Hi, I'm Cody Gough.

And I'm Ashley Hamer.

We're from Curiosity.com, and we've got three stories to help you get smarter in just a few minutes.

Today we'll talk about how to improve your sense of direction, the surprising

truth about the Pied Piper, and how we named our planets. Let's satisfy some curiosity.

Cody, do you have a good sense of direction?

Depends on who you ask.

Well, a lot of times people think that your sense of direction is just innate,

but we wanted to know if you can actually improve your sense of direction.

What a sense of direction really is, is just a relationship between lots of different factors, including spatial awareness and accuracy of your mental map, and your ability to connect the things you see around you with their location in the world.

And Curiosity found that according to spatial thinking experts,

there are a few ways to improve your sense of direction.

First, try intentionally registering a visible landmark as an indication of direction.

So if you live in Santa Barbara, the mountains are always to the north and the Pacific Ocean is always to the west.

Just taking a minute to think about the landmarks that you can use to navigate and then using them will help a lot.

But if you can't see landmarks, then remember, the sun rises in the east and sets in the west.

So depending on the time of day, you can look where the sun is

and you can know which direction that is.

If it's cloudy and you're out in nature

and you're kind of lost in the woods,

you know, there's the old moss grows on the north side of the trees trick you

ever tried that Cody I didn't even know that yeah the old boy scouts and girl

...