An article in El Reg may help explain why some people always have a sense of where ‘True North’ is placed. I can normally tell in which direction ‘north’ is placed as a result I rarely get lost. This is in contrast to my wife who finds it difficult to back-track her way in a city, and finds it impossible to strike a new diagonal short-cut. Oddly my ability becomes totally confused in the Southern Hemisphere (I suspect due to conflicts between magnetic fields and visual clues). More understandably it also gets confused inside modern steel framed buildings.
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