Do ‘places of the soul’ really exist?
From the Ngorongoro to the genius loci, from monarch butterflies to GPS neurons, from Maylis de Kerangal to Ece Temelkuran: a reflection on the joy of simply calling ourselves ‘earthlings’
Anyone climbing towards the ridge of Ngorongoro, in northern Tanzania, will find that when they reach the top, what opens up before them is not a valley, but a vast caldera – perfectly defined and intact – the largest of the complete calderas found on the mainland. Standing there, you can make out elephants and rhinos dotting the plain at the bottom of the crater, and a lake with a pinkish rim, coloured thus by the backs of thousands of pink flamingos as they probe the shallow waters with their curved beaks. If you sleep at the campsite on the edge of the slope, you can hear the elephants climbing up the slopes at night and moving amongst the tents; in the distance, the sounds of the wildlife inhabiting the rich ecosystem nestled within what remains of the extinct volcano.
If there is one place where I have ever felt I belong, it is this plateau in central-eastern Africa. The Olduvai Gorge, to the north-west – also known as the cradle of humanity or the valley of the dawn of man (and woman...), because traces of almost every stage of human evolution have been found in various rock strata – and further still, the Serengeti National Park, with its vast savannah that turns crimson every year when millions of wildebeest gather there, accompanied by zebras. A savannah dotted with acacia trees and tall grasses, beyond which, perhaps, our ancestors first began to stand on two legs.
Is my sense of belonging a matter of choice, or a sort of ‘genetic memory’ of our truest origins? Do we truly belong to a place? Every four generations, hundreds of millions of monarch butterflies leave North America, travelling as far as 4,500 kilometres, to spend the winter in Mexico, all gathering in the same areas – which cover no more than a few square kilometres – and which are completely blanketed in orange wings.
Why they all end up there remains unclear, even though for several years now many researchers have been trying to understand the mechanisms that make this spectacular migration possible: how do they manage to find their way (using the sun, by comparing its position with that measured by their internal circadian clock? Using the Earth’s magnetic field? Through the polarisation of light? Various hypotheses backed by evidence have emerged in recent times), how they recognise places they have never been to before (it takes 3–5 generations to complete the entire journey), and why they go to certain – very few – places and not to others. Is it written in their genes? And how does a biological map work?
Ours appear to be made up of ‘place cells’, the main class of neurons in the hippocampus, discovered by John O’Keefe. For this discovery, in 2014, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine alongside Edvard and May-Britt Moser, who, in turn, identified the ‘grid cells’ – nicknamed, along with the ‘boundary cells’, ‘GPS neurons’: together, they are thought to constitute our brain’s positioning system. Some studies also suggest that if they fail to function, episodic and autobiographical memory is also lost. We forget what happened in those places, as if those places embodied our very memory itself
