How Animals Build a Sense of Direction
The Quanta Podcast
Quanta Magazine
4.7 • 638 Ratings
🗓️ 17 February 2026
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What guides a bat’s internal compass? It’s not the stars in the sky, or the Earth’s magnetic field. On this episode of The Quanta Podcast, host Samir Patel speaks with staff writer Yasemin Saplakoglu about how new research into animals’ sense of direction could help explain the feeling of getting “turned around,” or even why some of us are so bad at finding our way. This topic was covered in a recent story for Quanta Magazine.
Each week on The Quanta Podcast, Quanta Magazine editor in chief Samir Patel speaks with the people behind the award-winning publication to navigate through some of the most important and mind-expanding questions in science and math.
Audio Coda from Prat, Y., Taub, M. & Yovel, Y.
Everyday bat vocalizations contain information about emitter, addressee, context, and behavior.
Sci Rep 6, 39419 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/srep39419
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It doesn't matter how long you've lived in a place. |
| 0:07.0 | At some point, you're going to get turned around. |
| 0:10.0 | You're going to think you're going one way and you're actually going another. |
| 0:14.0 | This happened to me just the other day. |
| 0:16.0 | After decades in New York City, I got out of the subway. |
| 0:19.0 | I walked an entire block across town before I |
| 0:22.9 | realized I was going the wrong way. Granted, it wasn't a block that I knew well, but I was pretty sure |
| 0:28.7 | I knew where I was going. I mean, I didn't take out my phone to check. Once I reoriented, |
| 0:33.9 | sure, I was able to turn around and get to my destination eventually. |
| 0:38.7 | If I have any sense of direction, and I have a little, I think, where did it go? |
| 0:49.0 | Welcome to the Quanta podcast, where we explore the frontiers of fundamental science and math. |
| 0:53.4 | I'm Samir Patel, editor-in-chief |
| 0:55.1 | of Quanta magazine. There are still a ton of mysteries about the human brain, but neuroscientists |
| 1:01.3 | are always making progress in understanding them. So what is possibly firing or not firing |
| 1:08.3 | when you're commuting to work on a familiar path, when you're taking a road trip, |
| 1:14.7 | when you're navigating a new city for the first time. This was all the subject of a recent story |
| 1:19.9 | on Quanta by our biology staff writer Yasmin Saplocolu called How Animals Build a Sense of |
| 1:26.2 | Direction. And she's here with us to talk about it. |
| 1:28.8 | Welcome back to the show, Yasmin. Thanks for having me. So Yasmin, what's the big idea? |
| 1:34.9 | The big idea is that animals have a sense of direction and know how to navigate their environments. |
| 1:41.3 | But this has mostly been studied in lab environments. So how do they do |
| 1:47.1 | it out in the wild where they're actually living? Which applies to us, right? We're all animals. |
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