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Hundreds of thousands of years ago something brilliant occurred in the human brain. A circuit was completed, a spark of inference caught fire, and our consciousness became unique in the whole of history. We went seeking and found our way back. We invented time to measure the distances we traveled. We recognized in the ground a record of the past that we could reconstruct, and we traveled forward in time to imagine a not-yet-real moment in the future. We became creatures capable of abstract thought. We invented narratives with a beginning, middle, and end. The first epics may have sprung from the mysterious firings of our hippocampal cells that proliferated as we strove to travel longer and longer distances. We discovered we could describe out loud the things we saw and the places we wanted to go, we could tell each other stories, and we began to traverse the world in the likes of migrant birds and animals, changing it as we did.
Navigation may have served as an evolutionary precursor to storytelling, but humans quickly started to use storytelling as a wayfinding tool, one that helped us have the greatest geographic distribution of any species. The human mind seems built to encode topographical information in the form of stories. We created repositories of shared memories in some places and developed deep, emotional attachments to them. We called those places home. We accumulated knowledge of nature through observation, intimacy with the sun, moon, stars, wind, and landmarks and created complex traditions of practice to know where we were, to seek out places, make new homes, or return to ancient ones. The same brains that evolved to encode space and time shot new navigational guides into space in the form of satellites. Stories proliferated, a noosphere of human experience and memory ensconcing the world.
From a Darwinian point of view, wayfinding is a condition of survival: we do it to avoid predators, to find food and shelter. But understanding why we move today isn’t only about the methods and conditions. There are deeper levels of the mind and soul to consider, the internal things that repel, pull, call, and force people to go places. We can’t reduce human wayfinding to survival because it fails to meaningfully explain the full spectrum of our experience, our fears, dreams, and hopes that drive us—the traits that make us human. It’s these traits that seem most imperiled in a future of handheld GPS devices and self-driving vehicles, a future in which we willingly give up autonomy in order to avoid getting lost.
In the fall of 2016, I started following a Twitter account called @lostTesla. It was created by Kate Compton, an American computer programmer who told me she was on a drive from Boston to New Hampshire when she started thinking about a tweet from Elon Musk. He wrote that at the tap of a button on your phone, you can summon your Tesla, which “will eventually find you even if you are on the other side of the country.” Something about the “eventually find you” captured Compton’s imagination, and she wondered about a car’s internal experience. What does it perceive? Does a car possess qualia, meaning an individual subjective, conscious experience? At a hotel that night, Compton wrote a bot—software that autonomously tweets based on a programmer’s code—in an hour or two. She imagined the bot to be a Tesla car that had become lost and was wandering, driverless, through an unknown American pastoral setting in search of its human owner. Since then, every day twice a day, @lostTesla has been tweeting its thoughts:
what is a sparrow
I leave a quiet town / now a silo, a silo, a silo / the sun is gone now. Everything is gold / my sensors detect light.
i notice my reflection in the windows of a department store. i’m covered in flower petals
My hood is wet / i see a shiny truck. Many chickens. Can I be a chicken with you? SetMode:FEELING_PRESENT.
I stop to recharge. will i dream? i dream of rabbits. toggleFlag:DREAMING
Over the months that I followed @lostTesla on its travels, the car seemed to become less of a machine and more of a smelling, hearing, seeing, embodied entity. Its movements in space provoked marvelous observations and a seeming surprise and pleasure at the depth of its own feelings toward the world. Maybe this is a logical evolution. The experience of being lost is uniquely human. Animals, equipped with biological instruments that seem to give them absolute certainty about their geographic position, rarely seem to. It is humans who have had to evolve the intellectual and emotional capacity to solve the problem of becoming disoriented and who generated the cultural practices of wayfinding. Maybe our emotional connections to each other and places serve navigational purposes, in the sense of orienting us over very large spatial and time scales—the journey of a lifetime. But in the future, the problem of being lost could become an increasingly rare experience, one that our descendants may deign an unfortunate weakness of human cognition and a quirky artifact of history, even as Lost Tesla, still roaming the landscape, discovers its own joyful sentience.
EPILOGUE OUR GENIUS IS TOPOPHILIA
The first thing John Stilgoe, a landscape historian, told me was, “I feel sorry for your generation. It doesn’t get lost much.” I sat across from Stilgoe in his office at the top of Sever Hall in the northeast corner of Harvard Yard. Dressed in a wool suit and bow tie, he has been holding court here for decades as a professor in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies, and he is known as a polymath whose intellectual range spans history, transportation, fashion, literature, ecology, and the pleasures of bicycle riding.
I was there because one of Stilgoe’s central concerns is what he calls visual illiteracy. Busy, rushed Americans, he thinks, no longer take the time to explore and discover their surroundings and have lost their capacity to even see them directly. Stilgoe believes that in an age dominated by programmed, mediated material and the internet, the ability to look at things, to practice the art of observation that was required of us as a species for eons till now is an essential aspect of our intellect and has to be relearned. To this end, Stilgoe teaches a course called “Scrutinizing the American Environment: The Art, Craft, and Serendipity of Acute Observation,” which exposes his students to thousands of images taken from American suburbs, farms, industrial zones, and recreation and abandoned areas in an effort to permanently alter the way students see the world.
In his book What Is Landscape? Stilgoe writes that “[a]nalyzing landscape empowers. Noticing—noticing without keeping any sort of journal, visual or otherwise—reveals and entices. Piecing together what one sees when one wanders or walks quickly on everyday errands requires only will and practice.… Exploring landscape, however casually, is a therapy and magic of its own. But it depends on curiosity and scrutiny.” Stilgoe has dedicated entire books to answering the question of what constitutes a landscape in the first place, settling on a definition of the surface of the earth shaped by humans. He suggests that the presence of navigational aids, whether they are reefs in the sea or topographical features on land, can transform wilderness into shaped land, that is, into landscape.
On this day in particular, Stilgoe’s concerns are with my generation, and the ones to come, for whom GPS is a natural wayfinding tool. To use it, you already have to know where you want to go, making it the enemy of wandering. Exploration—preferably on foot but also by bicycle, canoe, horse, or ski—is, according to Stilgoe, the best way to stretch the mind, because it facilitates discovery. And for someone who prizes exploration as a primary method of human insight and worships the kind of ambulatory exercise that allows the mind to wander, there could be no more dystopian future than one in which humans relinquish their unique capacities in return for mere efficiency. To him, getting lost is an opportunity for discovery, one that demands that all the senses come alive, and creates a maximum alertness in which observation and possibility are heightened. In What Is Landscape? Stilgoe writes that “[b]eing lost, even being deliberately free of electronic location devices, sharpens one’s senses and often eventually reassures. Making one’s way often reveals paths distinct and well used or hard to discern, abandoned (perhaps for good reason), but all nonetheless instructive.”
“If I’m lost and I don�
��t have anyone to ask, I love that feeling,” he said, though he drew a distinction between being desperately lost in dangerous circumstances and getting lost in a generally unknown place. In the latter case, to go off track is really about challenging the borders of one’s familiarity, pressing beyond the known spaces of our understanding and experiences and into the new. “There are categories of being lost. Panic means you have the voice of Pan in your ear,” he said.
Stilgoe grew up and still lives in the seaside town of Norwell, Massachusetts, where his father was a boatbuilder and his mother a homemaker. He had free rein of the woods, marshes, coast, and sea. Nowadays, Stilgoe lamented, children don’t venture into the marshes around his hometown, even after public assurances by the local police that these spaces are perfectly safe. Girls especially, he feels, have been cheated by the lurking terrors within the American psyche, the nearly hysterical response to perceived risk. To see the true extent of change over the generations you have to go back a bit. Over the last century, but particularly the last few decades, Stilgoe believes society has circumscribed freedom of movement in America, especially for children. Stilgoe has documented how in the 1890s children and teenagers engaged in national recreations like canoeing, bicycling, and even amateur ballooning or flying with large, tethered kites. “Men and boys built gliders, lay beneath them, and coasted down snow-covered hills until the airfoils lifted them from careening sleds,” he wrote. How many teenagers today would be content to walk alone outdoors? And if they did, would they have the vocabulary to describe what they saw? “Exploring, being lost for a while, looking around without distraction, or just going for a walk eventually raises questions of words, if only in the telling and retelling of short-term adventure,” Stilgoe writes.
Part of the problem is parents’ incessant management of their children’s time. “I think they’ve missed a kind of self-guided, nonorganized activity, nonsports activity growing up. Wandering around, getting into things. And the assumption seems to be nowadays is if a child isn’t in an organized activity, the child is a criminal,” Stilgoe said. “But as far as I can understand, most of my colleagues I work with seem to have found their careers by being slightly disorganized. Lucking into something, you know?”
Changes in the way kids get around are also part of the problem. Bicycles used to empower children to engage in short-range exploration of local worlds until, he said, ten-speed bicycles, whose chains are prone to being caught in brush, steered them out of the old fields and woods and onto roads. Today’s kids might not even be allowed to ride bicycles on streets without supervision. And there are other, more nefarious fears at work preventing children from roaming by themselves. American landscapes today are infused with perceptions of menace and a sense of dread, creating boundaries around possibility and limiting the places where children are free to go.
Studies of contemporary children’s “home range,” the distance from home that children are allowed to go outdoors, show a dramatic decrease in the “right to roam,” not just for kids in the United States but also those in Australia, Denmark, Norway, and Japan. One 2015 study in Children’s Geographies that was focused on Sheffield in north England showed how over three generations the children in a single family had undergone a severe hemming of movement. The grandfather recalled that he could travel several kilometers without asking permission to fish, ride bikes, visit friends; the only limitations were the weather and hunger. “If we were on our bike [parents] never [knew] where we were.” Meanwhile the second-generation parent was only allowed to travel half a mile from home without permission. And the third-generation child wasn’t allowed to go anywhere without permission and was only allowed to go one place with permission: a friend’s house three doors from home. A newspaper story published in the Daily Mail in 2007 told a similar story. Over four generations in Sheffield, children had gone from being able to travel as far as six miles from home without supervision to no distance at all; one child was driven in the car everywhere, including to the playground nearby that his mother had once been allowed to walk to on her own. As the study’s authors point out, the consequences of these changes are multifaceted, impacting physical and social skills. And, they write: “Autonomy is a key to the acquisition of spatial skills, therefore the development of these skills can be hindered if children cannot move independently in the outdoor environment.”
For Stilgoe, the ubiquity of smartphones can never be a good thing. His career has been dedicated to creating thirst in his students for curiosity, exploration, and wonder—believing them to be in fact the keystones of true intellect. Smartphones don’t open the user up to their surroundings, they funnel attention into themselves and a universe where everything is known, mapped, and accessible. “I’m grateful I didn’t grow up with a smartphone,” he told me. “My students don’t even know why I’m grateful.”
He paused and stared at the ceiling. “Oh, I’m a bundle of joy.”
* * *
The French sociologist and philosopher Pierre Bourdieu described the world as a book that children learn to read through the movements and displacements their bodies make in space. Through their motion, children create the world around them as much as they are shaped by it. Of course, the first place a child experiences is the womb. The womb is not a void but a place of many sensations: a fetus hears sound, perceives light, smells, and tastes. Swimming in amniotic fluid informs the development of a nervous system. When he first emerges, a newborn baby is worldless, meaning the borders between himself and his surroundings are nonexistent. In the first weeks and months, he seeks out those boundaries, where skin and object meet, using mouth and touch to begin to establish spatial experience and knowledge of his new reality. At birth, Jean Piaget wrote, “there is no concept of space except the perception of light and accommodation inherent in that perception. All the rest—perception of shapes, of sizes, distances, positions, etc.—is elaborated little by little at the same time as the objects themselves. Space, therefore, is not at all perceived as a container but rather as that which it contains, that is, objects themselves.” By exploring and moving, alighting their hippocampal cells, infants create spatial representations in the brain and build the architecture for episodic memory, the crucial component of autobiography and sense of self through time.
As infant amnesia erodes and the fleeting capacity to retain memories strengthens, other remarkable characteristics start to emerge in children. They develop personalities and the ability to create private worlds and stories, which become powerful generators of intelligence and knowing. In 1959, the American psychologist Edith Cobb called these capacities the “genius of childhood,” thinking that they allowed children to develop intense bonds to places. A close friend of anthropologist Margaret Mead, Cobb was fascinated by why childhood is so crucial to human evolution and culture. She defined childhood as a period from approximately five or six to eleven or twelve years old, and argued that the gift of this prolonged childhood in contrast to other species was the profound plasticity it gave children to respond to their environment. “This plasticity of response and the child’s primary aesthetic adaptation to environment may be extended through memory into a lifelong renewal of the early power to learn and to evolve,” wrote Cobb.
For her research, Cobb consulted some three hundred volumes of autobiographies, searching some from as far back as the sixteenth century for accounts of childhood. The results led her to believe that children are geniuses in a rather specific sense; she used a definition of genius in its early iteration, as “the spirit of place, the genius loci, which we can now interpret to refer to a living ecological relationship between … a person and a place.” It’s particularly during the middle period of childhood that Cobb thought children experience the natural world in highly evocative ways, when they begin exploring a new awareness of themselves as having a separate and unique identity in relationship to the outside world. They gain an exceptional perception of time and space, and profound moments of transcendence from its
continuum. Cobb felt that places—concentrations of meaning, intention, and experience—spur children’s sense of self.
Cobb was not the only one to recognize that children have a unique capacity for strong bonds to places. The psychologist James Gibson wrote that a “very important kind of learning for animals and children is place-learning—learning the affordances of places and learning to distinguish among them—and way-finding, which culminates in the state of being oriented to the whole habitat and knowing where one is in the environment.” The French geographer Eric Dardel wrote that “for man, geographical reality is first of all the place he is in, the places of his childhood, the environment which summons him to its presence.” Children inhabit and experience places as having existed before the capacity for choice, before they develop their separate identity. They feel primordial, as though they have existed since the beginning of time. “Before any choice, there is this place which we have not chosen, where the very foundation of our earthly existence and human condition establishes itself,” wrote Dardel in his book L’Homme et la terre. “We can change places, move, but this is still to look for a place, for this we need as a base to set down Being and to realize our possibilities—a here from which the world discloses itself, a there to which we can go.”
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