In Praise of Walking: A New Scientific Exploration

by Shane O'Mara

The brain’s GPS codes for your position in the world, independent of what you are doing in that space, and allows animals and humans to solve problems that are absolutely fundamental to survival: to find and remember secure and safe places for shelter, or to find reliable sources of food, for example. This system is activated by movement, such as walking or running. It has also been co-opted in the case of humans to allow mental time travel, in addition to supporting physical space travel. It even allows one to deal with the problems presented by predators in the environment. You learn where possible refuges are, and you know where the boundaries of those refuges are, because of ‘latent learning’ during exploration; you also learn to deploy that information quickly and effectively in order not to become a meal. Our walking journey so far has taken us through how we find our way, how we get lost, and how we build our inner maps of the world we inhabit. The world we inhabit is increasingly urban, and it is a complicated one. Our urban space is a world of artifice, quite unlike anything found in the natural world we evolved in. Most humans now live, and therefore walk, in a built environment – their village, their town, and particularly their city. Let us now walk the streets of the city, and see how it moulds our walking.