How are people, infrastructure and economic activity organised and interrelated? It is an intractable problem with ever-changing infinite factors of history, geography, economy and culture playing their part.

Many of us know the feeling of standing in front of a subway map in a strange city, baffled by the multi-coloured web staring back at us and seemingly unable to plot a route from point A to point B. Now, a team of physicists and mathematicians has attempted to quantify this confusion and find out whether there is a point at which navigating a route through a complex urban transport system exceeds our cognitive limits.