Here’s a fascinating study on our perspective and how it came to be.

Imagine looking at the Earth from space. What is at the top of the planet? If you said the North Pole, you probably wouldn’t be alone. Strictly speaking, you wouldn’t be right either.

The uncomfortable truth is that despite almost everybody imagining that the world is this way up, there is no good, scientific reason to think of north as being the roof of the world.

The story of how it came to be considered to be that way is heady mix of history, astrophysics and psychology. And it leads to an important conclusion: it turns out that the way we have decided to map the world has very real consequences for how we feel about it.