Read­ing how some ani­mals are able to “instinc­tively solve nav­i­ga­tional prob­lems” that baf­fle us humans, I was reminded of Tom Van­der­bilt, author of Traf­fic, writ­ing on the most com­mon nav­i­ga­tional mis­takes we all make.

In [a recent study] a num­ber of sub­jects were asked to esti­mate the travel time for a north­bound ver­sus south­bound bird. The major­ity of respon­dents believed trav­el­ing north from the equa­tor would take longer than the reverse.

What was going on, the authors spec­u­lated, was that sub­jects were sup­plant­ing map-based metaphors for the actual expe­ri­ence of travel. “A life­time of expo­sure to the metaphoric link between car­di­nal direc­tion and ver­ti­cal posi­tion,” they write, “may cause peo­ple to asso­ciate north­bound travel with uphill travel.” Or, as they quote Tree­beard in Lord of the Rings: The Two Tow­ers: “I always like going south. Some­how… it feels like going downhill.” […]

The north-south imbal­ance is just one of any num­ber of ways we rearrange objec­tive time and space in our heads. There are the famous exam­ples of geo­graph­i­cal dis­tor­tion, for exam­ple, in which peo­ple rou­tinely assume that Rome is far­ther south than Philadel­phia or that San Diego is west of Reno (when in both cases the oppo­site is true). Or take a sim­ple trip into town: Stud­ies have found that peo­ple tend to find the inbound trip to be shorter than the out­bound trip, while a jour­ney down a street with more inter­sec­tions will seem to be longer than one with fewer (and not sim­ply because of traf­fic lights).

Our state of mind on any trip can influ­ence not just our per­cep­tions of time but of geog­ra­phy itself. As Den­nis Prof­fit, et al., write in the won­der­fully titled study “See­ing Moun­tains in Mole Hills,” […] “hills appear steeper when we are fatigued, encum­bered by a heavy back­pack, out of shape, old and in declin­ing health”—and this is not some vague feel­ing, but an actual shift in our esti­mates of degrees of incli­na­tion. Tran­sit plan­ners have a rule of thumb that wait­ing for tran­sit seems to take three times as long as travel itself. And then, loom­ing over every­thing, is Vierordt’s Law, which, applied to com­mut­ing, roughly states: Peo­ple will men­tally lengthen short com­mutes and shorten long commutes.

If this topic inter­ests you, Van­der­bilt writes about such top­ics on his blog, How We Drive. You may also be inter­ested in a video inter­view with Van­der­bilt that looks like it will be excellent.