[avar]

    > I don't know if there is any research into [needing to
    > reorient maps when driving].

There is! One thing it's highly correlated with is whether you're either a heterosexual woman, or a homosexual man.

There's a really good description of this and other brain attributes correlated with gender or male homosexuality in the BBC show "The Making of Me - John Barrowman". This specific part starts around 6m30s in: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6a063_the-making-of-me-joh...

Here's an article about it in New Scientist, "Gay men read maps like women": https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7069-gay-men-read-map...

That's not to suggest that you're either a homosexual man or a heterosexual woman based on this datapoint alone. There's of course plenty of people who don't fall into those groups who prefer to read maps that way, just to answer your question about whether there's research about it. Yeah, there's at least some research showing that spatial recognition is indicative of gender & sexual orientation.

[DigitalJack]

I'm an exception. Terrible sense of direction... My sister in law is an exception too. I swear she had a virtual map in her head that was always perfectly oriented.

I actually prefer having a GPS map north up, so that I can train my brain to have a non-relative mental map so that once I orient myself to the compass I can figure out where to go.

As it is, my mental map bears little resemblance to reality.

[jansenv]

This is extremely fascinating! It seems like an almost un-pc fact.