Michael Bond on The Art and Science of Finding and Losing Our Way

Podcast Episode #009 

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. 

For the complete tanscript of this episode please visit my website Treesmendus.com