Fear

This story starts with fear, as so many stories do, harking back forever to that moment when, confused by light, we are dragged out of our mothers into an unknown space and must sort out, among these alien forms, where we are.

"Where" is the primal question, rather than "when," "how," or "who" because for any animal, figuring out where to move in defense or attack relative to the forces around us has always been the first step to survival. From the start, staying alive has depended on navigation: the art of figuring out our position and in what direction to travel.

* * *

I HAVE A HISTORY OF not knowing true position. Recently, near the end of a long late-night drive that took me from New York City to Route 195 in southeastern Massachusetts, I grew drowsy; pulling over at a rest area, I switched off the engine and quickly fell asleep. When I awoke I had not the slightest idea of where I was or how I had gotten there, to slouch in this tight, cold space in darkness. In that instant I could have been anywhere, I might have been kidnapped by aliens, I could have lost my memory and been shipped to Turkmenistan. In some ways, I was as helpless as a newborn once more. A strange terror gripped me then, and held me back from moving or calling out for what seemed like minutes, though it was probably only a few seconds. It was a panic somehow augmented by the emotional memory of similar situations, whose outcomes lay beyond the haze of fatigue, in a place I could not quite recall.

That feeling was matched by the desperation with which, as soon as panic furloughed my motor centers, I catalogued as quickly as possible what I could see or touch: steering wheel, windshield; and beyond the glass, a tall, highway-style lamppost, a dark stand of white pines. I remember the relief that washed over me when geophysical clues crossed lines on a mental map, suggesting a solid position and memories connected to them: car, rest area, highway. It was country that looked close to home, which as it turned out lay forty minutes to the east: home, where my brother, who was gravely ill, waited to see me.

* * *

LIVING IMPLIES CHANGE AND THUS movement, and since navigation is the art of computing where we are, where we've been, and where we are going, it's not an exaggeration to say that navigation in its myriad forms is not only a crucial survival tool but the prime expression of living. Of the generally accepted criteria for life, most imply knowing our current position and moving where we must to fulfill a particular goal. "We have a brain for one reason and one reason only," a Cambridge neuroscientist named Daniel Wolpert once stated, "to produce adaptable and complex movements." Producing movement means finding position and a direction in which to move. Our brains evolved by navigating.

Navigation is so basic, so present at all levels of our lives that, like the proverbial company of blind men touching various sectors of an elephant and coming up with different definitions — it's an archway, a wall, a fire hose — we rarely recognize the whole for what it is. We navigate when we search for Smith's office in a part of our workplace we've not visited before; we navigate when, on the East Coast, we think of e-mailing a friend in San Francisco, situating him mentally three thousand miles away in SoMa, in the darkness before dawn. Even waking up in a space we know well, requiring a glass of water at 3:00 A.M., we automatically use navigational skills to plot our journey: roll off the bed, stagger around the chest of drawers, the scattered jogging shoes, through a door, then turn left (fingers outstretched, touching a wall to guide us) down an unlit hallway to the kitchen tap. The process is so unconscious that if someone were to insist we were navigating within our own house we would probably scoff.

And yet, during our short voyage from bed to faucet, the navigation and memory centers in our brains perform a suite of calculations: of distance, course, time in relation to known landmarks; whose complexity is not watered down by the fact that we're not aware of them. These calculations are the same in kind — and performed, relatively speaking, with similar efficiency — as those employed by a World War II navigator using parallel rulers, pencil, and map to chart a bomber's journey from southern England to Berlin and back.

* * *

THE INCIDENT ON ROUTE 195 has shaken me. Over my thirty-plus years of adult life, I have traveled frequently and awoken in many odd places: a cornfield in southwestern France, a brothel in Indonesia, a rooftop in Damascus, a subway train (after a night of imprudent celebration) in the Bronx; but as a rule I've always been certain of what, and who, I would see when my eyes opened.

As I think back, I decide it was not the waking-up part that shook me as much as the particular flavor of associated terror and its familiarity. For I have known such extreme and debilitating panic twice before, and both times it was linked to losing track of where I was.

* * *

THE MONTHS THAT FOLLOW ARE full of turmoil and loss. My brother dies, and my wife and children and I have to absorb the emotional shock, as well as legal and financial fallout, from his death. At times, waking from the day-to-day routine that absorbs our lives, remembering Louis is no longer here, I feel I have lost track of myself in a fashion similar to what happened on Route 195. Is it despite or because of this that I become increasingly determined to examine not only the origins of my own propensity for navigational breakdown but everything else about this skill that so defines us?

I am not overly thrilled with the idea of exploring such personal navigational panic. I decide, therefore, to start my research at the furthest remove from the consciousness spectrum, at the level of a developing cell and how it knows which part of the body it's meant to reside in. I learn, after sifting through scientific papers from Germany, Israel, Taiwan, that one of the top researchers in the field works in the same college at which I teach; and I make an appointment, therefore, with Dr. Stephen Small at New York University in Manhattan.

To meet Small I must travel and therefore navigate. Driving from our house in southeastern Massachusetts I follow Route 195 west and then, in Providence, Rhode Island, alter course toward New York City. My car is not fitted with a Global Positioning System receiver, or GPS, so I match the Jeep's compass readout to the sun as our star swings...