Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot Com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Bowl your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. We
Speaker 1: are on the third Map episode. The last two episodes
Speaker 1: we talked a lot about the human experience with maps,
Speaker 1: about all the complex ways that we interact with their maps,
Speaker 1: how core the map is to our understanding of the universe,
Speaker 1: about how complex it gets when you throw in religious
Speaker 1: ideas and philosophic ideas and and all these unreal things,
Speaker 1: and and it just becomes this quagmire. So in this
Speaker 1: episode we are stripping away a lot of the human
Speaker 1: complexity and we're looking at the animal complexity when it
Speaker 1: comes to maps, because you won't find a lot of
Speaker 1: physical maps that have been drawn by like an elephant
Speaker 1: or a beetle. But as far as we know, as
Speaker 1: far as we know, they may not actually create maps,
Speaker 1: but there is mapping going on because because humans were
Speaker 1: mapping before they actually made the maps. If we discussed
Speaker 1: so we have the we have the neural architecture for mapping.
Speaker 1: It's part of how we or any animal moves through
Speaker 1: a three dimensional world full of fixed and movable objects.
Speaker 1: It's just part of our navigational system. Yeah, and there
Speaker 1: are similar similarities between humans and animals, but you could
Speaker 1: argue that animals have a much more sophisticated system than humans.
Speaker 1: And in fact, the term cognitive mapping was the first
Speaker 1: used to describe the superior maze solving abilities of lab rats.
Speaker 1: You know, we think about that term in terms of humans,
Speaker 1: but that is not so Uh. It is these guys
Speaker 1: that really helped us to understand how very well they
Speaker 1: can navigate space. Right, So let's talk about the similarities
Speaker 1: in the way that humans and animals navigate. For starters,
Speaker 1: and something we discussed in one of our previous episodes,
Speaker 1: horizontal vertical neurons. We are we when it comes to
Speaker 1: like a chessboard, we are nearly more similar to the
Speaker 1: rook the little castle that moves up and down side
Speaker 1: to side. Like that's what we understand the most. Uh.
Speaker 1: Throw in the movements of a queen or a bishop
Speaker 1: that's going diagonal, and uh, we're not as we're not
Speaker 1: as hardwired to catch those movements into into move in
Speaker 1: that way in our head. Yeah, they're stealthie moves to us, right,
Speaker 1: And the reason for that is because we have these
Speaker 1: sack codes or eye movements, this machinery that really tracks
Speaker 1: well on this X y axis. And it's the same
Speaker 1: for other animals. Um. And it really makes sense for
Speaker 1: us land lovers, animals and humans because think about our
Speaker 1: coordinates that we deal with all the time. We deal
Speaker 1: with these really vertical trees and this really horizontal landscape.
Speaker 1: So it would make sense that that's how we are oriented. Uh,
Speaker 1: let's say and co paris into something like a sephalopod
Speaker 1: like a squid, in which the coordinates are very different
Speaker 1: underwater in the deep and they don't need that sort
Speaker 1: of X y orientation which we've talked about before. Like
Speaker 1: how incredible it is that they can navigate their space.
Speaker 1: If you if you need any proof that humans live
Speaker 1: them at X y axis, uh, certainly try doing some
Speaker 1: eye exercises where you roll your eye like like the
Speaker 1: hands of the clock, and you'll find that it's that
Speaker 1: diagonal space in between in between the the twelve and
Speaker 1: the three, in between the three and the six, that's
Speaker 1: where you're gonna find a little strain unless you've been
Speaker 1: using I exercises regularly, which you know some people do.
Speaker 1: I suppose we all should really it's just pain. You're right,
Speaker 1: then when I do it in a circle, I can
Speaker 1: really see, but when I go up and down and
Speaker 1: side to side, it's much clear. Uh. So there you go.
Speaker 1: That's that's one of the similarities that we have with
Speaker 1: other animals, at least land dwelling animals. And then we
Speaker 1: have something called path integration. Yes, path integration in a
Speaker 1: sense backtracking. Uh. The example that comes to mind with
Speaker 1: the path integration is you fly somewhere you've never been
Speaker 1: to before. You're on vacation, and basically someone drove you
Speaker 1: to the hotel, so you have no real idea of
Speaker 1: where you are, but you still I guarantee it. If
Speaker 1: you you're in say you're a you're in a hotel
Speaker 1: in Bangkok. You can step out the door. You can
Speaker 1: look at the end of the street and we're like, oh,
Speaker 1: there's a place where I can buy a newspaper. You
Speaker 1: can go get that newspaper, and then you can look
Speaker 1: down the other street and you're like, oh, there's a
Speaker 1: place that's selling mangoes. Go buy a mango, and then
Speaker 1: you'll be able to get back to your hotel, either
Speaker 1: by backtracking or by taking um a different course, like
Speaker 1: you'll you'll have in your head this map of the
Speaker 1: places you've been and where you are in reference to
Speaker 1: the place you came from. Yeah. Ken Jennings and his
Speaker 1: book Map Head talks about this. He talks about being
Speaker 1: in d C and going to all these different museums
Speaker 1: there and then going back to the Metro the train system,
Speaker 1: and saying, you know, they didn't retrace their steps through
Speaker 1: these five different museums, basically looked at where the sun
Speaker 1: was and where the train was and said, okay, we
Speaker 1: think we can make our way back there. And of
Speaker 1: course animals do a similar thing, but much in a
Speaker 1: much better way than we do, or a more direct way.
Speaker 1: In fact, you can look at an ant and see
Speaker 1: it roaming around for two hundred meters just kind of
Speaker 1: randomly meandering foraging for food, and then once it finds food,
Speaker 1: it takes an absolute direct path back to the beginning
Speaker 1: of where it was. Um. Such is their homing device
Speaker 1: in their in their heads. You brought up landmarks, and
Speaker 1: that's another core thing that both humans and their fellow
Speaker 1: animals you used to navigate. In fact, we've had studies
Speaker 1: which have shown that that fish even can use landmarks
Speaker 1: to to navigate the world around them and to reorient
Speaker 1: themselves when they've been taken out of one environment a
Speaker 1: bit a large environment and putting a smaller one, or
Speaker 1: vice versa. And we've seen um each species like jay's
Speaker 1: and nutcrackers, their foragers who tuck away their food in
Speaker 1: thousands of different places, relying heavily on landmarks. Another good
Speaker 1: example are whales in the Pacific who are traveling toward
Speaker 1: North America on the west coast. I mean they the
Speaker 1: whole continent of North America is essentially a landmark, and
Speaker 1: that establishes where they're going to take their turn. And
Speaker 1: then of course there's the position of the sun, which
Speaker 1: plays into our circadian rhythms. Are this this understanding on
Speaker 1: a biological level about what the what the cycle of
Speaker 1: the solar cycle it's doing, what the lunar cycle is doing,
Speaker 1: and so we're able to determine where we are in
Speaker 1: relation to the regular setting and rising of the sun. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And so of course animals and some birds can even
Speaker 1: travel at night using the sun, and the theory is
Speaker 1: that they take the reading from where the sun sets
Speaker 1: and then uses that to set their course. And then
Speaker 1: others think that the polarization of light coming from the
Speaker 1: sun place role as well. Of course, this is all
Speaker 1: stuff that we have in common with animals. There's a
Speaker 1: bunch of other things that animals used that that we
Speaker 1: just don't have access to, things like scent um, even
Speaker 1: the like a bees waggle. Yes, yeah, we're not. We're
Speaker 1: not so good at using the waggle to navigate. I've tried,
Speaker 1: but nobody knows what I'm talking about. Of course, one
Speaker 1: of the big differences in the ways that the humans
Speaker 1: navigate the world and animals navigate the world our our ability,
Speaker 1: or in our case, our inability to detect the Earth's
Speaker 1: magnetic field and navigate the world by it. Um. We
Speaker 1: discussed in the past when we're talking about bats, we
Speaker 1: talked about magnetite, which is this uh magnetic substance in
Speaker 1: the bat that allows it to detect there's magnetic field.
Speaker 1: Humans have it in their bodies as well, but we're
Speaker 1: not really able to do anything with it. Um. Other
Speaker 1: animals can do really amazing things with it, such as
Speaker 1: the loggerhead turtle. Yeah, these are pretty famous because they
Speaker 1: hatch and then they make a ten year, eight thousand
Speaker 1: miles circuit. Of the North Atlantic returning back to Florida,
Speaker 1: um where they hatched from. And they are very sensitive
Speaker 1: to the magnetic fields that the Earth has. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think ever like nine thousand miles thousand kilometers before they return,
Speaker 1: and it's a it's believed that they create this mental
Speaker 1: magnetic map in their their heads based on the angle
Speaker 1: of magnetic field and intensity in the areas that they
Speaker 1: travel through. Yeah. In fact, there have been some experiments.
Speaker 1: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill had some
Speaker 1: researchers who actually through the turtles off course, but then
Speaker 1: the turtles were able to find their way back with
Speaker 1: very little difficulty. And they think, again, this is the
Speaker 1: magnetic fields, the lines that they're following, and then um
Speaker 1: believing that some magnetic orienting was going on, the next
Speaker 1: experiment subjected the turtles to a variety of magnetic fields
Speaker 1: that differed from the Earth's natural field, and of course
Speaker 1: the turtles went off course again and exposure to a
Speaker 1: magnet that mimic the Earth's field set them right again.
Speaker 1: So this is proof that the turtles can the tech
Speaker 1: that earth magnetic field and then use it to navigate,
Speaker 1: which I think is fashionating it because to me, this
Speaker 1: is like a superpower that which do not possess. Now
Speaker 1: that magnetite I mentioned, the crystals of magnetite have been
Speaker 1: found in various creatures. It's even been found in some bacteria.
Speaker 1: You'll find in the brains of bees and termites, fish,
Speaker 1: um again, humans, though it's not only doing anything there,
Speaker 1: and in birds, most notably in the beaks of pigeons.
Speaker 1: Humming pigeons. Yeah, humming pigeons, of course we know are
Speaker 1: are wonderful at navigating and have been used by humans
Speaker 1: quite a bit for that purpose. But the studies do
Speaker 1: suggest that the bird's sense the magnetic field independent of
Speaker 1: their motion and posture, and that they can identify their
Speaker 1: geographical position. Now, the reason why researchers are really interested
Speaker 1: as well this this pigeon type receptor system is that
Speaker 1: nanotechnologists are really interested in learning more for accurate drug
Speaker 1: delivery systems based on this receptor system. And I also
Speaker 1: wanted to point out that they think that this this
Speaker 1: magnetite could be a universal feature of all birds, which
Speaker 1: would help solve this mystery of why they can navigate
Speaker 1: so well. Because we know, of course, the magnetite helps
Speaker 1: the magnetic fields, the sun's position. But there are also
Speaker 1: other things going on, like scent. Yes, And before we
Speaker 1: get into scent, let's take a quick break, and when
Speaker 1: we come back, we will talk about navigating the world
Speaker 1: around you with maps made out of smell. All right,
Speaker 1: we're back maps, smell maps. Yes, so you know, to
Speaker 1: a certain city. We've talked before about as humans, where
Speaker 1: we're just walking through the streets of our lives, walking
Speaker 1: through our daily environments. Even if we're not actively thinking
Speaker 1: about the map around us, our our mind is forming
Speaker 1: a map based on the information that's coming in and
Speaker 1: the things we're experiencing. So to a certain extent, we
Speaker 1: may form a smell map. We may know what parts
Speaker 1: of the office are smelly, which parts smell like a
Speaker 1: strong air freshener, which parts they smell like doughnuts, depending
Speaker 1: on the time of the day. So to a certain extent,
Speaker 1: we have a very limited smell bat But it's nothing
Speaker 1: like the smell maps that some of the animals out
Speaker 1: there used to navigate the world. Ye I was just
Speaker 1: thinking about when I lived in midtown Atlanta and on
Speaker 1: a Sunday morning, I would take a walk around and
Speaker 1: I always wanted to do a scratch and sniff map,
Speaker 1: because there's you know, an area that has a lot
Speaker 1: of bars in it, and you know, there were very
Speaker 1: distinct areas that Yeah, there's always mixed alcohol and the
Speaker 1: gutter stink, yeah, and the bleach trying to clean the
Speaker 1: sidewalks New Orleans e yes, pop, Yeah, but yeah, that
Speaker 1: doesn't that kind of pales in comparison to an animal's
Speaker 1: ability to smell an entire habitat it's flying over. Now. Obviously,
Speaker 1: we have animals such as ants that famously use sent
Speaker 1: trails to navigate. They you know, you see them marching
Speaker 1: in their lines leaf cutter ants, for instance, and they're
Speaker 1: marching from one place of the other. They're just following
Speaker 1: the cent trail left by the guy in front of you.
Speaker 1: And you can manipulate that cent trail to spell out
Speaker 1: your name, to to lead them off course, to to
Speaker 1: to do all sorts of um, I guess, kind of
Speaker 1: mean things to the poor leafcutter ants who are just
Speaker 1: trying to get stuff done and and conduct their agricultural
Speaker 1: experiment underground. Oh you're just delaying them, yeah, because they're
Speaker 1: they're they're going to get the stuff. They're they're determined.
Speaker 1: But but yeah, So, so there's that model simply following
Speaker 1: cent trails. But but then there's some slightly more complex
Speaker 1: methods as well. Yeah, because what do you do if
Speaker 1: you're an ant in the Sahara, for instance, because it's
Speaker 1: so windy and sandy, you're not gonna be able to
Speaker 1: pick up a scent, right. Um. So there's a Swiss
Speaker 1: zoologist by the name of Rudiger Juaner, and he altered
Speaker 1: ants paces by putting them on tiny stilts. Ants on
Speaker 1: stilts made of individual pig bristles. And he did this
Speaker 1: for a reason, not not just to start a little
Speaker 1: ant circus um. He wanted to know how their pace
Speaker 1: informed their ability to navigate. So what he found is
Speaker 1: that when he put the ants on stilts, it really
Speaker 1: altered their pace, and they overshot their destinations by a
Speaker 1: pretty big margin, which then pointed to him that that
Speaker 1: ants are actually doing a sort of mental math math
Speaker 1: calculation with their steps. It was pretty fascinating. And that
Speaker 1: we had mentioned the waggle another way that other animals
Speaker 1: communicate directions, right, These are the bees that communicate by
Speaker 1: by shaking their their hinders and doing a little dance.
Speaker 1: The dance of the bees, which is more than just
Speaker 1: a celebration of their of their their honey base life,
Speaker 1: but but actually a communicative gesture. Yeah, they share geographic
Speaker 1: information like the direction of the food sources relative to
Speaker 1: the sun, the distance, and then the quality of that
Speaker 1: food source, which I thought was really interesting. There was
Speaker 1: I think there was an old there was an old
Speaker 1: Donald Duck cartoon where he dressed up like a b
Speaker 1: to uh, to steal their honey. And I can't recall
Speaker 1: if he actually did some waggling. He did some waggling,
Speaker 1: for sure, because hey, he's Donald and he's got this
Speaker 1: big fake stinger on his his hinder there. But but
Speaker 1: I want to say that he did a little waggling
Speaker 1: in as a b communicative measure as well. Well, and
Speaker 1: I do kind of remember, but the donc donc waggle
Speaker 1: that he has anyway, so sort of a natural thing.
Speaker 1: It's funny how in kids stories there's so many plots
Speaker 1: involving another creature trying to pretend like it is honey
Speaker 1: bee or some other thing trying to steal honey. It's
Speaker 1: a big deal. Yeah, I mean it's a it's a
Speaker 1: it's one of the classic stories, right, The bear trying
Speaker 1: to steal the bee's honey. I mean it's a cautionary
Speaker 1: tale too, right, because there's something that the bee has,
Speaker 1: the human or the bear or the duck wants it,
Speaker 1: and it's gonna risk getting stung if it tries to
Speaker 1: steal it. So that's right, Which is the whole point
Speaker 1: of children's books anyway, right, their instructive Um, All right,
Speaker 1: let's take everybody out here with a couple of other
Speaker 1: amazing examples of how animals navigate. First of all, there
Speaker 1: is this creature called the frill fin gobie, which is
Speaker 1: a little fish. It sounds like it could be a
Speaker 1: Middle Earth inhabitant theath yeah, or it does sound like
Speaker 1: a hobbits name, or maybe a dwarf. But but what's
Speaker 1: what's amazing about this little crater Well, it's a small
Speaker 1: tropical fish and it's found in rocky pools along the
Speaker 1: Atlantic shore, and all that is you know, pretty like, okay,
Speaker 1: pretty wrote information. Um, But this is the really cool
Speaker 1: thing about this fish. If a tidal pool that it's
Speaker 1: in becomes really low or predator shows up, the fish
Speaker 1: can eject itself straight up into the water and into
Speaker 1: another tidal pool with great accuracy, and it can do
Speaker 1: this six successive times until it can find a tidal
Speaker 1: pool that doesn't have a predator in it or seems safe.
Speaker 1: And what scientists think is that because these fish have
Speaker 1: had an opportunity during high tide to explore that they
Speaker 1: have been able to make a mental map of all
Speaker 1: these different title pools that they can work with in
Speaker 1: these situations, because jumping from one title pool to the next,
Speaker 1: I mean, that's that's a dangerous proposition if you don't
Speaker 1: have a clear idea that there is going to be
Speaker 1: a title pool there and then have some idea of
Speaker 1: what's gonna be in it, right, yeah, exactly right. What's
Speaker 1: the term out of the frying pan into the fire? Yeah, yeah, um.
Speaker 1: And then there's the Manx shearwaters. This is a kind
Speaker 1: of bird. Yeah, These guys are pretty amazing. They regularly
Speaker 1: migrate well over ten thousand kilometers to South America in
Speaker 1: the winter, uh, where they use the waters off southern
Speaker 1: Brazil and Argentina. So you'll have some of these older
Speaker 1: birds that have clocked some phot somewhere the neighborhood of
Speaker 1: eight million kilometers five million miles during the course of
Speaker 1: its lifetime, like you anytime I think about that. Um
Speaker 1: in terms of any bird migration, you know, you think
Speaker 1: they're they're they're humans that spend large portions of their
Speaker 1: time never leaving a particularly area, and in many cases
Speaker 1: lived their entire lives within a very um fixed space.
Speaker 1: And then you have these birds that are just true
Speaker 1: globe quatters. Globe quatters, they are true globetrotters, you know.
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, And actually I'm gonna tell you this story
Speaker 1: about a shearwater. Now when I tell you the story,
Speaker 1: you try to imagine yourself as this shearwater. Okay um.
Speaker 1: In nineteen fifty three, British ornithologists RM Lockley asked his
Speaker 1: friend in London to take two Manx shearwaters on a
Speaker 1: plane from London to Boston with him a commercial it's
Speaker 1: a commercial flight, it was I think you pretty much
Speaker 1: do anything. Um. It's only one of the shearwaters survived. Uh.
Speaker 1: And when they got to the Boston Boston Slogan Airport,
Speaker 1: his friend set the bird free, which is what the
Speaker 1: ornithologists wanted him to do. So the friend wrote to
Speaker 1: Lockley to tell him what he had done, and then
Speaker 1: twelve days later and thirty miles later, the Shearwater returned
Speaker 1: to London ahead of the letter. So this is amazing
Speaker 1: to me because can you imagine someone stuffing you on
Speaker 1: a plane and not having any context of where you are,
Speaker 1: being taken to another location again without any sort of
Speaker 1: data about where the sun is, any sort of landmarks sent,
Speaker 1: and then being able to find your way home. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I would just like the first thing I would have
Speaker 1: to do is just climb a tree so that the
Speaker 1: wolves wouldn't eat me, you know, just like climb up
Speaker 1: there and maybe they'll find my body and only that
Speaker 1: my eyes will be done. So that's your strategy to
Speaker 1: climb a tree. Pretty much. My sense of direction is
Speaker 1: not that good, so you know, you can actually increase that.
Speaker 1: There have been studies that say that the people can
Speaker 1: increase their their sense of direction and their ability to
Speaker 1: to navigate better. It's just practice practice. Yeah, okay, well
Speaker 1: there's hope for me. Maybe maybe I won't just climb
Speaker 1: the tree and die. Maybe I'll look around. No, no
Speaker 1: Map boot camp for you. I think Map boot camp.
Speaker 1: I'm trying to imagine people showing up from Matt boot Camp,
Speaker 1: Like the instructions will have to be pretty like they
Speaker 1: basically need to send a bus to your house to
Speaker 1: get you because because otherwise it's just no one's gonna
Speaker 1: show up. It's gonna be like three guys showing up
Speaker 1: for five minutes late, and they're like, where my goodness,
Speaker 1: I had the GPS and everything, and and now I'm
Speaker 1: I barely survived. I think this would make a great
Speaker 1: reality show. All right, Well, there's just some quick insight
Speaker 1: into the animal world of maps. How animals navigate the
Speaker 1: world informed these Uh then it may it be a
Speaker 1: physical map, but they're certainly forming these elaborate mental maps
Speaker 1: of the world around them. So hopefully in these three
Speaker 1: podcasts that we've we've done to to cover maps, you
Speaker 1: you have a different view of what a map means. Well,
Speaker 1: not only what it means on paper, but what it
Speaker 1: means in the mind of the the human or animal
Speaker 1: that conceived it. Indeed, in how much animals and humans
Speaker 1: are alike in many ways in navigating this world. All right,
Speaker 1: if you have something you would like to share with
Speaker 1: us about maps, your experience with maps, your experience with animals.
Speaker 1: I know some of you guys out there are dog
Speaker 1: or cat owners, and you may have some miraculous stories
Speaker 1: about dogs or cats that have disappeared for a little
Speaker 1: bit and come back, or or have made of a
Speaker 1: long journey from and from their current home to a
Speaker 1: previous home, that sort of thing. Everyone loves those stories,
Speaker 1: so let us know about them. We'd be happy to
Speaker 1: read if you want to air. You can find us
Speaker 1: on Facebook and you can find us on tumbler. We
Speaker 1: are stuff to blow your mind on both of those feeds,
Speaker 1: and you can also find us on Twitter, where our
Speaker 1: handle is blow the Mind. And you can always drop
Speaker 1: us a line at blow the Mind at discovery dot com.
Speaker 1: For more on this and thousands of other topics, Is
Speaker 1: it how Stuff Works dot com