Howler, are you a tetrachromat?
It's pretty much savant level, in my case. ANYWHERE that I've been, I can find again. I recently found a little restaurant in the Latin Quarter (tucked into an alley) that I'd been to once the week before (led by a school tour guide through the streets for about a mile), and managed to find it using landmarking and just... well, okay, this sounds silly, but a sort of internal compass. My DH no longer doubts my ability to act as navigator. I can almost do this from maps.
I have an internal compass, too, but I have to calibrate to a map. I have to have a sense of where I am in the world, which way is north, etc. Plonk me in a new city and I'm unsettled until I've seen a map.
There was a piece on NPR about the journalist spending time with people who use directional tags in their language (I greet you from SSW of your position, or The tree to the north of me is beautiful). At first she could not keep track of directions, then it clicked and she described it like having a headup display bird's eye map inside her head. That's what it's like for me.
Found it! Radiolab, of course.
http://www.radiolab.org/2011/jan/25/The remote Australian Aboriginal community of Pormpuraaw, located on the western side of the Cape York peninsula in Queensland, northern Australia, offered an interesting way to further test the hypothesis that people represent time by using their spatial cognition. Unlike all of the groups previously tested by Boroditsky’s group, the Pormpuraawans rarely use relative spatial relationships (left, right, in front of, behind, etc.). Instead, they extensively use absolute directions (north, south, southeast, etc.) to represent spatial relationships on all scales, including the spatial relationships between objects (“Can you please hand me the jug to the southwest of your cup”). This trait is shared by as many as one third of the world’s languages from various geographical settings.
To function in societies whose languages use absolute rather than relative directions, it is essential that its speakers always stay oriented. Among speakers of the Kuuk Thaayorre, one of the several native languages rooted of Pormpuraaw, a person greets another by asking, “Where are you going?” One would look quite foolish if they set off southwards after answering “A long way to the north.” Having a permanent and near perfect internal representation of one’s direction is known as “dead reckoning.” With it, people perform extremely well not only in their familiar settings, but also in new settings, including within the interiors of complex buildings.
