Sense Of Direction Poem by gershon hepner

SENSE OF DIRECTION


Birds have an amazing sense
that human beings lack, that of direction,
where they're going to and whence
they're coming from too often mere projection
of their imagination. Birds
don't suffer this way, since they have magnetic
receptors, but they can't speak words,
and therefore cannot be poetic
about this sense, though it's amazing,
but reach the distant goals for which they long
without a language, paraphrasing
poetry by means of song.

James Gorman writes about studies of the bird navigation "Study Sheds Light on How Birds Navigate by Magnetic Field, " NYT,4/27/12) :

Birds are famously good navigators. Some migrate thousands of miles, flying day and night, even when the stars are obscured. And for decades, scientists have known that one navigational skill they employ is an ability to detect variations in the earth's magnetic field. How this magnetic sense works, however, has been frustratingly difficult to figure out.
Now, two researchers at Baylor College of Medicine, Le-Qing Wu and David Dickman, have solved a central part of that puzzle, identifying cells in a pigeon's brain that record detailed information on the earth's magnetic field, a kind of biological compass. "It's a stunning piece of work, " David Keays of the Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna wrote in an e-mail. "Wu and Dickman have found cells in the pigeon brain that are tuned to specific directions of the magnetic field."
Their report appeared online in Science Express on Thursday. Kenneth Lohmann at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who also studies magnetic sensing, said in an e-mail that the study was "very exciting and important."
Navigating by magnetism includes several steps. Birds have to have a way to detect a magnetic field, and some part of the brain has to register that information; it seems likely that another part of the brain then compares the incoming information to a stored map. The Baylor researchers have offered a solution to the middle step. They identified a group of cells in the brainstem of pigeons that record both the direction and the strength of the magnetic field. And they have good, but not conclusive, evidence to suggest that the information these cells are recording is coming from the bird's inner ear. Dr. Dickman said this research "is still something we want to pursue." They did not work on the third step, but Dr. Dickman said a good candidate for the location of that map was the hippocampus, the brain region involved in memory of locations in both birds and humans.
David Dickman wrote from Baylor:
Thanks Gershon, very nice.
My cosmic Twin Shelley Gornish made this comment:
My mother, brother and I were and are directionally challenged. My mother could not even tell the difference between right and left without touching her left hand (she was left handed) . Yussie and I always got lost. At his Memorial service one of his colleagues commented that when he and Betsy bought a house they bought one where all Joe had to do was make a right at his corner and then drive straight to the medical school. I can only drive to places that I have been to and have been told how to get there. Map reading is close to impossible. I never knew that this disablility was associated with a poetic soul.
4/27/12 #10,024