logo
welcome
Guardian

Guardian

Lost your sense of direction? Turn off your phone and you’ll soon reconnect

Guardian
Summary
Nutrition label

82% Informative

We are becoming, quite literally, disoriented in a digital world where we have given up on tools that enhance our cognitive abilities, like paper maps and magnetic compasses.

We have retreated from using the spatial skills that sustained us for millennia .

To be disoriented means to be lost to the east’: the word comes from Latin for the sun rising in the east.

Mercator was more interested in enabling pilots to sail east to west than north.

The west succeeded in putting north on top at the expense of places it denigrated and labelled “southern” ( America and Africa ), or as part of the “Middle East ” But will it stay there as India and China reorientate our global economy and potentially turn it 180 degrees ?.