A Wired Most Fascinating Book of the Year

A wise and insightful exploration of human navigation, what it means to be lost, and how we find our way.

How is it that we can walk unfamiliar streets while maintaining a sense of direction? Come up with shortcuts on the fly, in places we’ve never traveled? The answer is the complex mental map in our brains. This feature of our cognition is easily taken for granted, but it’s also critical to our species’ evolutionary success. In From Here to There, Michael Bond tells stories of the lost and found―Polynesian sailors, orienteering champions, early aviators―and surveys the science of human navigation.