I listened to a program on Radio 4 about the differences in the way men and women read maps. The theory being that men read maps by taking a sort of birds eye view approach while women orientate the map to themselves. Maybe that's true, but of the men in my life there are some very interesting strategies going on. My first husband was fairly OK at map reading, but tended not to read the instructions and navigated mainly by instinct, on many occasions this took him miles out of his way. My stepfather has to do a dummy run the day before (he is a belt and braces sort of person!). My brother in law is hopeless and he manages to get lost every time he ventures out of his home town, he can get lost equally easily with or without a map. Laura is an excellent map reader, but Emily still gets lost going to the corner shop and Sam has a very good memory and can remember routes and landmarks very clearly. Robbie can read a map but he has the attention span of a goldfish so he us not an ideal navigator when travelling by car. I tend to plan in advance for unfamiliar journeys, I usually have a look at an online route finder, check to see if it makes sense then print the map and directions, I glance through the directions but I find it easier to work from the map.
On the radio program a man and a woman were set a task to navigate from A to B in Milton Keynes. I have got lost there more than once because everything looks the same, there are few landmarks, but my first husband thought that it was simplicity itself to find his way around Milton Keynes, he liked the straight lines and the symmetry so I guess that indicates a different thought process. I had to pick Emily and her friend up from Milton Keynes after a concert, the police had made everyone walk away from the concert venue to be picked up. I asked Emily to describe the landmarks so that I could find her - she said she was standing next to a tree near a roundabout, it was like looking for a needle in a haystack!
The radio program repeated the old joke explaining that men have to produce millions of sperm per 'go' for just one to have a chance of reaching the target - because none of them are willing to ask for directions! Now that is true, men don't read instructions and they don't ask for directions.
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