connection? My two boys live and work in London, and since I we can’t travel in Covid, I feel like if I could I would travel on foot over land and sea to have a two hour conversation with them. I get it.
Two to three thousand years ago, prehistoric people lived in small family units but they were connected to each other. They would have had to travel great distances, over large landscape – family groups would range – to trade information, knowledge and goods. To find each other.
One thing order to do that their memories must have had to have been good. When they change direction at any point, they had to keep and idea of where home was. The landscape had many risks.
We all have that in our histories, but we don’t tend to exercise our special skills as much – often we don’t need to. But there are still living examples of how people will travel over land for days for a conversation with a friend.
If only we could relaim that – learn about our surroundings and how to survive.
In your book you talk about our relationship with spaces. Around where I live in Manitoba, the towns are named after waterfalls : Pine Falls, Great Falls, Silver Falls – all the communities along the Winnipeg River. And the indigenous community next to us is named Sagkeeng, which means where the mouth of the river meets the lake.
A great example of place naming and how early humans named places in order to secure a special memory of a place. Naming a place provides two purposes: 1) helps you to know when you got there (identify) and 2) gives you a name to help to remember a place (memory) helps us to remember features, and this becomes our kind of map. And remembering or telling a story of what happened at that place helps even more. Humans are story tellers and it is much easier to remember a place where something happened. So try to weave place into story too. Stories not tied to place are generally not told.
What is going on in the brain when we navigate re place?
The part of the brain called the hippocampus is specialized to tell us about the place we are in – they activate and fire up in a configuration that gets set – so whenever we go back into the place that same set of cells fires up in that same pattern. That is effectively what gives us the memory of the place. And then there are other cells in that area that tell us the direction we are travelling, or tell us when we reach a wall or the edge of a wood. These cells called boundary cells tell us which direction our head is facing. So together, place and boundary cells give a sense of the space around us.
With dementia these cells around the hippocampus are the first to be affected. The same cells that we use to navigate they begin to die off. So that is why people with dementia have a loss of orientation. People forget where they are going or people don’t recognize where they are in a place that should be familiar. This is why dementia becomes so terrifying. The world that they are used to knowing suddenly becomes unknown and unknowable. So it is a disease of orientation as well as memory.
So what happens when we walk into the kitchen and forget what we came in there for?
People vary in their ability to remember places. The inability not to remember things is not just a feature of older age. It is something that happens right back to our early twenties. So this is not something that we should panic about as we get older. As we age we get a little bit worse at a lot of things, but we also adapt to find ways to manage that loss of skill.
So we have all gone into a kitchen for example and wonder why we are there at all? One good trick is to go back to the that place where you had that thought and try to remember why you wanted to go into the kitchen in the first place. Very often that memory will come back. And that is because the brain seems to tie in the idea of space in with memory.
Memory is founded on a spatial structure. The hippocampus in the brain is the essential part of the brain for memory as well as navigation.
At an early age, people seem to pick up a bird’s eye view that allows you to make a mental map. So this allows us to take short cuts. This is a spatial approach. This is memory and place. This is called autobiographical memory.
Whereas egocentric memory is following a specific set of instruction eg turn left here and right there. The egocentric approach is effective for A to B travel. But it does not exercise that part of the brain which is essential for orientation, imagination, memory, and orientation.
The spatial approach to navigation exercises these cognitive abilities because you have to work at it. You have to be aware of the places you are going through. You have to think how that hilltop relates to the edge of the forest, that takes quite a lot of cognitive effort and that is happening in your hippocampus.
We started here a nordic walking group of seniors ages 60 – 90 years old. At first we started to walk in the woods for a very short time and distance. Now we are walking out in all directions and getting a birds’ eye view of our area – maybe for the first time even though we have lived here forever.
Well that is great, it sounds like you are already doing it.
Well we did not know we were doing it until now.
There are some people who are afraid of doing that, but there are ways around it. I don’t know if you carry GPS, but you can have that in your pocket, turn it off, and try walking out without it. So being aware of the direction you are going with the knowledge that if you need it you can turn on your GPS.
One thing that is extremely difficult to do and is actually a good test of navigation is to go somewhere using your smartphone and follow the directions it gives you whether you are walking or driving. When you arrive you turn off your GPS and try to return the way you came. It will be extremely difficult to do that because you won’t have been paying attention and you won’t have that connection to your world around you so you will have nothing to go on. Better to go out in full awareness and turn on GPS only if you need to. The key is to pay attention to landmarks.
I really have not heard this information before, so listeners when you read the book you will get all the neuroscience as well as this interesting detail.
When we think about cities, for example London where my boys now live, why is it so confusing to get around?
So on a map, where your boys live in Clapham Common is a large green space so it looks quite distinctive. The problem with London is that it is a group of settlements tied together, it was never planned as a city. So people tend to know their area pretty well, as they would a small town. What is difficult is knowing how your area links up with other areas and how the city as a whole feels and how you travel across it.
A lot of cities are planned on a grid so the roads will travel in one direction and another set of roads at right angles to that. That obviously makes it easier in some ways to follow directions. In London there are no grid systems like that. There are one or two places that have a grid system but as soon as you get outside that streets start going in other directions. So it is a very piecemeal city.
The other problem with London is that is the Thames, the river and we love it as Londoners. People seem to think that it goes from East to West. It does come in on the East and leave on the West but in between it goes up and down and winds around. So you can think oh yes Clapham is south of the river and Westminster is north of the river. Then you think all I have to do is walk across the river. But the river is not a good guide unless you know exactly where the bends are.
In the book you talk about The Shard as being not nearly as good a guide post as the Twin Towers were in Manhattan.
The Shard somewhere in the middle, looks the same pretty much on every side. The tube map in London does not reflect the surface.
One of the chapters that still haunts me is the story of a woman – a 66 retired nurse – that I could completely relate to…would you please tell us that story?
Yes Geraldine Largay was hiking in Maine on The Appalachian Trail which goes for two thousand miles up through the US to the Canadian border. She had covered a lot of it when she got to this part of Maine. She was doing very well, she was fit, and she was by her own account a slow walker. She was doing fine and heading North. Until one day she stepped off the trail in an area of heavy and extensive forest to go to the bathroom.
She probably didn’t go more than 80-90 paces into the woods and then she forgot where she had come out from. She could not retrace her steps. She ended up wandering around for the next 2 days, trying to get a message out on her cell phone and there was no reception.
She ended up climbing up a hill which was still covered in trees and pitching her tent and camping there. And tragically she remained there for the next three weeks. That is where she perished.
She was never found despite the fact that there was one of the biggest search and rescue operations in the history of Maine. They never found her. Her body was found two years later by a forester there who just happened to stumble on the remains of her camp.
The tragedy is that Geraldine did not do anything wrong. She followed all the advice that any search and rescue expert would have told her. Most people when they get lost – it’s terrifying – any of your listeners who have been lost will know this – that you never forget the terrifying experience induces immediate panic, inability to think rationally, and going back to our evolutionary history, (in the prehistoric landscape that we were talking about earlier) getting lost would have been certain death.
People when they get lost seem to run, move, do anything but stay still. But Geraldine after walking around a little bit she stayed where she was. She was just incredibly unlucky I think, not to have been found.
I wanted to study this case, partly to look at the search and rescue attempt, which was also fairly systematic. The problem was a lack of information. They thought she left the trail at a different place and therefore lost a lot of valuable time. It just shows that we are so vulnerable to the world.
Yes, there are so many things to think about. That is just like women to go so far off the trail to go to the bathroom. Men might have just stayed on the path to do the same thing.
Yes I guess if she would have paid attention to landmarks when she went in… but who does that?
The other thing is that she was used to walking with her friend and she was alone this time.
Yes she had been on her own for a little while, but of course yes if she had been with someone else it probably would have turned out differently. It is always recommended that you go with a friend, a buddy, if you are going into a wilderness area. That is something that search and rescue experts always recommend if you can.
Are there other tips that you can leave listeners with today to exercise that part of our brain, the hippocampus Michael Bond?
The main one is developing this of awareness of where you are going and how you relate to your surroundings.
It is so easy, in some ways the older we get, we get into the habit of doing it.. is to only walk in the places that we know, or to walk without really thinking about how we are connecting to the physical world .
You see people in the city walking and looking at their phones and of course they are 100% disconnected from there surroundings. They have got no hope of remembering.
I think the general lesson is as you are moving through the world, try to build up that map of your mind of that place that you are in…not just of your own footsteps and that immediate space in front of you… to have that broader view, and takes awareness.
You have to look up, look around you, you have to be aware of what is on the horizon, what’s close by. The hardest thing is to take note when you change direction. If you are following a path, it is easy to think, ok I am heading east or I am heading toward that hill, but even a slight turn will take you on a different trajectory that will amplify as you come to other turns. Unless you are being aware of where the path turns and by how much (at what angle) you quickly lose a sense of that map. So that is the hardest exercise that anyone can develop, is to pay attention at all times when something changes in your trajectory. Think of that map because it actually is a mental map. And we all have the ability to develop that part of our brains, whatever age we are. The neuroscientists say “ a healthy hippocampus is a healthy brain.”
Where can people find your book and your work Michael?
Twitter link is @michaelshawbond
Website: https://www.michaelbond.co.uk/
