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March 16, 2009
This delightful, dense and illuminating book by Ellard, an experimental psychologist, explores how we navigate space and hone our sense of direction, despite being paradoxically spatially primitive and overly evolved. All animals, monocellular and multicellular alike, find their way to their basic needs—heat, light and nourishment—but while ants, for example, don't get lost and amoebas are guided by an “internal toolkit,” most human beings face unique difficulties. Unlike the Inuit, who have a superb sense of direction, most people find that the more sophisticated their environments, the weaker their grasp of space and direction. Ellard offers insights into how humans navigate their own homes and why they select certain spots for refuge—preferences influenced by gender, culture and history. He emphasizes the importance of orienting children to natural space as well as “virtual spaces,” and his chapter on cities serves as an excellent primer on urban planning and psychogeography, the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographic environment on the emotions.

May 15, 2009
Ellard (Experimental Psychology/Univ. of Waterloo) investigates the current thinking about spatial intelligence.

How, asks the author, can humans be such masters of abstract space yet so clumsy in getting from point A to B? What types of spatial information available to all creatures are we missing out on? Ellard writes with admirable clarity, patiently introducing numerous concepts and theories, from the elemental fact that humans must move to survive—to find food, to find a mate—all the way to renowned architect Bill Hillier's"space syntax," a math-grammar used to describe relationships between small parts of space within a larger spatial context. Along the way, readers are smartly briefed on an accumulation of spatial-processing material, from both the physiological and psychological realms—optic flow, the vestibular system, landmark navigation, light-wave recognition and magnetic fields. The author also includes a lively discussion of the spatial organization of home and city and draws on the work of Le Corbusier, Jane Jacobs, Guy Debord and Ivan Chtcheglov, who claimed that"city spaces evoke feelings are surely as mixtures of chemicals produce drug effects." Ellard then travels through cyberspace, searching for connections to the human understanding of spatial relations—"navigation from website to website by a series of clicks mirrors the way that our mind processes space. Internet sites are connected to one another as nodes in a topology." The author's thoroughness and range are only hampered by the absence of geographers in the narrative, who should certainly figure in any study of spatial organization.

An anecdotally rich provocation in service of environmental awareness.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

June 1, 2009
As an experimental psychologist at the University of Waterloo and director of its Research Laboratory for Immersive Virtual Environments (RELIVE), Ellard draws on a vast knowledge base of how humans perceive space, use space, and move through space versus all that is done by animals such as bees, rats, and birds. In the first two-thirds of this book, he displays this expertise with clarity and a sure hand, providing lay readers with a thorough understanding of space syntax, visibility graphs, spatial cognition, etc., as they relate to humans and other creatures and their impact on our lives, our architecture, our homes, and our cities. But the author becomes less sure and convincing in the book's last third when he attempts to tie the preceding pages to cyberspace environments such as Second Life, to greenspace in our urban design, and lastly to our failure to be outdoors in nature. Ellard believes that we may "neglect our stewardship of our planetary home to the extent that we risk losing it." VERDICT Ellard's message is not new, but his reasoning is novel. Despite its flaws, this title will intrigue readers interested in psychology, the environment, and architecture.Michael D. Cramer, Schwarz BioSciences, RTP, NC

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2009
Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages ofall of us, actually, dozens of times every day. We go to work and back home again. We go on a hike in the woods. We navigate the aisles of the supermarket. But how do we do it? How do we find our way from place to place and how, at the same time, do we manage to get lost in environments that should be ridiculously familiar to us (shopping malls, for example)? The author examines the similarities and differences in navigational systems of animals and humans, showing that, in some cases, we are almost foolishly incompetent compared to creatures we generally consider to be a lot less intelligent than we are. He also explores how we have tailored our everyday environments to accommodate our lack of navigational abilities (such as the creation of massive landmarks, like the Empire State Building). If you're looking for an eye-opening, if somewhat embarrassing, book to help understand why you keep getting lost when you know you shouldntand what you can do about itwell, here you are.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)