Finding your way
If you’re like most viewers, you missed David Suzuki’s science series The Nature of Things earlier in the week because you were watching The Big Bang Theory instead.
No worries. This weekend gives you a chance to catch up, with a repeat of Where Am I? — an entertaining program about the science of following simple directions without getting lost.
A Calgary woman has trouble reading a map while driving with the kids on an open highway — who can’t relate? — while, several time zones away, Jeopardy! champion and Map head author Ken Jennings stands over a globe and tries to explain the secret of following directions to all those out there who haven’t won the long-running game show.
“I’ve always known I’m not good with directions,” Calgary’s Ann Dodd tells the camera. “My automatic reaction to a map is panic, especially when, driving in a car, my husband hands me a map and says, ‘Where do we go next?’ I get anxious.”
One can’t help but admire that Dodd’s so open with her admission. Most people would pretend other wise,and fake it. “The map’s wrong!”
It’s a psychological condition, evidently, and there’s a nam eforit.Where am I?looks at the brain science behind “developmental topographical disorientation” or DTD, and the results are fascinating to watch. It turns out that having a good sense of direction is not simply a question of whether women are better than men. As with so much about the human brain, genetics play a role. It turns out that several of Dodd’s ancestors and family relatives have the same problem with spatial relationships.
Neuroscience projects at McMaster University and other science labs have designed controlled experiments that examine how we remember where we’ve been, and how we use that knowledge to understand where we’re going.
A good sense of direction isn’t simply a question of finding one’s way in the family car. Where am I? journeys to the Canadian Arctic and show showt he Inuitused to rely on sled dogs, ancestral tradition and their knowledge of the land in an environment where becoming lost can literally be an issue of life and death. (CBC News Network, 5 p.m.)