Dark and Magical Places: The Neuroscience of Navigation by Christopher Kemp

Author:Christopher Kemp [Kemp, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781324064381
Google: 2pNozwEACAAJ
Amazon: 1324005386
Barnesnoble: 1324005386
Goodreads: 58085260
Publisher: Profile Books
Published: 2021-11-15T06:00:00+00:00

Unlike the Siberians, I am not able to do this to any degree at all. Von Wrangell would have watched me with dismay. I can navigate neither hummocky ice nor my own neighborhood, which bristles with familiar landmarks.

Elizabeth Chrastil (a 9 out of 10) is standing in an empty, low-ceilinged room on the campus of the University of California, Irvine in the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory. In fact, it’s not even a room: it’s a portable classroom trailer, a room that can move, not unlike the rooms of my own house when I try to imagine them in my mind. It sits approximately forty miles southeast of the concrete freeway sprawl of downtown Los Angeles. The skylights and windows have been blacked out, and the walls are unadorned and painted a nondescript grey color—approximately, Pantone Cool Gray 6C. The carpet is an institutional pistachio green. At the moment, in the center of the room, one of Chrastil’s subjects pulls a sturdy black pair of virtual reality goggles over her head. Tucking in her disobedient hair, she straightens and then lifts her foot and takes a tentative step forward—into the void.

Chrastil is leading her subject through a virtual path integration test. Outside the trailer, beyond its thin walls, the campus bustles with activity as students head from lecture halls and laboratories to the science library and bagel shops. But inside the trailer, the subject is navigating a featureless pixelated desert.

“A lot of people are really excited to do virtual reality tasks,” says Chrastil. But then they land in the virtual desert. It’s not fun. It’s like Tron. “It’s actually really kind of boring,” she says. Even so, to Chrastil the featurelessness of the virtual desert is an important tool: it’s an empty environment. “We want to reduce the number of cues and landmark information that are out there in the world,” says Chrastil. We rely heavily on landmarks when we navigate, and there are brain structures solely dedicated to detecting them. But landmarks won’t help Chrastil understand path integration.

“They can be very useful for navigating,” she says, “but they might not force you to rely on path integration.”

This is not an abstract idea. It has concrete real-world utility. Imagine you’re staying in an unfamiliar city: early in the morning, you leave your hotel and step onto the sidewalk, into the shadows of the canyon formed by two facing walls of skyscrapers. It’s a place the sunlight never quite reaches, like underwater depths far beneath the surface chop. You are in search of coffee. You turn left, walk to an intersection that belongs to a gang of scruffy pigeons, and then take a right, where you pass a pharmacy, a shoe store, and a watch repairer, before turning left again, onto a wide avenue lined with brand-name stores. Nike. Apple. Gap. Tiffany & Co. And then finally: a coffee shop, sandwiched between dark and shuttered designer stores.

By this time, if you are like me, you are hopelessly lost.

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