When the reality tells me the "feeling" is wrong

I was on the north-bound train almost approaching my destination; an idea suddenly came to my mind, why did I feel the train is heading to a different direction at this time comparing to the time when I was aboard.

There is no doubt that the train is driving to North; otherwise, I may never get back home. Having this assumption in mind that the train is right, I began recalling the scenario in which I got aboard from Adam/Wabash. This does not sound like a very difficult task; however, here are a few things making it more complicated than expected:
 

1. The stop where I departed is underground, thus there are a few clues for me to get a sense where the train is going. In other words, the sort of survey knowledge I established before cannot take effect here, at least for me; 
2. The entry of a particular station: specifically, for those stations with centered platform, there are typically two entries located on two sides. If a passenger going North enter from the north gate,  since there are two floors, she or he need to turn around to catch the Northbound train once reaching the platform, vice versus;  
3. The seats are placed towards to two directions. One is with where the training is driving to, while the other is the opposite. Having said that, there could be another couple of mental rotations to carry out;
4. The train's door opening at either sides depending on the design of station platform.

When the first factor is relatively independent, another three in fact has certain interactions. Imaging you are heading to North: you firstly enter the station from the South gate, which means that you don’t have to turn around; fortunately, when the trains arrives, after boarding from the right-side door, you decide to use the seats on the right is following train’s direction, in this case, you  may feel less striving to recognize the direction. Nevertheless, if you get into the train through the left door and decide to sit on the left side where those seats are facing backward, it might add extra work for the agent in terms of figuring out where s/he is going to. If you start from an above-ground station, the puzzle could be even easier to resolve, because you have a number of visual clues to reference such as landmarks.

Having listed the possible noises preventing me from feeling right for the direction, I continue recalling each scene from the time to enter the station to board the train. Since I am more type of visual thinker, I enjoy playing back every single memory frame. The first challenge was presented because of the internal construction structure of the station, it is important in that the number of turns along with its direction co-determine my actual orientation in the world. I resolve this problem by putting myself in an imaginary blueprint of the station, and re-experiencing the journey virtually in head. Then the second challenge follows because I have to map the spatial relationship between my seat and the door from which I got in. Please be aware each cart has two doors on one side, which means that if I sit closer to the door where I boarded, it will be easier; but if I choose a seat that is further away, or if I don’t remember which door I entered, it would be another story.

Finally, I got the “feeling” corrected by reasoning the spatial relationships among each object that I am able to recall. Further, playing back the scenario is helpful in terms of structuring the space I was in before. A big question here is that: why did I lose the feeling of direction in the first place? I mean when the train is operating underneath, the feeling is alright; yet once the train drives out of the tunnel, I became a little anxious since my intuition tells me that feeling is incorrect. I was also surprised by how many chunks of information and attention resources I have employed to get that feeling fixed, let alone the intensive computations occurring in my head. Every time I spare a little attention for other activities (e.g. talking to friends), I may need to restart the process again, because a sub-process generates so much data that needs to be temporarily stored in working memory for the next thread of computation(s).

(© 2012 Miaoqi Zhu)