In July of 2025, top athletes competed in a kilometers-long race – but it had no set path. That’s because it was the World Orienteering Championships, and participants equipped with only maps and compasses were expected to find their way between far-off checkpoints at high speeds, weaving between trees, sprinting over rocks, and skirting cliffs.

This might sound a little daunting. But whether you identify as a wayfinding whiz or get lost returning from the grocery store, your brain has a built-in navigation system that facilitates spatial skills, from sensing which direction is north to map reading and route learning.

It consists of two major parts: the striatum and the hippocampus. The striatum is clued into sensory inputs, like nearby landmarks. With repetition, it comes to associate specific stimuli and actions with certain responses and outcomes, linking these cues with set routes. This forms navigation habits; for example, when you automatically take the same sequence of turns on your way home.

Place cells and grid cells

The hippocampus, meanwhile, constructs continuous, dynamic mental maps of your environment. It helps you figure out how to get somewhere, even if you’ve never been or haven’t taken that exact route before.

Researchers realised the hippocampus’ importance in mental mapping in the 70s, while observing rats’ brain activity and noticing that specific neurons in the hippocampus fired when the rats were in certain spaces. The same thing also happened in complete darkness, indicating that these neurons, which came to be called “place cells,” formed cognitive maps independent of sensory input.

It seems that activity in these areas during sleep represents a kind of place replay as the brain consolidates spatial information.

And in 2005, researchers discovered additional types of navigational neurons in the region surrounding the hippocampus. This includes “grid cells,” which fire in a regular pattern as one moves, providing the brain with a kind of internal coordinate system. Together, the breakthrough discoveries that put place and grid cells on the map earned the 2014 Nobel Prize.

Navigation skills can be improved

But while the striatum and hippocampus form a navigation system that allows our brains to adapt between strategies depending on the task, we still struggle to find our ways. In the absence of strong external cues, people tend to make small errors that send them off course and into circles.

And generally, some of us find ourselves lost more often than others. Most people can handle a striatum-centric, well-practiced route; but those who lean more on hippocampus-forward self-orienting tend to stand out as navigators.

Twin studies suggest that genetics account for around 60% of the variation in our navigation abilities. These abilities appear independent of general intelligence, suggesting that navigation is its own distinct cognitive skill. And crucially, research indicates that it’s one that can be practiced and improved. Compared to people from suburban and rural areas, those who grew up in cities – especially ones with more uniform, grid-like layouts – appear to struggle more with navigating less ordered environments. And in a 2010 study, rugby players and martial artists were blindfolded and asked to navigate back to a starting point. The rugby players, who train at much larger scales, did so with more directional accuracy, suggesting that the difference in their spatial training improved their judgement across longer distances.

London cab drivers, meanwhile, must learn what’s referred to as “the knowledge,” which consists of extensive routes and landmarks across the city’s infamously complex maze of streets. Those who successfully complete the training have been observed to experience significant hippocampal growth.

But the brain’s malleability can be a double-edged sword. While GPS devices reliably get us around, they lead to worse spatial reconstructions than verbal directions and paper maps do. By allowing our brains to engage less actively with environmental cues, GPS may degrade the hippocampal navigation system and impair our own internal sense of direction. So, to help improve it, you can try putting your GPS away on more familiar routes and paying attention to distant landmarks. Instead of using turn-by-turn directions, consider experimenting with a paper map and exploring new places on foot, since physical movement helps the brain encode spatial information. Then, with a little practice, the next time you get turned around, maybe you can first look within yourself to find your way.