Mapspin: Turning the Map Round Until It Faces the Way You Are Walking

Mapspin (n.): the slow, solemn rotation of a map, a phone or your whole body on a street corner until the little drawing finally agrees with the street in front of you. It happens most in a new town on the first morning of a holiday, outside a bakery that smells wonderful, at a junction with five exits and no obvious north.

A mapspin begins with a confident glance. You know where you are, the blue dot knows where you are, and the café you want is just there, up and to the left. You set off to the left. After twenty steps the dot sets off to the right. You stop, hold the phone flat in front of you like a tray of drinks, and begin to turn, very slowly, on the spot.

Paper maps produce the grandest mapspins. A full fold-out city plan cannot be turned discreetly. It has to be held at arm's length, rotated a quarter turn, then another, while the wind tries to fold it into a sailing boat. Halfway round, the river on the map lines up with the real river, and for one glorious moment everything makes sense. Then you notice you are now holding the whole town upside down, with all the street names standing on their heads.

There are recognised styles. The shuffle is a mapspin done with the feet, the map held still while its owner revolves beneath it. The lean is done with the neck, the head tilted until the street names are nearly readable. The full mapspin, practised by families, is performed by four people round one map, each turning it towards themselves in turn, and it can last longer than the walk.

Locals never mapspin. They stand nearby, kindly pretending not to watch, and occasionally lean over to point, which is the most helpful thing anyone can do and somehow also the most embarrassing.

The real idea behind it

Turning the map is not a sign of a poor sense of direction. It is a shortcut almost everybody's brain prefers. A map lying the way you face lets you read it directly: what is ahead on the paper is ahead in the street, and left is left. When the map is turned another way, you have to rotate it in your head first, and psychologists have shown since the early 1970s that turning a shape in the mind takes longer the further it has to turn, much like turning a real object.

The same thing catches out the maps fixed to walls in parks and stations. In the early 1980s an American psychologist studied those you are here signs and found that when a sign was mounted so that up on the map did not mean straight ahead, many people confidently set off the wrong way. That is why many phone maps can rotate themselves to match the way you are facing, quietly doing the mapspin for you.