Why do some people have a better sense of direction than others? - Oliver Baumann

In July of 2025, top athletes competed in a kilometers-long race— but it had no set path. That's because it was the World Orienteering Championships, and participants equipped with only maps and compasses were expected to find their way between far-off checkpoints at high speeds, weaving between trees, sprinting over rocks, and skirting cliffs. This might sound a little daunting.

But whether you identify as a wayfinding whiz or get lost returning from the grocery store, your brain has a built-in navigation system that facilitates spatial skills, from sensing which direction is north to map reading and route learning. It consists of two major parts: the striatum and the hippocampus. The striatum is clued into sensory inputs, like nearby landmarks.

With repetition, it comes to associate specific stimuli and actions with certain responses and outcomes, linking these cues with set routes. This forms navigation habits; for example, when you automatically take the same sequence of turns on your way home. The hippocampus, meanwhile, constructs continuous, dynamic mental maps of your environment. It helps you figure out how to get somewhere,

even if you've never been or haven't taken that exact route before. Researchers realized the hippocampus’ importance in mental mapping in the 70s, while observing rats’ brain activity and noticing that specific neurons in the hippocampus fired when the rats were in certain spaces. The same thing also happened in complete darkness, indicating that these neurons, which came to be called “place cells,”

formed cognitive maps independent of sensory input. It seems that activity in these areas during sleep represents a kind of place replay as the brain consolidates spatial information. And in 2005, researchers discovered additional types of navigational neurons in the region surrounding the hippocampus. This includes “grid cells,” which fire in a regular pattern as one moves,