Autonoeisis vs Biocompass

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"The science of creaturely navigation is a contested research area, but as O’Connor reports, it is widely thought that many animals have what is called a “bio-compass” that allows them to use the Earth’s magnetic field to find their way. Magnetite has been found in the brains of mole rats, the upper beaks of homing pigeons, and the olfactory cells of rainbow trout. Live carp floating in tubs at fish markets tend to align themselves along a north–south axis. Red foxes mostly pounce on mice in a northeasterly direction. Dog owners, take note: your dog may well swing round to face north–south when it crouches to relieve itself.

Humans don’t possess inbuilt bio-compasses, but we do have something arguably more powerful: storytelling. Our remarkable navigational ability as a species is closely connected to our ability to tell stories about ourselves that unfold both backward and forward in time. For some evolutionary psychologists, this capacity for “autonoeisis” — what O’Connor describes as “the capacity to be aware of one’s own existence as an entity in time” — is what made us such good hunters. Faced with the tracks left by a prey animal, early humans were able to imagine beyond the immediately visible, reading those signs for what they might foretell as well as what they recorded: This deer’s prints show it to be wounded…We are driving this herd of bison into a box canyon, where they will be trapped…We excelled at tracking because we could generate what Michael Bond, in From Here to There: The Art and Science of Finding and Losing Our Way, calls “mental representations of the outside world that we can use to get around and orientate ourselves.”

“If we opened people up, we would find landscapes,” Agnès Varda observes in The Beaches of Agnès (2008), the autobiographical film she made when she was about to turn eighty, which tells a version of her life through the places she loved, among them the River Seine and the Belgian coastline. As metaphor, this is a gothic proposition: that we internalize certain terrains so fully they become part of us, visible to others only when the surgeon’s scalpel or the pathologist’s bone-saw begins its excavatory work. As physiology, it seems nonsense. Over the past half-century, however, neuroscientists have made a series of remarkable discoveries about the ways human brains perceive, process, and store our passage through space." (https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/07/01/wayfinding-landscapes-inside-us/?)