What to expect this week:

Have you ever been lost in the woods? Or even driving on the roads (before Google Maps)?

It’s a frightening feeling to not have your wits about you in an unfamiliar location, but it’s a feeling that’s becoming less and less common. With iPhones in every pocket, people no longer have to rely on manual navigational skills to find their way around. You simply plug in an address and follow the (phone) leader.

But there is something inherently rewarding about solving the problem of being lost and there is a sport predicated on such an idea. It’s called orienteering. Orienteering is a sport where competitors must find their way through an unfamiliar course using only a map, compass, and their own sense of direction.

In this week’s video, I show how orienteering mimics ancient behaviors associated with foraging, as well as the potential cognitive and physical benefits one can gain from doing it.

Housekeeping:

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Orienteering: The Gamification of Survival

Humans have turned survival into a game. It was once our primary motivation. Death was to be assumed, so survival brought gratitude. Now, we often assume that survival is the default state of humanity. So many of us simply exist, without having to hunt for our food and having the ability to find a potential mate with a few swipes of a dating app. 

This is likely contributing to the existential angst we see around us. Because people in the modern world seldom struggle to survive, we outsource our depression and anxieties to the insignificant problems of mundane life - like how many likes we get on social media, or what our boss will say about being late to work.

Our lives have strayed so far from how we evolved that we are actually drifting back to our primitive nature in many ways. People in the industrialized world do things like camping or long hunting expeditions, just to escape the monotony of modern culture and reinvigorate that visceral hunger for survival. We take a voluntary, playful approach to survival - we gamify it.

A relatively new sport that has gradually been gaining more attention over the years embodies this gamification of survival. It’s called orienteering and it may be a promising way to reintegrate “survival” into your life.

What is Orienteering?

Orienteering is the sport of timed navigation. Participants are given maps and compasses and are left to their navigational skills to reach a series of checkpoints (called controls) and a final destination. The participant who most successfully traverses the control route and makes it to the final destination first wins the race. However, it’s up to you to determine your route.

The races can be shorter and more sprint-like (10 minutes), or longer and more duration-focused (one hour or more). Some variations, called rogaining, can last up to 24 hours and include teamwork. While some events are held in more urban areas, most are in natural settings like public parks

It’s a sport that is especially demanding on both physical fitness and mental acuity. Studies have even been done to prove it. 

A meta-analysis was published in 2020, looking at the physical and cognitive demands of orienteering [1]. They show how it requires sufficient levels of aerobic and anaerobic conditioning. This is because it involves mostly endurance work (aerobic) with intermittent bouts of high-intensity sprinting on uphill terrain (anaerobic). Cognitively, successful participants are competent in their memory, attention, anticipation, and simplification abilities. 

More recent studies have compared orienteers to control groups with little or no experience in the sport. In 2021, a group of researchers from Italy found that expert orienteers scored higher in visuospatial tasks and were more confident and positive in their sense of direction [2]. 

Most recently, a randomized clinical trial compared the cognitive and walking abilities of three groups of elderly people [3]. One group consisted of orienteers, another consisted of general hikers and the last group was the control that did neither. What they found was extremely interesting. First, orienteering and hiking both improve cognition and walking gait in the elderly. Second, the orienteers performed even better than the hikers. 

The authors conclude with, “This RCT suggests the effectiveness of orienteering, even if it has never been practiced, being useful for greater efficiency in gait performance and cognitive flexibility.”

David Raichlen, professor of biological sciences and anthropology at USC had this to say about the results from that study [4]: 

Optimal Foraging Theory

In this way, orienteering is analogous to what biologists call optimal foraging theory. Let me explain.

When living in the wild, finding food is not optional. Frugivores search for patches of fruit, predators hunt for herds of prey, and scavengers seek out decaying bodies, all to acquire the sufficient energy required for survival. This search is not a blind pursuit, however. 

Optimal foraging theory is a concept in ecology and behavioral biology that seeks to understand the foraging behaviors of organisms by analyzing how they maximize the amount of energy or nutrients gained while minimizing the costs associated with obtaining food. In essence, it explores how animals make decisions about where, when, and what to eat to efficiently meet their nutritional needs and ensure survival and reproductive success.

The key point here is efficiency. Due to competition with other organisms, natural selection pressures animals to seek out and harvest their food efficiently. In so doing, animals must search for their food strategically, “directional search paths are more efficient than random” ones  [5]. Primates are a great example of this sense of directionality and planning in terms of food foraging.

Primatologists suggest that chimpanzees memorize their landscapes and monitor food-yielding areas in a goal-oriented manner [6]. Moreover, light was shed on their foraging planning capacities when one study showed how they change their nesting positions and the timing of their search to account for finding more desirable fruits [7]. 

Figs are a sweet fruit of choice for many creatures in these chimpanzees' environment, which means that they are depleted by competitors more quickly than other types of food. The researchers of this study found that:

It has since been shown that various other primate species also likely have mental maps of their environments which they use to search for food efficiently [8].

Prehistoric people probably weren’t too different in that regard. We tend to envision them walking or running barefoot across a desert landscape, or maybe through some jungle foliage to hunt their next prey or pick some berries. They weren’t doing this aimlessly. They were navigating the natural world through cognitive and cultural tools. 

Humans that were more effective at minimizing their energy expenditure while maximizing their nutrient acquisition were more likely to survive and reproduce. Similarly, orienteers who find the most energy-efficient route are the most successful. Also, they use similar cognitive mapping and navigational systems to do so. Like the chimps traveling between fruit patches as efficiently as possible, orienteers must travel from control to control with efficiency.

Life is Like a Video Game

Humans have reached a unique point in evolutionary history. Never has a species on earth been so susceptible to boredom and pathologies associated with meaninglessness (like depression). Never has a species been given the opportunity to live life this close to “easy mode”.

Playing video games on easy mode can be fun for a little while. It lets you bypass building the skills necessary to get to the next level. You can simply walk through your enemies. But, there are reasons why video game developers don’t only provide one level of difficulty. They give you the option to modify the game’s difficulty and challenge yourself to a greater degree.

Why? Because humans need a challenge. And now that we live in a world where true challenges are becoming harder and harder to find, we are fabricating them ourselves. Challenging ourselves in ways like orienteering are examples of us gamifying survival. The sport is a cultural replication of the skills needed to forage for food and might be something worth trying out for people looking to turn up the difficulty level of their own life.

References:

[1] Batista, M., et al. 2020. “Physiological and cognitive demands of orienteering: a systematic review.” Sport Sciences for Health 16(e7592).

[2] Feraco, T., et al. 2021. “Orienteering: What relation with visuospatial abilities, wayfinding attitudes, and environment learning?” Applied Cognitive Psychology 35(6):1592-1599.

[3] Biehl-Printes, C., 2024. “Unraveling the Unparalleled Benefits of Orienteering vs. Hiking on Gait Performance and Cognition: Randomized Clinical Trail.” Archives of Gerontology and Geriatrics 117:105201.

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLWbFVKFffM&t=3910s 

[5] Krebs, J. 1978. “Optimal Foraging: Decision Rules for Predators.” In Behavioral Ecology: An Evolutionary Approach, edited by J. Krebs and N. Davis. Blackwell Scientific: London, Uk.

[6] Janmaat, K., et al. 2013. “Chimpanzees use long-term spatial memory to monitor large fruit trees and remember feeding experiences across seasons.” Animal Behaviour 86(6):1183-1205.

[7] Janmaat, K., et al. 2014. “Wild chimpanzees plan their breakfast time, type, and location.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111(46):16343-8.

[8] Trapanese, C., et al. 2019. “What, where and when: spatial foraging decisions in primates.”Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society 94(2):483-502.

Fit Fuel Song Suggestion

The Fit Fuel song suggestions are hand-picked by yours truly to elicit the motivation (and possibly aggression) needed to initiate or persist through a grueling workout. They consist of heavy, brutal guitar riffs and gruesomely guttural vocals. Additionally, I timestamp what I believe to be the best riff of the song - one that will kick your nervous system into overdrive when approaching a personal record (PR).

Like One by Metallica, this song is not negotiable - a workout playlist without this is incomplete.