I’ve often been fascinated by the way your sense of direction works. By that I don’t mean knowing from landmarks where you are or being able to follow maps, I mean the sense, wherever you are, of knowing which direction is North, for no reason other than that North just ‘feels different’ from the other directions. I’m fairly sure it’s got something to do with some interaction between your brain and the Earth’s magnetic field. I’m fascinated with it partly for philosophical reasons and partly because I’m curious about the ways it can go wrong.

The philosphical stuff first. I didn’t think anything of that kind of sense of direction until about 10 years ago I casually remarked on the topic to one of my then housemates. To my amazement, she didn’t know what I was talking about: She simply didn’t have the same sense (The series of conversations that followed temporarily earned me the nickname ‘magnetic man’ amongst that particular social circle). Following up with a couple of her friends revealed the same thing. It appears that what I thought of as perfectly normal and unremarkable, actually isn’t shared by a significant portion of the population. That gets me wondering, how do you describe the sensation. I simply can’t. I know that North ‘feels different’ to any other direction (to be pedantic, that’s probably not quite right, it’s probably more like that each direction feels different, but I’m so used to mentally using North as a reference direction). But beyond that, words fail me, literally. I have nothing else I can compare the sensation to. It’s a little bit like the problem of, ‘how do you explain to a blind man what it’s like to see, or to a deaf man what it’s like to hear?’ I quite often ponder the question, but never find an answer. Consideration of those kinds of question that are the reason why I take a fairly spiritual view of the nature of the Universe, on the assumption that there is something pretty profound about consciousness itself, and that no explanation of life that is founded on materialism is ever going to suffice.

But when my sense of direction fails is I think equally fascinating, if a little more mundane. The most common case where it fails is if I’m on a street or in a building that faces any ‘diagonal’ direction (eg. NW, or NE, etc.). Then, almost invariably, the side that is nearest to North feels like it actually is North. I can only guess that somewhere in my brain’s processing, the dominent orientation of the available boundaries gets factored in, and my brain tries to make these run along the nearest available rectangular direction.

There’s also specific locations where it fails. Occasionally my sense of direction just disappears, but more usually it gives wrong results. Annoyingly, the Apress offices are one such location. Whenever I’m in the building, my sense of direction seems to rotate by 90 degrees anti-clockwise, so that what is East feels like North. It is just wierd. The building is on the West side of 9th Street, Berkeley (California), a street that runs North-South (actually that’s not quite right, the direction is a few degrees (I’d guess perhaps 10ish) towards NW-SE, but North-South is a pretty good approximation). (It’s between Parker and Dwight if anyone feels inclined to look it up on google maps :-) ). That means that when I walk in the main entrance to the building, I’m walking, roughly, West. And that’s fine. It feels, correctly, like West. I go up the stairs, along the corridor, and get to my desk, and it’s goes wrong. Every time. I’m sitting at that desk at this very moment. I know perfectly well I’m facing East (OK, 10ish degrees North of East), looking towards 9th Street. Yet my sense of direction is firmly telling me that I’m facing North. Yet within a few seconds of leaving the building, I know my sense of direction will have righted itself.

Of course I’m pretty sure the explanation is pretty mundane. I’d hazard a guess there’s some steel bars running through the building (actually I don’t need to guess that much, some of them are visible). And I’d guess they have a chance magnetic field that is interfering with the Earth’s magnetic field inside the building. (At some point I really ought to buy a compass and bring it in to test that hypothesis). But the experience is anything but mundane - it’s fascinating, and very strange. Several times, I’ve tried to walk in, while concentrating to see if I can observe the point at which my sense of direction screws up, to see if I can experience my sense of direction changing, but no matter how many times I try, I can’t. I lose concentration, the moment misses me, and I end up once again, sitting in an office with my sense of direction giving me totally false information.

I’d love to know if anyone else has similar experiences?

For the sake of listing them, a few other places that similarly fool my sense of direction are: Underground trains (the BART under San Francisco is particularly bad here - a couple of times I’ve ended up exiting the BART at a station I’ve never been to before, and proceeded to walk exactly the wrong way along the road, until a few minutes later I started to notice something odd about which direction felt like which, presumably as my sense of direction starts to right itself). Flying back from the US to the UK - often feels like the plane is going West (but flying UK-US is fine). And the Convention Center in Los Angeles (where the last couple of PDC’s have been held) gives me the same 90-degree rotation that the Apress offices do.