In Wayfinding, Bond considers how we relate to places, and asks how our understanding of the world around us affects our psychology and behaviour.
The way we think about physical space has been crucial to our evolution: the ability to navigate over large distances in prehistoric times gave Homo sapiens an advantage over the rest of the human family. Children are instinctive explorers, developing a spatial understanding as they roam. And yet today, few of us make use of the wayfaring skills that we inherited from our nomadic ancestors. Most of us have little idea what we may be losing.
Bond seeks an answer to the question of why some of us are so much better at finding our way than others. He also tackles the controversial subject of gender differences in navigation, and finally tries to understand why being lost can be such a devastating psychological experience.
For readers of writers as different as Robert Macfarlane and Oliver Sacks, Wayfinding is a book that can change our sense of ourselves.
About the Author
Michael Bond, who won the British Psychology Society Prize 2015 for The Power of Others, is a freelance journalist and former senior editor and reporter at New Scientist.
About the Publisher
Picador is a literary imprint at Pan Macmillan, defined by books published in the author’s voice; Picador believes the way a story is told is just as important as the story itself and publishes writers from all over the world, bringing international authors to an English-language readership and providing a platform for voices that are often not heard. The Picador list includes literary fiction; new, relevant and challenging fiction; narrative non-fiction; authoritative, cultural non-fiction; and the best contemporary poetry, as well as some uncategorisable books.
