Can you always find your way blindly? Or do you need a navigation when you get somewhere you’ve never been before? It may have to do with the environment you were born in. According to scientific research, people from rural areas have a more developed sense of direction than city dwellers. How can that be explained?
How has the sense of direction been studied?
An international group of researchers published the findings in the journal in early 2022 Nature. The sense of direction research is designed as a video game. The nearly 400,000 respondents have to find their way in larger and smaller virtual environments. Respondents born outside the city are often better at this than city dwellers, is the main conclusion of the study.
What’s causing this?
In your youth you learn a certain orientation that you will continue to use for the rest of your life. The environment in which you grow up is crucial for the development of your sense of direction. People from the countryside learn at an early age to look for landmarks and thus orient themselves in a large environment.
And if you grew up in a city with a clear, well-arranged and regular street plan? Then you have to cover relatively little distance for most practical matters. You know your own living environment, but then it is easier to get lost in large rural areas or in more complex cities.
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How big is this difference in sense of direction?
The older you get, the more your navigation skills deteriorate. For people who grow up in the countryside – who are better at finding their way anyway – this is less difficult than for urban dwellers. “Now we see that people who grew up in an area with a rectangular street pattern are on the same level in navigation as rural people who are 5 years older than them. And in some areas, that difference was even greater,” quotes De Volkskrant Hugo Spiers, one of the researchers.
What else can we conclude from this?
Previous research has already shown that green environments – which can also be city parks, by the way – have a positive effect on your brain activity. Growing up in such a green environment is good for your brain and your sense of direction. Could it also help against dementia to take a walk in nature or in a park? Dementia symptoms are often related to brain activity and sense of direction.
It seems an obvious conclusion, but this should first be further investigated. Taiwanese and Chinese studies show the opposite trend. Dementia is more common in rural areas than in cities, is the purport of that study. Because outside the city, health care and other medical aid is further away and less available than in the city. Of course, the difference between urban and rural areas in the Netherlands is smaller. But still: living in a city and in the countryside both have their pros and cons, as it turns out.
(Bron: Nature, Research In Transportation Economics, De Volkskrant, Environmental Neuroscience Lab, National Library of Medicine, Alzheimers Dement. Foto: Shutterstock)