7 ms·

Man finds his way home using Google Earth - after 25 years

275 points by pkuhad 15y ago

lusr 15y ago
Impressive - how many people have concrete enough memories from that age? I have maybe one I could use to locate somewhere, but otherwise that age is lost to me.
- oscardelben 15y ago
  Most likely his memories are so vivid because he got lost. Our brain remembers that kind of situations way better.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - tehayj 15y ago
    Plus his life was pretty tough. He might have some rather traumatic memories from that first town where he lived in. Life of a beggar aint that comfortable.
- nhebb 15y ago
  I remember the town I lived in when I was 4 years old vividly. In my case it wouldn't help much because it's been turned into a resort community and everything has changed. I sure hope Google Earth is archiving snap shots over time so people can look back and watch how the world transformed. My memories before 4 were a blur, but my daughter remembers falling off a Big Wheel and breaking her front tooth when she was 1-1/2. She's 17 now but she can even tell you what outfits she and her best friend were wearing that day. Some people just have sharp memories of their early childhood.
  - corin_ 15y ago
    An old family friend of mine has studied a fair few things in this area and his opinion (I'm not sure if this was based on his studies or if it's just a related area) is that people cannot remember anything from that age. The logic here is that if you are reminded of things your brain can think you remember them. This doesn't just mean that someone can say "when you were 2 x happened" and you suddenly think "I remember x!", it means that, if for example you heard the story when you were 5, a decade later that story might now feel like a memory of the incident itself. I can't remember exactly what age he said the cut-off was, I think it was 3ish - and I don't honestly know if this is a well-educated opinion or a proven fact, but it's definitely an opinion I'm inclined to believe, both for it sounding reasonable and for the credibility of the person who explained it to me. edit: Just looked up his current job, as it's been a few years since I've spoken to him. He's currently a tenured (that bit I remembered!) Senior Lecturer at the University of Sydney, and his bio page says his specialist areas include: - Emotional Development and Social Cognition in Infancy and Early Childhood - Individual Differences in Children's Socio-Cognitive Development - The Inter-Generational Transmission of Social Fears - Attachment and the 'Internal Working Model' Construct - Children's Theory of Mind and Folk-Psychological Understanding By directly referencing him I hope I haven't mis-represented him too much, I'm sure there are inaccuracies in my memory of the conversations we had about it, but I'm confident the gist is correct.
    - lusr 15y ago
      My opinion is that this is probably what is happening when people claim to have many clear memories from a very young age, though I dare not suggest it since they tend to take offense at having their reality challenged and I don't have data to back up my suspicion. The correct term for this is "confabulation" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confabulation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confabulation) and is related to "false memory" and "source amnesia". I'm sure most people have a few legitimate clear memories (the single one I have is indeed of a traumatic, though amusing, event) of the 4-6 age range, and of course you have your savants; it's the unusual number of people who claim to vividly recall their youth pre-3 to 4 years of age who I'm skeptical of.
      - corin_ 15y ago
        I just spoke to my mum who happens to be writing him a letter and is going to ask about it to get clarification - though it will be too late for this thread. She also thought she remembered him saying 3 years old, so 4-6yo memories are perfectly feasible, and I think most people have them. I have loads.
      - Drbble 15y ago
        To use technology apologies, the thing is that memory is not a video recording. It is constantly actively maintain reformed in your brain every time you recall it. Some research has shown that a long term memory can be destroyed by inducing minor amnesia at the moment of recall, while many diseases can catastrophically damage brain and memory without harming long term memories. It is very similar in some sense to maintaining hot backups of database data, which can be corrupted by writing bad data over the backups, or messing up during restore. A 20 year old real memory is not a recording that you have carefully preserved. It is more like a a clarisworks document on a floppy disk that you copied to a wordperfect doc on a hard drive, then to a word doc on a CD, then to Google docs, and each time you copy it you have any to reconstruct some lost details. Rehearing and retelling the memory is critical. As such, the actual different in constructing a real memory vs false memory diminishes to kill over time.
      - fhars 15y ago
        If you set up your questions in the right way, you can make people remember to have seen Bugs Bunny on a Disneyland visit: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/06/010612065657.htm http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/06/010612065657.ht...
- corin_ 15y ago
  I can't help but think that at five years old I could have told anyone that I lived in Oxford, and therefore wouldn't need to remember what it looked like to find my way back there 25 years later. Am I wrong about the ability of five year olds?
  - perlgeek 15y ago
    Not at all. When I went to school at age 6, I knew which busses to take, knew the names of the stops that were relevant to me (and after a few weeks the name of all the bust stops in between), and my parent's address and phone number. And I grew up rather sheltered, in comparison to Indian slum inhabitants. Granted, one year can make quite a difference at that age, I'm sure I at least know the name of the town and which quarter I lived in.
  - mistermann 15y ago
    My daughter knew her City and street address at 2.75 years, but then, that's just because we taught it to her as a fun game, not something she picked up organically. Whether should would recall when in a scary environment separated from her family is another thing entirely.
  - aasarava 15y ago
    Many places in India don't have definitive addresses. They tend to be relative, such as "across from the train station." And I suspect that when you live in the slums and are begging at the age of five, your world is quite small -- the chances that you might leave town on a trip or know someone who's not from the same area are slim. So you likely don't need to know, much less practice, the name of your town.
- eftpotrm 15y ago
  I could. I surprised my parents some while back when we discovered I could remember the full address and phone number of a house we left when I was 5.5 and they couldn't. I found it again pretty easily when I was at university not that far away, along with my school and church. I'm pretty sure I could find our regular shops from then as well. There are occasional details of life from around then that I remind them about. Kids remember more than you'd think, and tend to get home details drummed into them by parents in case they get lost.
- jasonkester 15y ago
  In my 30s, I successfully drove to and found the house that my family moved out of before I turned 2. I haven't been in it since we moved, but I could still draw you the floorplan today. I've never considered myself to have a particularly good memory, so I don't doubt that anybody else would have an issue doing the same thing.
  - mkl 15y ago
    You may not have a good memory in general, but I think you have exceptionally good early memories. I can't remember a single room of the house I left when I was four.
- marshray 15y ago
  I can remember the shape of the wheels on my crawl-a-gator and the jumping seat that hung from the door frame. Let me see if I can find a picture.. yep that's it http://daddytypes.com/2009/02/12/brother_can_you_spare_a_crawligator_.php http://daddytypes.com/2009/02/12/brother_can_you_spare_a_cra... It sounds like this poor kid spent a lot of time on the streets, literally. It's not surprising to me that he was able to recognize it later.
mad44 15y ago
My OCD kicks in. Where does this odd thing come at the end of the article? "The older brother who accompanied Mr Brierley on the train ride was found dead on railway tracks." Earlier in the article, it was written that Saroo boarded the train after he got lost. No mention of older brother, which made me think he was alone.
- mad44 15y ago
  Also fuck poverty. I hope we can wipe poverty off the earth soon.
  - bh42222 15y ago
    I hope we can wipe poverty off the earth soon. Most of the industrialized world can be said to have done that. Western Europe, Japan, probably Canada too. It is easy* and requires only low levels of corruption, good law and order, combined with mostly free markets. Wealth in terms of natural resources is NOT a requirement, Switzerland is resource wise very poor. (Unless you count scenic views of the Alps as a resource.) *When I say easy, I mean possible and requires only changes in human behavior - so super hard in fact.
    - joering2 15y ago
      +1 great comment, but I think you meant "Eastern Europe".
      - chollida1 15y ago
        since he included Canada and Japan, I'm assuming he meant Western Europe.
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
    - DanI-S 15y ago
      I suspect it may also require the systematic exploitation of the remainder of the world through aggressive pursuit of unfair trade agreements and projection of military force abroad, but I may be wrong. Also: the help of a larger, richer friend overseas who is much less concerned with equality.
worldimperator 15y ago
Good to see that google is finally running an efficient PR department :-)
infocaptor 15y ago
Vow, first i thought this is the plot from a bollywood movie.
- tathagatadg 15y ago
  There has been too many. But Bollywood doesn't need billions of dollars worth technology to reunite families! We have (a)fate and (b)a song that the families sing and dance to in happy days(kids are young, they learn fast). Decades later, due to fate family gets placed into a 1 mile radius, and the kinship-proximity sensor gene trigger the release happiness hormones which in turn makes the family members break into song and dance. Technology is catching up it seems ...
ShabbyDoo 15y ago
Yet another example of how hard it is to predict how a product/technology will be used or what societal benefits/detriments it might provide.
ajays 15y ago
While I love the story, I think the headline gives too much credit to Google Earth. He was able to find his home by joining a Facebook group and asking people. Yes, he used Google Earth to find the town; but he was able to find his way home only by emailing people. Regardless, it's a great story. Whenever technology (be it Google Earth, or Facebook) makes such a positive impact on someone's life, I find it uplifting.
- ynniv 15y ago
  And specifically an application used to view satellite imagery, rather than the company that produced the imagery. They might as well credit Internet Explorer instead of Facebook. Taken to an extreme, they could have credited Windows XP for the reunion. Somehow Google Earth is often credited for anything involving satellite imagery. He probably actually used Google Maps.
  - onemoreact 15y ago
    It sounds like he used a combination of Arial footage and street views to locate the town. Having located it he could have traveled there or even called, but instead use other services to talk to people in the area. So, IMO it really was Google street views coupled with maps that let him find the place. PS: He remembered the Khandwa train station and surrounding area not a street name and not what the area looked like from space.
    - pbhjpbhj 15y ago
      @sausax, no need to think whether Google have street views (note not Streetview) in India - http://maps.google.com/maps?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=Khandwa%20train%20station&oe=utf-8&gl=uk&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hl=en&sa=N&tab=wl http://maps.google.com/maps?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&#38... is an image of Khandwa station on Google. IIRC Google Earth have used Panoramio (sp?) for location images for some time, longer than they've offered Streetview or indeed location views on Google Maps.
      - mayanksinghal 15y ago
gwern 15y ago
> Mr Brierley said his mother told him of how they had searched endlessly for him after he went missing and saw fortune-tellers who told them they would one day be reunited. Hah. I bet they did.

275 points by pkuhad 15y ago

lusr 15y ago

Impressive - how many people have concrete enough memories from that age? I have maybe one I could use to locate somewhere, but otherwise that age is lost to me.

oscardelben 15y ago
Most likely his memories are so vivid because he got lost. Our brain remembers that kind of situations way better.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- tehayj 15y ago
  Plus his life was pretty tough. He might have some rather traumatic memories from that first town where he lived in. Life of a beggar aint that comfortable.
nhebb 15y ago
I remember the town I lived in when I was 4 years old vividly. In my case it wouldn't help much because it's been turned into a resort community and everything has changed. I sure hope Google Earth is archiving snap shots over time so people can look back and watch how the world transformed. My memories before 4 were a blur, but my daughter remembers falling off a Big Wheel and breaking her front tooth when she was 1-1/2. She's 17 now but she can even tell you what outfits she and her best friend were wearing that day. Some people just have sharp memories of their early childhood.
- corin_ 15y ago
  An old family friend of mine has studied a fair few things in this area and his opinion (I'm not sure if this was based on his studies or if it's just a related area) is that people cannot remember anything from that age. The logic here is that if you are reminded of things your brain can think you remember them. This doesn't just mean that someone can say "when you were 2 x happened" and you suddenly think "I remember x!", it means that, if for example you heard the story when you were 5, a decade later that story might now feel like a memory of the incident itself. I can't remember exactly what age he said the cut-off was, I think it was 3ish - and I don't honestly know if this is a well-educated opinion or a proven fact, but it's definitely an opinion I'm inclined to believe, both for it sounding reasonable and for the credibility of the person who explained it to me. edit: Just looked up his current job, as it's been a few years since I've spoken to him. He's currently a tenured (that bit I remembered!) Senior Lecturer at the University of Sydney, and his bio page says his specialist areas include: - Emotional Development and Social Cognition in Infancy and Early Childhood - Individual Differences in Children's Socio-Cognitive Development - The Inter-Generational Transmission of Social Fears - Attachment and the 'Internal Working Model' Construct - Children's Theory of Mind and Folk-Psychological Understanding By directly referencing him I hope I haven't mis-represented him too much, I'm sure there are inaccuracies in my memory of the conversations we had about it, but I'm confident the gist is correct.
  - lusr 15y ago
    My opinion is that this is probably what is happening when people claim to have many clear memories from a very young age, though I dare not suggest it since they tend to take offense at having their reality challenged and I don't have data to back up my suspicion. The correct term for this is "confabulation" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confabulation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confabulation) and is related to "false memory" and "source amnesia". I'm sure most people have a few legitimate clear memories (the single one I have is indeed of a traumatic, though amusing, event) of the 4-6 age range, and of course you have your savants; it's the unusual number of people who claim to vividly recall their youth pre-3 to 4 years of age who I'm skeptical of.
    - corin_ 15y ago
      I just spoke to my mum who happens to be writing him a letter and is going to ask about it to get clarification - though it will be too late for this thread. She also thought she remembered him saying 3 years old, so 4-6yo memories are perfectly feasible, and I think most people have them. I have loads.
    - Drbble 15y ago
      To use technology apologies, the thing is that memory is not a video recording. It is constantly actively maintain reformed in your brain every time you recall it. Some research has shown that a long term memory can be destroyed by inducing minor amnesia at the moment of recall, while many diseases can catastrophically damage brain and memory without harming long term memories. It is very similar in some sense to maintaining hot backups of database data, which can be corrupted by writing bad data over the backups, or messing up during restore. A 20 year old real memory is not a recording that you have carefully preserved. It is more like a a clarisworks document on a floppy disk that you copied to a wordperfect doc on a hard drive, then to a word doc on a CD, then to Google docs, and each time you copy it you have any to reconstruct some lost details. Rehearing and retelling the memory is critical. As such, the actual different in constructing a real memory vs false memory diminishes to kill over time.
    - fhars 15y ago
      If you set up your questions in the right way, you can make people remember to have seen Bugs Bunny on a Disneyland visit: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/06/010612065657.htm http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/06/010612065657.ht...
corin_ 15y ago
I can't help but think that at five years old I could have told anyone that I lived in Oxford, and therefore wouldn't need to remember what it looked like to find my way back there 25 years later. Am I wrong about the ability of five year olds?
- perlgeek 15y ago
  Not at all. When I went to school at age 6, I knew which busses to take, knew the names of the stops that were relevant to me (and after a few weeks the name of all the bust stops in between), and my parent's address and phone number. And I grew up rather sheltered, in comparison to Indian slum inhabitants. Granted, one year can make quite a difference at that age, I'm sure I at least know the name of the town and which quarter I lived in.
- mistermann 15y ago
  My daughter knew her City and street address at 2.75 years, but then, that's just because we taught it to her as a fun game, not something she picked up organically. Whether should would recall when in a scary environment separated from her family is another thing entirely.
- aasarava 15y ago
  Many places in India don't have definitive addresses. They tend to be relative, such as "across from the train station." And I suspect that when you live in the slums and are begging at the age of five, your world is quite small -- the chances that you might leave town on a trip or know someone who's not from the same area are slim. So you likely don't need to know, much less practice, the name of your town.
eftpotrm 15y ago
I could. I surprised my parents some while back when we discovered I could remember the full address and phone number of a house we left when I was 5.5 and they couldn't. I found it again pretty easily when I was at university not that far away, along with my school and church. I'm pretty sure I could find our regular shops from then as well. There are occasional details of life from around then that I remind them about. Kids remember more than you'd think, and tend to get home details drummed into them by parents in case they get lost.
jasonkester 15y ago
In my 30s, I successfully drove to and found the house that my family moved out of before I turned 2. I haven't been in it since we moved, but I could still draw you the floorplan today. I've never considered myself to have a particularly good memory, so I don't doubt that anybody else would have an issue doing the same thing.
- mkl 15y ago
  You may not have a good memory in general, but I think you have exceptionally good early memories. I can't remember a single room of the house I left when I was four.
marshray 15y ago
I can remember the shape of the wheels on my crawl-a-gator and the jumping seat that hung from the door frame. Let me see if I can find a picture.. yep that's it http://daddytypes.com/2009/02/12/brother_can_you_spare_a_crawligator_.php http://daddytypes.com/2009/02/12/brother_can_you_spare_a_cra... It sounds like this poor kid spent a lot of time on the streets, literally. It's not surprising to me that he was able to recognize it later.

mad44 15y ago

My OCD kicks in. Where does this odd thing come at the end of the article? "The older brother who accompanied Mr Brierley on the train ride was found dead on railway tracks." Earlier in the article, it was written that Saroo boarded the train after he got lost. No mention of older brother, which made me think he was alone.

mad44 15y ago
Also fuck poverty. I hope we can wipe poverty off the earth soon.
- bh42222 15y ago
  I hope we can wipe poverty off the earth soon. Most of the industrialized world can be said to have done that. Western Europe, Japan, probably Canada too. It is easy* and requires only low levels of corruption, good law and order, combined with mostly free markets. Wealth in terms of natural resources is NOT a requirement, Switzerland is resource wise very poor. (Unless you count scenic views of the Alps as a resource.) *When I say easy, I mean possible and requires only changes in human behavior - so super hard in fact.
  - joering2 15y ago
    +1 great comment, but I think you meant "Eastern Europe".
    - chollida1 15y ago
      since he included Canada and Japan, I'm assuming he meant Western Europe.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - DanI-S 15y ago
    I suspect it may also require the systematic exploitation of the remainder of the world through aggressive pursuit of unfair trade agreements and projection of military force abroad, but I may be wrong. Also: the help of a larger, richer friend overseas who is much less concerned with equality.

worldimperator 15y ago

Good to see that google is finally running an efficient PR department :-)

infocaptor 15y ago

Vow, first i thought this is the plot from a bollywood movie.

tathagatadg 15y ago
There has been too many. But Bollywood doesn't need billions of dollars worth technology to reunite families! We have (a)fate and (b)a song that the families sing and dance to in happy days(kids are young, they learn fast). Decades later, due to fate family gets placed into a 1 mile radius, and the kinship-proximity sensor gene trigger the release happiness hormones which in turn makes the family members break into song and dance. Technology is catching up it seems ...

ShabbyDoo 15y ago

Yet another example of how hard it is to predict how a product/technology will be used or what societal benefits/detriments it might provide.

ajays 15y ago

While I love the story, I think the headline gives too much credit to Google Earth. He was able to find his home by joining a Facebook group and asking people. Yes, he used Google Earth to find the town; but he was able to find his way home only by emailing people. Regardless, it's a great story. Whenever technology (be it Google Earth, or Facebook) makes such a positive impact on someone's life, I find it uplifting.

ynniv 15y ago
And specifically an application used to view satellite imagery, rather than the company that produced the imagery. They might as well credit Internet Explorer instead of Facebook. Taken to an extreme, they could have credited Windows XP for the reunion. Somehow Google Earth is often credited for anything involving satellite imagery. He probably actually used Google Maps.
- onemoreact 15y ago
  It sounds like he used a combination of Arial footage and street views to locate the town. Having located it he could have traveled there or even called, but instead use other services to talk to people in the area. So, IMO it really was Google street views coupled with maps that let him find the place. PS: He remembered the Khandwa train station and surrounding area not a street name and not what the area looked like from space.
  - pbhjpbhj 15y ago
    @sausax, no need to think whether Google have street views (note not Streetview) in India - http://maps.google.com/maps?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=Khandwa%20train%20station&oe=utf-8&gl=uk&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hl=en&sa=N&tab=wl http://maps.google.com/maps?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&#38... is an image of Khandwa station on Google. IIRC Google Earth have used Panoramio (sp?) for location images for some time, longer than they've offered Streetview or indeed location views on Google Maps.
    - mayanksinghal 15y ago

gwern 15y ago

> Mr Brierley said his mother told him of how they had searched endlessly for him after he went missing and saw fortune-tellers who told them they would one day be reunited. Hah. I bet they did.