WordNet
n. an awareness of your orientation in space
Wikipedia
Sense of direction is the ability to know one's location and perform wayfinding. It is related to cognitive maps, spatial awareness, and spatial cognition. Sense of direction can be impaired by brain damage, such as in the case of topographical disorientation.
Humans create spatial maps whenever they go somewhere. Neurons called place cells inside the hippocampus fire individually while a person makes their way through an environment. This was first discovered in rats, when the neurons of the hippocampus were recorded. Certain neurons fired whenever the rat was in a certain area of its environment. Theses neurons form a grid when they are all put together on the same plane. We get our sense of direction when we match up spatial maps we have stored in the hippocampus, to the pattern of firing neurons when we are trying to find our way back or trying to find our car in the parking lot.
Usage examples of "sense of direction".
Her Feeling gave little sense of direction, but she was fairly sure that he was in bed, or at least in his bedroom.
Among those dark or dimly lighted upper chambers he quickly lost all sense of direction, and it was not strange that he eventually blundered into a chamber into which his foes were just pouring.
In the darkness he suddenly had no sense of direction, of how to find his way back to Lan and the others.
He never lost his sense of direction, and he invariably found some sort of shelter for the night—.
Still, his sense of direction led him on, and his feet knew the distance.
I'd buy a watermelon from the market if I hadn't lost every guran I had on an unwise investment on a chariot which might possibly have won the race had it not been driven by an Orc-loving charioteer with two left hands and a poor sense of direction.
I believed that my sense of direction had not altogether deserted me and I was heading for the mysterious pile of timeworn masonry on the point.
Better keep to one or other of the banks, or well lose our sense of direction.
But if his reading of signs and general sense of direction wasn't completely off, they were very near the river.
The guide had noted my absence upon the arrival of the party at the entrance of the cave, and had, from his own intuitive sense of direction, proceeded to make a thorough canvass of by-passages just ahead of where he had last spoken to me, locating my whereabouts after a quest of about four hours.