Some of us have no sense of direction (me) and some of us seem to have a compass built inside their brains (my friend OLD SCHOOL). How/why?

So you have no sense of direction too but you also do? I'm confused Shuhak. Thank you for your reply! :)

Perhaps I spent too much time looking up (clouds, wind, etc.), but not enough time looking down.  

That m'dear strikes such a familiar chord with me. Always looking up and seeing all kinds of wondrous things. That's where rainbows live you know. So I wonder what looking down more would have bought us? We will never know. SIGH. Thank you for your reply! :)

Do you have any idea what it is inside our heads that causes that though Durdle? Is it a defect in our dna? A weakness? I've wondered about that all my life since I have always been afflicted with it. It is a very scary thing for me. I mean if a known path is blocked and I have to find another route it can be awful. It happened years ago when I was working. I got on the freeway and it was the time of year when it was already dark. Came to a place where everything was stopped dead. I waited awhile and nothing moved. I was near an off ramp so I wiggled my way out and used it. Then I had to figure out how to get home. It took about 2-1/2 hours and I went in circles for awhile but I finally exhausted the wrong and hit on the right. I was terrified the entire time until I was close to home. Not by design but by fortuitous circumstance. That's just one example. SIGH. Thank you for your reply. Oh the trip should have taken 45 minutes.

No, I don't think it a fault, having a weak sense of direction.  Mine's not very good. Some people have it, some don't.

I think it may simply have been an instinct that over time became less important generally in humans, so has become fragile. Most of the time we have roads and things to guide us, rather than some innate sense of which way round things are.  It's probably a skill that needs constant use to maintain.

Sometimes, it's not a sense of direction you need but an ability to spot alternatives. As these show:

One of my former work-colleagues said his father-in-law was great company but one of those who  need to plan everything down to the nth degree. Even when simply going on an excursion for pleasure he would meticulously plot routes and times beforehand. Dave told me it rubbed off on his daughter, Sue, so for a while she would be just as nervous when she and Dave went anywhere by car. He said one day, Sue mis-read the road map and they missed their intended turning, off a motorway - you cannot stop and perform U-turns on them, and the junctions can be a long way apart. She was in a  bit of a tiz about it as result, but he said, "It doesn't matter - see what the next junction will give us!" He was right -she calmed down, looked at the atlas again and saw a valid alternative route from the next turning. Her father would probably have used that junction to turn back to the intended one irrespective of any alternative.   

One day last year I visited an exhibition in an area I rarely visit, some 250  miles from home. I assumed because the venue was Doncaster Racecourse, it would be easy to find and a few miles outside the city. I was wrong. It is almost in Doncaster city centre. I started seeing the Racecourse signs early on, as I turned off the motorway, but then entered dense traffic in a very complicated urban area with many confusing junctions, and no signs to the race course. I had the sat-nav on but it could not up-date rapidly enough to direct me properly in the close maze of multiple lanes, traffic-lights and roundabout junctions. One wrong turning took me into an industrial estate. The next, to a line of big lorries I thought stopped at traffic-lights until I realised they were queuing to enter a rail-freight terminal. I found the place eventually but it was a nightmare, and no sense of direction could have helped me. The weather was grey and dull too, so I could not use the Sun as a guide! I decided I would not visit that Exhibition again because it is so difficult to reach... then this year, events overtook us all anyway.

As I was reading this reply Durdle I thought "what a NIGHTMARE" and then I came to your using that same word. I'd probably still be there in that maze. My son went to Cal Berkley for his undergraduate studies. About 450-500 miles away from L.A..The first time I visited him was my first trip ever anywhere at such a great distance on my own. I forget the circumstances of how I got that map but I had in my possession a map of California and he had redlined the route from Northridge, California to Albany (the town next to Berkeley). Further he had written it out as well. Meticulous directions. I carried a big heavy flashlight with me on the floor in front of the driver's seat. My weapon in case I ran into trouble. I stopped halfway to get gas and the folks there were super nice to me. I got to his place without any problem! And going back home I just retraced the route and stopped at the same gas station. From then on for 4 years I'd make that trek several times a year. The first time is the hardest. I was so proud of my myself. I always carried the flashlight on each trip but really wasn't worried. I'm not brave or adventurous but I do love my son and so I "bit the bullet" so to speak and went far outside my comfort zone and found it wasn't as scary as I thought. It's good to know I'm not the only one whose sense of direction leaves a lot to be desired. Thank you for your thoughtful and informative reply. It does help to know I'm not alone. There are others out there just like me in that respect! :)

Oh goodness R. So what does the watch do for you m'dear? A compass watch? And you are a celestial navigator? Your map is the sky? Whoa! That's pretty darned impressive. Thank you for your reply and Happy Saturday to thee and thine! :)

I do need to know what time of day it is, so I can tell if the sun is in the east (morning) or the west (afternoon).
I'm not exactly a celestial navigator, but every Australian has the Southern Cross burned into his/her brain before we get to school - it's on the flag. Find the Cross and the Centaur (Alpha Centauri is easy, it's the brightest star in the night sky after Sirius and Canopus - its absolute magnitude is low but its apparent magnitude is huge because it's in our backyard, so to speak). The long axis of the Cross and the head and torso of the Centaur form an angle, an arrow that points south.

I did not know that m'dear. So your flag is also an educational guide so you will never lose your way as long as you look up and the skies are clear? I wonder if other flags are similarly designed? Your Aussies do walk to the beat of your own drummer which is among the things I find very admirable. Thank you for this informative reply. Geez the more I learn the more I discover I know so very little about so much. Well better not to dwell on that. :) This post was edited by RosieG at November 21, 2020 4:10 AM MST

You could absolutely do the same, R. The Dipper. Polaris is North.

OH? I can identify THE BIG DIPPER. I mean how can you miss it? Okay then. Alrighty. Thank you for the very helpful info. I suppose if I were more outdoorsy I'd have found "helper" things like that with which to become familiar. That's really nifty and didn't our ancestors of ancient times only have the sky? Sun moon stars. They noticed various cycles and from that they built things to tell time by how the sun hits a sundial. I mean who thought that up? And there are buildings so oriented that when the sun shines through certain spaces other information is ascertained. Year after year..century after century. Amazing. Thank you for your reply R! :)

Oh yes, they were very observant. They had to be, really, once agriculture started; but even the really ancient hunter-gatherers would have known the fairly regular cycles of the seasons, the sun and moon etc; and the effects on their food sources.

Sundials were probably an "accidental" discovery by people noticing the behaviour of shadows throughout the day, and realising they could exploit that for useful purposes.  

I mentioned using a watch as an approximate compass in an early reply; but there are in Nature a few other clues, such as algae tending to grow more on the permanently shady side of trees - North-facing in the Northern Hemisphere. Another, if you are in a region frequently swept by strong prevailing winds, is the distortion this gives to trees growing in exposed locations. They end up with their branches pointing down-wind, so all you need know is the prevailing wind-direction. A flowering-cherry tree in my garden behaves like that. 

It never fails to amaze me how we got here technologically Durdle. Creative imaginative genius brains? I always wonder (and have asked a lot) "WHO WAS THE FIRST ONE TO EVER DO THIS" whatever the "this" is. Take coffee beans. Who decided to roast them and grind them and brew them? Mindboggling to me.  I'm not very observant about a lot of things visually. Sometimes I just notice something that has been "there" for years. It just never got into my conscious mind. But I do observe and notice lots of things that are abstract. You can't actually touch them but there they are. I wonder whether people are either one or the other? I'm not an inventor per se but I have learned to adapt something smeone else discovers or deveops to my advantage. I guess we all do that. Thank you for your thoughtful and informative reply. Are you very observant about your surroundings? I know you are about the abstract. :)