Getting lost

Getting lost is the occurrence of a person or animal losing spatial reference.[1] This situation consists of two elements: the feeling of disorientation and a spatial component.[2] While getting lost, being lost or totally lost, etc. are popular expressions for someone in a desperate situation (perhaps not literally lost), getting lost is also a positive term for a goal some travellers have in exploring without a plan.[3][4][5] Getting lost can also occur in metaphorical senses, such as being unable to follow a conversation.

Process
In a maze one can get lost on a voluntary basis

Psychology and neuroscience help to understand the underlying processes which take place before, during and after getting lost. Getting lost is an aspect of behavioral geography, in which human wayfinding and cognitive and environmental factors play a role. For successful travel, it is necessary to be able to identify origin and destination, to determine turn angles, to identify segment lengths and directions of movement, to recognize on route and distant landmarks. This information is required to plot a course designed to reach a destination (previously known or unknown) or to return to a home base after wandering. If a destination is known but is not directly connected by a path, road, or track to the origin, successful travel may involve search and exploration, spatial updating of one's location, finding familiar landmarks, recognition of segment length and sequencing, identification of a frame of reference. Human movement is often guided by external aids (cartographic maps, charts, compasses, pedometers, and the like).[6]

Getting lost is particularly problematic for children (who have not yet developed tools and strategies for maintaining their bearings) and for the elderly, particularly those experiencing the onset of dementia.[7] Such individuals "can get lost while trying to find their local shop – due to their diminishing memory they can forget where the shop is, or where they live and why they went out of their house in the first place".[7] People experiencing dementia also get lost more easily in poor visibility conditions because the mind fails to appropriately fill in cues as to missing landmarks.[7] Getting lost in unfamiliar terrain can lead even an adult with a healthy mind to panic and engage in unthinking behaviors that make the situation even worse.[8] The tendency of the mind to seek patterns and familiar signs can contribute to this in two ways. First the lost person may mistake features of the terrain for markers that were seen before they became lost, creating a false sense of orientation that may lead the lost person to pursue routes that take them even further off course. Second, the lost person may mistake such features for markers that were seen after they became lost, creating a false sense that they have made a circle and returned to an earlier point of their effort to find their bearings.[8]

Historical occasions

There have been some historically notable instances of people getting lost and either being rescued or dying. George Shannon, the youngest adult member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition got lost on two occasions after being separated from the expedition. On August 26, 1804, he was sent to retrieve two pack horses; he was separated from the party for sixteen days and nearly starved, as he went without food for twelve days except for some grapes and rabbits. At first he thought he was behind the expedition, so he sped up thinking he could catch up. Then, getting hungry, he went downstream to look for a trading party he could stay with. Finally John Colter was sent to find him. The second time was on August 6, 1805, when the expedition was at the Three Forks. Shannon was dispatched up a fork the party had named Wisdom (the middle fork was named Jefferson and the placid fork, Philanthropy). He rejoined the party after three days by backtracking to the forks and following the trail of the others.[9]

John Muir wrote in his journals of an occasion when a visiting artist named Billy Simms "went forth to sketch while I was among the glaciers, and got lost - was thirty-six hours without food".[10] Mentally ailing Church of England mission priest Alexander Mackonochie died after getting lost on December 14, 1887, while walking in the Forest of Mamore, near Loch Leven, Scotland: the circumstances were later commemorated in a poem by William McGonagall.[11] In September 2014, Soviet and Russian mathematician Alexey Chervonenkis got lost in Losiny Ostrov National Park; a later search operation found him dead near Mytishchi, a suburb of Moscow.[12]

Fiction

People are sometimes depicted in fiction and literature as getting lost, with substantial consequences. For example, due to "the physical structure of Rome, whose streets were notoriously labyrinthine", it has been observed that "getting lost in Rome was staple of travel narratives".[13] The experience of getting lost is also a commonly reported theme of dreams.[14]

gollark: I'm running osmarks internet radio™ through icecast temporarily.
gollark: Stalkerish at least, definitely.
gollark: I managed to get osmarks internet radio™ into a public streams directory, unrelatedly.
gollark: It might be public information, but you are PUTTING IT TOGETHER to OBTAIN INFORMATION ABOUT SOMEONE although if that is not being RELEASED it is only STALKING or something and not DOXXING.
gollark: Technically it's not doxxing, just stalking.

References
  1. Paul A. Dudchenko, Why People Get Lost: The Psychology and Neuroscience of Spatial Cognition (Oxford, 2010)
  2. K. A. Hill, The Psychology of Lost Archived 2013-12-28 at the Wayback Machine (National SAR Secretariat, 1998)
  3. Flinn, John (March 24, 1996). "Savoring the joys of getting lost". Retrieved 29 November 2017.
  4. "A good traveler is one who does not know where he is going, and a perfect traveler does not know where he came from." - Lin Yutang
  5. "Getting Lost - Let's find a beautiful place and get lost". Retrieved 29 November 2017.
  6. Reginald G. Golledge, Wayfinding Behavior: Cognitive Mapping and Other Spatial Processes (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998)
  7. Betty Rudd, Introducing Psychopathology (2013), p. 72.
  8. John Edward Huth, The Lost Art of Finding Our Way (2013), p. 30-38.
  9. "Chapter 4: Lewis and Clark". Heniz History Center exhibit. Retrieved 2011-08-22.
  10. John Muir, in William Frederic Badè, The Writings of John Muir (1923), Vol. 9, p. 389.
  11. McGonagall, William (5 September 2011). "The Tragic Death of the Rev. A. H. Mackonochie".
  12. Известный ученый Алексей Червоненкис погиб в Москве (in Russian). kp.ru. 23 September 2014.
  13. Richard Wrigley, Regarding Romantic Rome (2007), p. 176.
  14. Stephen Gislason, Neuroscience Notes (2015), p. 128.

Further reading
  • Koester, Robert J. (2008). Lost Person Behavior: A search and rescue guide on where to look for land, air, and water. Charlottesville, VA: DbS Productions. ISBN 9781879471399. OCLC 213479933.
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