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I can only deduce that, if there is a gene for this characteristic, it must reside somewhere in
the X chromosome. This astonishing conclusion has caused me no end of cognitive dissonance.
You have no X chromosome? Y not?
I took up flying some years ago just so I could look down and see where the heck I was!
Not all who wander are lost - it's only we men.
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Carpal Tunnel
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the Colonel told us about American troops early in WWII blundering right into German ambushes because they had not learned to use maps
Well, we were talking about historical revisionism in another thread. Bill, you been talking to David Irving recently? Of course, it could have been the marines guarding the American embassy in Berlin, I suppose ...
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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Carpal Tunnel
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On the rare occasions when I can't find myselfHmmm. I thought you lived on the east coast, not in San Francisco! 
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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"You have no X chromosome?"
Yes, and a Y to boot, which is where I would have expected this hypothetical sequence of codons to reside. However, the fact that my daughters (yes, they *are* girls ... I checked when they were born) show evidence of having them means that they might (contrary to the expectations wrought from all of my previous experiences) reside on the X after all.
k
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No Bel, you haven't quite got it. Men do indeed use maps; women have no idea what a map is for or how to use it. AS to asking directions, you are right on. No man will ever ask someone for directions except as an absolute last resort.
And as for the kind of directions you usually get, it certainly varies very much. I once was given directions by a friend to get to his house and the ended up, "turn left at the next street after you see the red Volkswagen parked on your left." I thought this strange, figuring that if the owner of the VW were to take it out shopping, I would have a problem, but no, when we went, there was the VW. Turns out it had been sitting in the same place for years and never moved.
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On Spatial DimorphismAh ha! At last. A dichotomy of the sexes with which even the lesser of the sexes will agree. People of all manner and circumstance have observed that the human female is inept when giving directions or receiving same. This is because back when our species was roaming the forest floor in search of food the female wasn't allowed to roam with the men. This wasn't sexist. The female was the one with the milk. Time passed. Today the female lives in a modern world where cars and feet go many, many, places and the female can't even read a map. Or judge distances. Or empathize with the males own peculiar desires and altruistic behaviors (but that's another story). I had a good buddy once that the very first thing he did upon acquiring a new girlfriend or wife, was to teach them to fold a road map. Not read it- fold it. Yeah, yeah, bitch, bitch, bitch. I know that all you women weren't poured from the same syrup bucket but I also know that only one lady in one million could whip me in a fair fight. But now a "fair fight" would be a oxyanthropomorphizologicalmoron, now wouldn't it. Thanks Milum for the use of your machine, Raymond 
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Hay BobY and Milum ... you are partly right but mostly wrong.
In my early driving days - late 1940s - I had an unerring sense of direction and could find my way quickly and correctly by instinct ... A talent that fliers call "seat of the pants reckoning" and a talent much desired by pilots
In later years (late 1950s, early 1960s)I was manager of an American Automobile Association (AAA) office and during training was introduced to map reading and learned, too, that all AAA maps fold the exact same way.
Any AAA travel agent - yes, the ones who make up your maps and TripTix -AND they're mostly women these days -will clue you in, it's easy.
As to giving directions - Ask Cap Kiwi if he had any problems finding my house with the directions I gave him!
So there.
(Where is that auditory raspberry emoticon when you need it?)
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map reading, is a spacial skill. there is some slight evidence men are slightly better at spacial skills. How ever, it is not true that being male make you good at spacial skill or that being female makes you bad.
my ex husband went from queens to putnum county (pretty much dead north) via connecticut. (most definately east. i asked him-- didn't the sun light (it was early morning) shining directy into your eyes give you a clue you were going in the wrong directions. He replied "why should it?"
this same man lost the on ramp to the queensbourgh bridge, at queens plaza. (the brigde is less than a quarter of a mile away! all you need to do is to go straight.) he went from queens to an adress in brooklyn, via the verranzano bridge! The man could not find his way out of a paper bag with out help.
my kids grew up thinking i knew how to get everywhere in creatation-- since i was always the family navigator. when i was divorced, and going to Boston for the first time, i took along my daughter, handed her the map, and said you navagate.
fortunately, i really knew the way.. but i would ask her questions. at the end of the trip (and she missed a day of school coming with me to boston) she announced, "maps are usefull" -- i was stunned! and asked her if "didn't you already know that?" and she said "no"
her experience till then (she was 16) was "local maps" of the nieghborhood made as class projects to teach maps -- as as she said, she didn't need a map for the nieghborhood, she knew where thing were, and how to get there, and large scale maps (the US, Europe, the world)
she had no idea about road maps.
Now she is a bright kid, and had traveled alot, but she missed out about road maps. i wonder how many other kids have too? and if your spacial skills are weak, and you are never exposed, and its never really taught in school, unless someone teaches you, you never learn how to use maps. Since then, she has travel thousand of miles (she has driven to New Orleans twice!) and she never gets lost!
she some times get annoyed by directions.. one set of directions to a locale in DC started at I 495-- and she quipped, "gee, i didn't know you could get to DC on the LIE" (a local road with the same designation) so she got a map, and found her way from I 495 (LIE) to I 495 (DC beltway). my son seems to have inherited his sense of direction from his father.
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I find when men have trouble finding a place, they usually have someone or something to blame. Their partner read the map wrong. The directions were wrong. The signs were wrong. "The entrance to the roundabout which would have taken us onto the bridge at Niagara put us in the wrong lane on the roundabout." Right Cap K? 
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