By Tony Samson
A SENSE of direction was discovered to be built into the brain. This was the research work of three scientists working separately for which in 2014, they were awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine. John O’Keefe and a husband and wife team, Edvard and May-Britte Moser, proved that one part of the brain serves as a mapping system that allowed a person to navigate and manage to go from one place to another, and also to recognize places he had already been to.
This GPS of the brain also ensures that in a crowd of flight arrivals, people are able to walk through, stopping, swerving (excuse me), and slowing down so as not to bump into each other, except on purpose — sorry, miss I thought that was my neck pillow. This navigational ability is somehow absent in persons with Alzheimer’s syndrome or dementia, who then feel lost, unable to know where they are or where they need to be, even if it’s to get home.
The mental geographical positioning system (sometimes aided by a phone app) is able to find the way from one office to another. But how long it will take to get to a destination has to be calculated and thus passed on to the calculating part of the brain, which assesses the effect of traffic.
From here, the information may travel to the seat of emotion, where road rage resides. This part of the brain is known to make a driver speak loudly through the windshield to the driver in front of him, as if he can actually hear the loud invective — the light has turned green, Bozo. This may be followed by instructions to the hand to lean hard on the car horn for a few seconds, and release some adrenaline. Thus navigational attributes of the brain start a chain reaction beyond a sense of direction.
Organizations too maneuver through financial paths and regulatory crannies. Do they also possess mapping systems in their brains?
This is what planning sessions try to answer. A corporate crisis arising from new competition, disruptive technology, or simple complacency at the top, tries to focus management on where it needs to go. A facilitator is hired to herd executives into an off-site location to answer questions. They need to determine a set of objectives and strategies to get there, after defining what business the company is in. (You are not a pork rind retailer, but a promoter of an alternative lifestyle.) The captain of the ship needs a compass to see if it has lost its way. Or whether it needs to start a new journey, maybe with a new navigator.
A sense of direction and spatial awareness are essential. When one has to meet a friend at a new place, it is important to know where he is — I’m near the washroom to the left of the mall as you enter. This same navigational skill is required when looking for where you parked your car at the mall. A poorly functioning GPS may require taking a phone photo of the parking slot, and maybe the stores at the exit to the parking floor — but which floor was that?
One’s place in the social pecking order may require location skills too. Social climbers have a very developed sense of who is higher and requires liposuction flattery. They often manage to hoist themselves up tied to the coattails of bosses, until there’s a regime change. Even here the switching mechanism of the brain kicks in to recognize the new coat.
A sense of direction is critical. Still, nature’s GPS is limited to physical locations. It is no help to other navigational questions of life — why am I here? Where am I going with my life? Does this relationship have any direction? Is this the right way to go? Philosophical questions such as these may involve other parts of the brain, as well as other organs.
Navigational skills are part of one’s survival instincts. The tricky question has to do with purpose: not where one is going, but why he needs to go there. Life after all needs a sense of direction.
Tony Samson is Chairman and CEO, TOUCH xda
ar.samson@yahoo.com
