Colin Ellard is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Waterloo and the director of the university’s Research Laboratory for Immersive Virtual Environments, which is devoted to studies of the psychology of space, especially as it pertains to architecture, planning and design. He is also the author of You Are Here, a new book about the emerging psychology of direction. Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook chatted with him about the surprising ways we misunderstand the world around  us.

COOK: In your book, you pose the question: Which city is farther west, Reno or Los Angeles. Can you please explain?

ELLARD: I based this question on some interesting research done by Barbara Tversky in which she showed that most people answer this question by saying that LA is farther west. This happens because our minds play all kinds of tricks to schematize space -- that is, to reduce complicated spatial relationships to very simple ones by aligning things that aren't aligned, straightening things that are curved, and grouping things together in ways that may not reflect reality. (California is west of Nevada so therefore everything in California must be west of everything in Nevada -- but it's not). The tricks are there for a very good reason -- they can help us to organize memories for spaces, but they can also let us down sometimes.

COOK: I have looked at a map, and, honestly, I am still having trouble believing it is true...

ELLARD: I'm laughing here because I actually had to fire up Google Maps to be sure I had this right. And I wrote the book! It's a testament to the power of these mental space-warping tools of ours that even when we understand how they work we still fall prey to them.

ELLARD: Not really. If you think about most of the problems that animals have to solve involving space, they need to have exact geometric representations of locations. If you're a bee trying to find your way back to a source of nectar or a mouse trying to flee from a hungry wolf, then having a schematic representation of geographic spaces will not work so well. Human beings use space in a host of different ways -- we imagine spaces, plan them, talk to one another about them -- and so for many of these very high-level activities these kinds of representations of space might work very well. But we still get lost..

COOK: Can you please give an example of the navigation that animals are capable of?

ELLARD: I think my favorite navigator may be the African desert ant. These insects go foraging on long meandering paths, sometimes up to about 20,000 body lengths -- so think scaled to human size of something like running a marathon. When they discover food they pick it up and return it to their nest. They make an accurate turn towards the nest and experiments show that they also have a very good idea of how far they are from their nests. They do this in part using a sun compass that is embedded in their eyes and in part by keeping a very accurate count of their steps using a kind of odometer.

COOK: What is happening in their brains when they are doing this?

ELLARD: How this works at a neural level varies a great deal from animal to animal. In some cases, they're using very specialized detectors (sun compasses, magnetic field detecting circuits) and in others, they are using neural structures that we possess as well (for example, the hippocampus) but they may be using these structures in ways that exceed the abilities of the average human being.