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It isn’t just our impression of large-scale geographic space that is influenced by alignment, but also the smaller spaces that we traverse every day. Erik Jonsson, a retired engineer with a lifelong interest in navigation, conducted an informal study of drivers stopping at a rest station on an interstate highway in the United States. Though most drivers knew where they had come from and where they were going, few of them could tell Jonsson their compass bearing just before they had pulled off the highway. They had straightened out all the curves in the road.
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Tversky conducted another study in which she asked Stanford students questions about locations close to the campus. Just as we rotate whole continents in our heads to make them line up, the students tended to align local bodies of water with north-south and east-west compass headings. This tendency was so pronounced that the hapless students ended up making considerable errors in judging the relative positions of local landmarks and communities that they visited every day.

What causes us to rearrange our maps of space to conform to tidy horizontal and vertical lines that exist only in our imagination? Tversky argues that one part of the answer has to do with the natural axes of symmetry of our bodies, and the fact that we are upright beings who spend much of our waking lives orienting ourselves to the force of gravity. We tend to line up the world with the horizontal and vertical because two of the most salient benchmarks against which to compare all spatial attributes are the force of gravity and the appearance of the horizon. It is certainly true that preference for the vertical and horizontal is written into everything from our mythologies of space and the design of our street maps to the basic operation of our visual system.

Noted geographer Yi-fu Tuan describes a deeply rooted tendency for human beings to categorize the cardinal directions of space according to the axes of the body.
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Most cultures make clear distinctions between the meanings of “in front” and “behind” as they refer to the orientation of the body. The various cultural connotations of “left” and “right” are reasonably well known. In most cultures, the left side is inferior to the right. We shake with our right hands; we eat with our right hand in cultures where utensils are eschewed. Our most valued assistant is our right-hand man. The left hand is still referred to in the scientific literature as the sinistral hand, in contrast to the right, dextral hand, with the modern word
sinister
taking its root from an early designation of left-handedness. One interesting exception to the low status of the left is found in Asian cultures, in which the primary cardinal direction is the south (the main entrance to the Forbidden City is on its south side, for instance). This being the case, left is the side of the rising sun, and so is afforded privileged status.

In the ancient Asian science of feng shui, the orientation of buildings and cities with respect to the cardinal directions was considered to be critical to the health and success of the built environment. Streets and buildings were aligned carefully with such directions, and the human body can be seen in microcosm in some applications of feng shui principles. As our straight, two-legged posture pushes our heads up against the force of gravity, it is a cultural universal that physical height correlates with the direction from which human power emanates. Palaces tower over landscapes for reasons that transcend military strategy. The city of Beijing is built on largely flat terrain, yet the Forbidden City, the ancient throne and power center of the old city, is considered to be at the peak, with the surrounding regions arrayed below it like a set of virtual terraces.

Architecture’s embodiment of power structures, equating height with might, did not end with the decline of palaces, royalty, and feudal systems of governance. It takes only a quick glimpse at the skylines of the Manhattans of the world to be convinced of this. Gigantic, geometrically perfect towers of trade and commerce jut above the horizon, fierce and warlike. It is beyond coincidence that the modernist World Trade Center was the target of a vicious terrorist attack in 2001. Mohammed Atta, the apparent mastermind of the murderous assault, was trained as an architect and worked as an urban planner. One report suggests that he was driven into the arms of the jihad in reaction to the architectural westernization of parts of Cairo. Atta, more than many others, would have understood and resented the symbolic significance of the towers.

At the much more mundane level of the everyday operation of our sense of vision, it has long been known that we are more sensitive to vertical and horizontal lines than to oblique ones. Sensitive vision tests using fine grids of lines show that we are better able to see spaces between lines when they are oriented either vertically or horizontally than when they are presented at oblique angles. This sensitivity bias for aligned stimuli has to do with a preponderance of neurons in our visual brain that are tuned to the horizontal and the vertical. Nobody knows the origin of this bias, but it is likely to be related to the orientation of our bodies with respect to gravity.

Not only are we more sensitive to horizontal and vertical lines but we also seem to prefer them in images. Visual artists such as Piet Mondrian certainly understood such preferences. His paintings, mostly consisting of grids of colored blocks, were devoid of the oblique. Mondrian was a member of an artistic group known as the de Stijl group that tried to place aesthetics on a scientific basis. An explicit part of the artistic manifesto of the de Stijl group was the dictum that oblique lines must be avoided at all costs. Modern
psychological experiments have confirmed the intuitions of these artists. When participants in an experiment were asked to judge the pleasantness of a series of Mondrian paintings presented either as the artist had intended or tilted to oblique angles, they preferred Mondrian’s horizontals and verticals.

Our preference for vertical alignment crops up in everyday life as well. Who among us has not felt (and perhaps succumbed to) the desire to straighten a crooked picture on a stranger’s wall? Filmmakers use a technique, pioneered by Alfred Hitchcock, in which slight camera tilts produce sensations of visceral discomfort in viewers. When lines that would normally follow the horizontal or vertical are pushed slightly toward the oblique, cinemagoers are, quite literally, put on edge.

Note what is happening here. Psychological tendencies that have their roots in the orientation of our body and the organization of our senses seem to have taken precedence over what we see and feel of the dimensions of physical space. When we try to imagine such spaces, whether by remembering pictures or by mentally replaying our movements through space, our predilection for the clean vertical and horizontal contours overrides much of our ability to represent spaces accurately. We construct spaces rather than sense them.

Anyone who has looked at children’s drawings knows that our mind tends to simplify visual patterns. The complexity of real forms comes to be replaced by simple collections of basic shapes, organized according to schemas—sets of rules that dictate how these basic shapes must be fitted together. Such schematization of shapes results in human figures that become sticks with big round heads. Birds in flight become stylized squiggles, and the sun is represented
as a yellow disk with a symmetric burst of sunbeams around it. An important part of the training of an artist consists of learning to draw what is
seen
rather than what is in one’s mind. In other words, artists must be taught to unlearn the routines of schematization in order to draw accurate copies of real life.

The same processes that simplify our drawings act on our conceptions of space, and the reasons are similar. Maps that simplify spaces, straighten curves, even out distances, and turn irregular clumps of land into orderly geometric shapes are much easier for us to remember than those that contain every warp and wobble of raw geographic space.

One of the best examples of this tendency to regularize space, and another of the factors responsible for the geographic illusions that I pointed out in my list of questions, is something called regionalization. To understand how regionalization works, try this exercise: as you are sitting at this moment, close your eyes and point to the location of some object that you know to be in the room with you—a lamp, window, or door, it doesn’t really matter. If you open your eyes, you’ll probably discover that you were able to point reasonably accurately to the object you chose.

Now try something different. Imagine an object again, but this time, choose something that is outside the room you’re sitting in. If you’re sitting in your home, you might try pointing to the position of an object in a room on another floor. Now try pointing to the location of your best friend’s home. What about the location of city hall, or the nearest body of water? As you go through this exercise, you’ll notice that some targets are easier to point to than others, and that completing this task for certain kinds of landmarks will involve considerable mental gymnastics. You may have noticed something else as well. When we are required to imagine the position of an object that is not currently within view, we try to reconstruct that object’s
position in a series of discrete steps. I can point to the lamp across the room with no difficulty whatever, but if I then try to point to the location of the toaster in my kitchen, several rooms away, I try to reconstruct a path from where I am to the goal object, and then mentally add together all the segments of the path. Instead of trying to conjure a spatial image of the toaster from my current position, I manage the problem by first imagining the view from the threshold to my study as it opens into the hallway beyond. This orients me toward the kitchen. Then I imagine myself at the end of the hallway, looking into the kitchen. At each stopping point I imagine a view, and then I try to add all the views together to connect the beginning to the end of my path. As you can imagine, the larger the number of segments involved, the more likely we are to become inaccurate.

In one study of the psychological regionalization of space, people were taken into a small, windowless room and, after being given a chance to look around to become familiar with their surroundings, they were asked to close their eyes and point to objects in the room, much as I suggested you do a few moments ago. Participants found this task easy and generally did well at it. Next, they were taken out of the room and led on a walk around a part of the building that surrounded the experimental room. At various stopping points on their walk they were asked to point to objects inside the room they had left. Once back inside the room, they were asked to point to objects they had seen outside. Participants found both of these latter tasks to be much more difficult, presumably because they were trying to piece together views of space in the same way I did when trying to imagine my toaster. Other studies conducted with people in spaces that they had used regularly for at least two years (their offices) showed similar findings, so our difficulties in making spatial connections do not seem to have much to do with the amount of experience that we have with a part of space.
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Why do we regionalize space? One part of the answer is that regionalization is a handy way to help out our limited memory resources. Most people, when called upon to remember a long list of items, will resort to a strategy called chunking. For example, when I try to remember a grocery list, I categorize items into different groups—fruits, vegetables, meats, dairy, and so on. Then my job is to remember a small group of lists, each containing a handful of items, and this is easier than trying to remember one long list. The process of learning about spaces is similar. It is easier to memorize the locations of a series of objects within each room, and also to remember the rough layout of a set of rooms in a house, than it is to try to remember a long set of locations of objects and to place them all on one very large map.

Although this kind of hierarchical organization of space can help us to manage our memory load, it results in distortions in our maps of space. In our mental maps, the distances between points that are in different regions seem longer than distances between points within the same region. This effect is strong enough that it not only affects how we think about our lived spaces while sitting idly and reflecting but it also influences our choice of routes when walking or driving. A route that requires many changes in direction seems longer to us than one that is straight. The reason is that each turn brings into view a new set of features, and so constitutes a new region. The practical implications of these effects have drawn the interest of those who design buildings, neighborhoods, and cities because it is possible to influence how people might use a space by judiciously tinkering with its size and shape. In an urban center, if we want people to get out of their cars and walk, many clever tricks of planning will entice them to do so, but one tactic is to make interesting locations
appear
closer together by prudent organization of space.

Our tendency to chunk space into regions is a cornerstone of our spatial mind. Even experiments that use highly abstracted spaces show a strong effect. For example, one study showed that if research participants were asked to memorize the positions of a random array of objects on a computer screen, they did so by mentally dividing the screen into a series of regions based on the locations of the objects they saw. When they were quizzed about the distances between objects, distances
within
mental regions shrank compared with those that
crossed
regions.
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Most of us, when asked whether Seattle or Montreal is farther north, will answer by remembering that Canada is north of the United States and then assume (erroneously) that Montreal is north of Seattle. Similarly, Reno seems as though it should be east of Los Angeles because Nevada is (partly) east of California.

Mental maps, like the maps we sketch on napkins to guide our friends around town, are filled with inaccuracies, distortions, and even absurdly impossible spaces. When we begin to draw a map and we preface our effort with words such as “This is not to scale, but …,” we are implicitly acknowledging this feature of the weird spaces that we share with one another. But beyond being a kind of graphical shorthand we use to convey the main features of geographic spaces, the maps we sketch have deep affinities with the properties of the spaces that inhabit our minds. Our minds treat distance and direction with cavalier disrespect but represent topological relationships with greater clarity. Though we don’t seem to have much of a grasp of how far away things are, nor what their angular relationships might look like (especially when they cross regions), we have a good idea of how different parts of space (roads, paths, hallways) are connected. Just as topological maps, like twisted rubber sheets, can tolerate much distortion while retaining some information about spatial relationships, so can the maps we hold in our heads help us
through spaces, particularly the ones that we build for ourselves. Provided we understand how regions are connected, and what is in each one of them, we can plan routes to goals. We may not always (or even often) take the most efficient route, but we usually know which set of spatial decisions will help us get to our final destination. I might not know how far it is from the bakery to the post office, or which one of those goals is farther from my house, but I know how to get between one and the other, and I know how things will look when I get there.