We’re pleased to share a short excerpt from A Sense of Space: A Local’s Guide to a Flat Earth, the Edge of the Cosmos, and Other Curious Places, publishing November 12. Read on for an excerpt from Chapter One of this thrilling journey through humanity’s visualization of new spaces.

It is remarkable that this one part of the human brain, the hippocampus, seems to be implicated in so many scenarios, all of which have the underlying theme as different kinds of map:

Cognitive maps
Memory
Future planning
Imagining
Time sequencing
Social relations

This being the case, it is no small wonder that our cultures produce metaphors where social structure is mimicked in spatial terms. The powerful get the penthouse apartments and the not-so-powerful get the basements. In Samoa the powerful have houses closest to the center of the common village green and the not-so-powerful have houses nearer the periphery, close to the outhouses.

But what about our concepts of space itself ? Prior to contact with the West, the Polynesians were able to successfully navigate thousands of miles across the Pacific, often using the stars as guides. During the Norse expansion in the North Atlantic from 900 AD onward, the Viking sailors used the Sun as a guide and even had a crude sense of latitude from the position of the Sun in the sky. These feats of navigation
involved not only a kind of mental map of the vast swaths of ocean they traversed but also the peoples who lived in the far-off lands.

Then there are the spaces where our imaginations travel. Where do dead souls go in the afterlife? What are the geographies of heaven and hell? And what of places in the sky and under the Earth? Are they real? And, if they are real, what are their characteristics, and how do they relate to us as humans? Are they inhabited by intelligent creatures who have minds that work like ours?

The question of language designators as egocentric or allocentric, for example, has been studied by both cognitive psychologists and anthropologists. One aim of these studies is to see whether individuals in certain cultures have a better sense of direction if they are restricted to using the language of only allocentric place designators, rather than purely egocentric.

There is also a question of how concrete representations of space can merge into the mystical. We tend to think that this is not a property of Western cultures, at least not the practice of science, but for many cultures there is no distinction.

One of the anthropologists I worked with was Susan Montague. She related her experience learning the language of Kaduwaga Village in the Trobriand Islands, located off the east coast of New Guinea. When she was living there, she was perplexed by the prefixes of “o” and “wa” that were used to designate places. They seemed to be confusingly mixed. The “o” and “wa” distinction arises from a Trobriand cosmography where unborn/dead souls inhabit a realm underneath the Earth—these are the “wa” beings. A “wa” being can rise into the womb of a pregnant woman and become a live human or an “o” being. How this applied as a prefix to place names mystified Montague at first.

She described how she might be walking down the “o” path or the “wa” path. The inhabitants would correct her when she made an error, but she couldn’t understand what distinguished an “o-type-space” from a “wa-type-space.” Over time, she learned that it was related to the Kaduwagan concept of space and reincarnation. “O” space is a space where people can congregate and effectively agree upon what is there concretely. “Wa” space, conversely, is more indeterminate and a space that is not as agreed upon. The “o” space is the space of the living, occupied, established, embedded in the culture, like the inside of a general store, where people gather. The “wa” space is the space of the dead, unoccupied, not agreed upon, and somehow malleable and independent of culture, like a flat region hidden behind someone’s house, untouched and ungardened.

In my attempts to understand the secrets of navigation across many cultures, I’ve come to understand that there are cultural elements that we would deem as empirical but that blend into what we in the West would call superstition. For example, the use of stars to orient or navigate is something Westerners might recognize as valid and utilitarian, but associating the same stars with ancestors of mythical heroes seems superstitious. Many tend to neatly divide beliefs into what they feel is a clean delineation of scientific versus unscientific. Yet I’ve come to see more of a continuum.

In the philosophy of science there is something appropriately called the “demarcation problem,” where it is difficult to find a way to characterize the boundaries among what we might call serious science, pseudoscience, and pure imagination. In looking at the history of concepts of space from the ancient Egyptians to our modern understanding, there are countless demarcation problems where the human imagination may spawn new cultural manifestations. It seems impossible to create clear demarcations in the same way Montague found seamless connections between the Trobriand geography, cosmography, language, culture, and a view of the spiritual realm.

My colleague Gerald Holton, a historian of physics, reflected on these seamless cultural connections in the context of Einstein:

John Edward Huth is the Donner Professor of Science at Harvard University. He has done research in experimental particle physics since 1980 and is currently a member of the ATLAS collaboration at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN). He participated in the discovery of the top quark and the Higgs boson and is the author of The Lost Art of Finding Our Way.