With the emergence of GPS, the need to think has diminished our innate navigational skills.
Rosamund F Langston, PhD Lecturer in Behavioural Neuroscience at Ninewells Hospital describes this loss of our innate navigational skills, because like all skills, if you do not use them, you lose them.
She includes map reading as one of the soon to be forgotten skills, but also a sense of direction too.
Click here for Wikipedia’s explanation of the Arctic Tern.
A summary 2011 The two prevailing ideas on long distance navigation are based around two ideas: Magnetic cues Olfactory cues (smell) It is clear that near home animals, birds and humans build up a map of their neighbourhood with remembered sights smells and landmarks. This is all mediated by the hippocampus. There is some evidence…
This site has been created to share information and invite you to contribute in order to see if we can find out how animals and humans navigate without aids. There has been a lot of academic work in this field which is difficult to follow without interpretation. We shall try to put as much of…
The Royal Institute of Navigation Conference RIN 13 – Bionav – is the world’s leading Animal Navigation conference took place at the Royal Holloway College, University of London, Egham, Surrey, on 11-13 April 2013. Leading scientists from all over the world participated and presented their work. All areas of animal navigation techniques were covered, including, in some…
Intro I have put together this article to spell out some of the thinking that I have come across recently. A lot is highly contentious (such as Torsion waves) but as we struggle to understand how animals (and humans) navigate effortlessly, ideas which seemed so strong suddenly seem to be beset by impossible conditions. We…
On 30th March 2015, Richard Silberstein gave a presentation to the Science Medical Network on “Universal Consciousness”: Mystics of various religious and spiritual traditions have, on occasion, described a mystical realisation as that of the entire universe’s conscious. In this talk, he described some novel parapsychological studies that may shed light on the question of whether consciousness constitutes an…