I'm the absolute opposite way. One of the stories my parents usually like to tell is when I was like 5 we were in unfamiliar city, they got lost and could not find the car for over an hour ignoring me, and when they finally listened to me I've managed to get them back to the car in 5 minutes. I can easily recollect how to get from points A to B in cities I've been once 5 years ago.
I'm like you - my mum and her sister were both infamously bad at navigation, and family stories tell how they got lost driving home from the city centre. Eventually they paid attention to two-year old me standing up in the back seat (this was before cars had seat belts in the back) saying "it's that way!". Apparently I navigated them all the way home across the city at the age of two. Now I don't know how much this was exaggerated, but as long as I can remember, I've always had near-perfect navigational skills while my mum is hopeless, so there's probably some truth to it.
Given my mum was so bad, even when I was very small, my parents would give me the map to navigate from the back seat whenever we went anywhere new. My father would usually drive, and he was a good navigator so may not have needed me, but sometimes my mother would drive. Either way, I would navigate across the country. I don't know how young I was when we started this, but probably about seven. I always loved maps.
Only when I was an adult did I discover that different people thought about navigation in different ways. Most people, it seems, navigate by waypoints. "Turn left at the Red Lion pub" and so on. Some people, including me, can navigate by absolute directions - "go north east, then west" and so on, and actually think this way. If you ask me which way is north, in the daytime I'm pretty much perfect, no matter the weather. At night or indoors, I'm good, but sometimes can be a bit off - maybe up to 45 degrees. Not sure exactly what I'm picking up from outdoors, even when it's cloudy, but I know I'm completely reversed if I visit Australia, so likely something to do with polarised light.
So is it learned? Sure, I got a huge amount of practice when I was young in pre-GPS days. But I could do it at the age of two, so probably there was some capability there from the start. Now I'm in my fifties and use GPS everywhere, mostly for traffic guidance. But I do feel I'm not as good at raw navigation as I used to be. But in the 1980s when I was first driving long distance, I'd stare at a map for a few minutes, and then drive 200 miles across England without needing to look at a map again. For those from the US, in England, 200 miles is long way and a lot of junctions! Not sure I could do that these days, so maybe it is practice. Or maybe I'm just getting old.
I have a map in my head of all the roads I've ever been down. Adding to it is a treat, I love adding new roads to it.
The limits are that I don't remember all the hundreds of Craigslist pickups I've done.
Also, I navigate by always knowing which way the CN tower is relative to my current location, I live within 100kms of it. If we go on vacation the reference location switches to wherever we're staying.
