大象传媒

Tristan Gooley is a navigator, explorer and writer.聽 His book The Natural Navigator explores how we can find our way using natural signs.聽 He has walked with and studied the methods of the Tuareg, Bedouin and Dayak people in some of the remotest regions on Earth and is the only living person to have both flown solo and sailed singlehanded across the Atlantic.聽 He says that natural navigation is something we all do and one of the key questions he asks people to ask themselves is:聽 鈥渨hich way am I looking鈥�.聽 He says that we would be amazed even in an urban environment at the clues around us which help with that answer: from the flow of people along a busy street, to lichen on buildings and piles of dust or leaves on the road-side.聽

For humans, knowing where things are seems effortless. Yet, as Professor Jennifer Groh, a Neuroscientist at Duke University in the USA explains our brains devote tremendous power to work out the simplest details about spatial relationships. Tasks we take for granted, like going to the local shop or finding our mobile phone take coordination across different sensory and motor domains.聽聽 Very recently The Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine was awarded to three scientists who discovered what was described as the brain's "GPS system" 鈥� in other words its navigation system.聽 Jennifer explains the contribution that this discovery has made to our understanding of how we find our way around. She makes the case that spatial processing takes up such a large part of the human brain function that the brain鈥檚 systems for thinking about space may be the systems of thought itself.聽 聽

Jennifer Groh proposes a brain pacemakers that would help musicians to play faster.聽Eight years ago Jennifer started to learn to play the Banjo.聽 But after five years, despite regular practise, her progress began to decline because she could not increase her finger speed. 聽She proposes a brain pacemaker that would speed up activity in the motor cortex to help her and fellow musicians move their fingers faster. 聽She says that humans are unusual in that they have control over how fast they can walk and talk.聽 They can choose to play a song slowly or quickly, whereas birds by comparison sing their song at a particular stable tempo.聽 We don鈥檛 know how the brain controls the tempo of music and language, and we don鈥檛 know how we get faster with practice but a brain pacemaker might help. 聽