Lots of people have a good "sense of direction" in terms of an awareness of their surroundings that keeps track of cardinal directions. It also correlates with

Lots of people have a good "sense of direction" in terms of an awareness of their surroundings that keeps track of cardinal directions. It also correlates with an ability to use other indicators to reinforce or reacquire this awareness. Put me on some winding singletrack in the woods, or driving around an unfamiliar part of town, and I'll remember an imaginary map of where I've been and which directions I've turned, and be able to tell you where north is all day. If I forget, there are context clues everywhere - it's late afternoon here in Michigan so the sun is setting in the southern sky, pointing south-southwest. I'm currently in a windowless manufacturing facility, but I know where the front door is and I remember that's on the west side of the building, so I'm facing east. It helps a lot that many roads and buildings are indexed to be precisely aligned with the compass. It also helps that my Garmin GPS watch has a built-in compass, so if I ever need to shoot a bearing precisely, I train and recalibrate this sense of direction. But if you put a blindfold on me, sit me down on an office chair, spin it around for a couple minutes as you wheel me down the hall and into an unfamiliar room...after I have finished retching, I hypothesize that I'd have no sensation to tell me where north is. I appreciate the author's study design here - the source PDF [1] and linked website [2] describe feeding the turtles in the same pool, but exposing them to varied magnetic fields by surrounding the pool in a giant Helmholtz coil. It's not as if they flew the turtles alternately to New Hampshire and to the Gulf of Mexico, which might leave lots of context clues in light or smell or taste, but as if they effectively teleported them to an identical pool of water with slightly different magnetic fields. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08554-y.epdf?sharing_token=3jyO_nr20tkXxF-Esv7ZJNRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0PSnysHTEUp3kJfbIuzukZMThbZ8UBJFCT2hnGyGlumPkJLfUAJPW5LikAnQfKvu93LI60cSZLUJe2cedXeaZ1dwUnJCiAk3QOyzbJQepZOnJ0rWmckUY_B4ROlR9SQEt8%3D https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08554-y.epdf?shar... [2] https://oceanweb.sites.oasis.unc.edu/www.unc.edu/depts/oceanweb/turtles/index.html https://oceanweb.sites.oasis.unc.edu/www.unc.edu/depts/ocean...