The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

Another enjoyable Beginner’s Guide to Natural Navigation course at the RGS yesterday. In attendance: a patent attorney, paraglider pilot, academic, film maker, doctor, retiree, vet, town planner and optical assistant to name a few.

Among the off-piste topics that we discussed there was talk of whether we sleep better aligned North-South than we do East-West and also the idea that the expression, ‘follow your nose’ may have some science behind it: humans have iron oxide in their sinuses which may account for some experiments that have shown a magnetic sense of direction in humans.

Lest I forget, I will be giving a series of talks to launch my book in March. The date and venue for my talk at the Oxford Literary Festival has been confirmed:

Wednesday 24/3 12:00, further details and tickets available here.

Hope to see you there!

This morning I gave a talk to 30 pupils in Year 1 at my son’s school. Much scarier than talking to 500 people at the Royal Geographical Society!

I’ve just published a couple of articles I have written and which are exclusive to this site. The first is about whether we have a ‘sixth sense‘ that helps us navigate. The second is about whether men and women have different navigation abilities.

I came across this story this morning about a pet dog, Sophie Tucker, that was washed overboard in rough conditions during a sailing holiday off the Australian coast and swam five miles to the small uninhabited island of St Bees.

The story focuses on the distance swum, which is incredible enough, but makes no mention of how the dog found the island. We can rule out vision, because she would not have been able to see further than about twenty feet in front of her in those conditions. Even in flat calm a dog would barely able to see the tops of trees five miles away because of the curvature of the earth’s surface.

Smell is the most likely solution, but that points to an even tougher dog, because to follow the smell of land she would have had…

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