You Are Here: Why We Can Find Our Way to the Moon, but Get Lost in the Mall

An eye-opening exploration of the intriguing and often counter-intuitive science of human navigation and experience of place.

In the age of GPS and iPhones, human beings it would seem have mastered the art of direction, but does the need for these devices signal something else--that as a species we are actually hopelessly lost. In fact we've filled our world with signs and arrows. We still get lost in the mall, or a maze of cubicles. What does this say about us? Drawing on his exhaustive research, Professor Collin Ellard illuminates how humans are disconnected from our world and what this means, not just for how we get from A to B, but also for how we construct our cities, our workplaces, our homes, and even our lives.

Colin Ellard is an experimental psychologist at the University of Waterloo, the director of its Research Laboratory for Immersive Virtual Environments, and an international expert in the psychology of navigation. The results of his research have been published in scientific journals for more than twenty years. Ellard lives in, and regularly gets lost in, Kitchener, Ontario.