Detecting direction: How Gurindji people draw on the earth’s magnetic field

Abstract

Like many First Nations languages, Gurindji expresses spatial relations according to cardinal directions, for example “put the flour north of the vegemite” or “there’s a fly on your west shoulder”. This attention to geocentric cues has cognitive effects that show that Gurindji people have an extraordinary mental map of the world anchored in the trajectory of the sun, but which is constantly in operation regardless of the time of day. One question is whether this unique attention to geocentric cues is reflected neurologically, i.e. whether Gurindji people have a hard-wired magneto-reception ability. Human neurophysiology has been shown to contain a geomagnetic sensory system. Small rotations in the magnetic field triggered drops in the brain’s EEG alpha-wave power. However, no participants were consciously aware of these magnetic field shifts. All participants tested spoke English, which uses a left/right system, with cardinal terms marginal in everyday speech. In this talk I report on results from recent collaborative work with Caltech and Karungkarni Art showing that some members of the Gurindji community are consciously aware of the geomagnetic field, a first in human behavioural and sensory research.

Bio

Felicity Meakins (FASSA, FAHA) is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Queensland and was a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language. She is a field linguist who specialises in the documentation of First Nations languages in northern Australia and the effect of English on these languages. She has  worked as a community linguist as well as an academic over the past 20 years, facilitating language revitalisation programs, consulting on Native Title claims and conducting research into First Nations languages. She has compiled a number of dictionaries and grammars, and has written numerous papers on language change in Australia.