The Neuromantics – S2, Ep 2

How do birds know where things are? “The keys are where you last saw them”, we often say, meaning that, as mammals, we have to recall both an internalised map of location and the lost keys’ visual identity (their shape and colour) in order to find them again. And for a long time it was thought that birds did something similar, matching object cues to spatial memory. New research is taking us on a different journey. In “Taking An Insect-Inspired Approach to Bird Navigation”, by David J. Pritchard and Susan D. Healy (2018), the picture that emerges is of an avian world much closer to that of insects, driven by action and motion parallax, where hummingbirds “see” in a way that only reveals itself when movement starts, where spatial memory is prioritised over object identification. Move a feeder six feet to the right, and the bird misses it. Why?Maybe we’re a bit like that, too. Expecting our minds to be broadened by travel, we find ourselves flummoxed by the reality. Rather than confront it, we look for ways to confirm the original hypothesis, the expectation. Three pin-sharp tales of disorientation demonstrate just this problem with human navigation. In the first, “The Long Crossing”, by the Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia (from The Wine-Dark Sea, Granta, 2001; translated by Avril Bardoni), a group of penniless Italian immigrants looks forward to arriving in the United States. In the second and third, “BF and Me” and “Teenage Punk”, from A Manual For Cleaning Women (Picador, 2015) by Lucia Berlin, the journeys are developmental: an old lady cuts a drunk handyman some slack, a dawn safari shifts in the memory. Experience changes us. Even so, it takes a lot to stop us believing in a stable identity.