Do our brains pay a price for GPS?

[alp227]

By Leon Neyfakh
Boston Globe: Sunday Ideas
August 18, 2013

When I moved to Boston in 2011, I took public transportation to work. A couple years later, a friend lent me his car while he was out of town, and for the first time in my life I became a guy who drove to the office. Parking in the employee lot came naturally enough; so did listening to “Morning Edition” and balancing my coffee in the cup-holder. Actually navigating the streets of Cambridge and Boston, however — that part was less intuitive.

So I did what any rational, 21st-century person would do in my situation: punched my work address into my smartphone and listened as a GPS-powered, step-by-step guide told me exactly what to do. Turn left in 300 feet, take the second exit out of the rotary, and so on. This I could handle. Before I knew it, my destination was on my right.

After a few days, I grew confident, and one morning decided to find my own way. But as I tried frantically to remember the GPS’s instructions, I realized that despite multiple trips to and from work, I had learned exactly nothing about the city’s geography. As I sat at a red light, I didn’t have the foggiest notion of where I was relative to where I’d come from — or, more importantly, where I was trying to go.

My first instinct was to turn the GPS back on so I could stop being lost. My second was to wonder what, exactly, its handy instructions had done to my mind. How could I have followed all those steps, and made all those turns, without retaining anything?

How GPS affects our natural ability to navigate is a question that has, in recent years, begun to attract the attention of researchers around the world. What they are finding suggests that my experience was not just one novice commuter’s blind spot: Instead, I was one of millions of people for whom technology is disrupting something the human brain is supposed to do well. When we use GPS, the research indicates, we remember less about the places we go, and put less work into generating our own internal picture of the world.

Often referred to as mental maps, these schematics tell us where things are in relation to each other and allow us to navigate among them. They are as powerful as they are mysterious, even to specialists who have devoted their careers to studying how they work. “They are very individual,” said Julia Frankenstein, a researcher at the Center for Cognitive Science at the University of Freiburg in Germany. “The things which matter to you might be completely different to those that matter to your wife or your children.”

full: http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2013/08/17/our-brains-pay-price-for-gps/d2Tnvo4hiWjuybid5UhQVO/story.html

[soryang]

1. Pilots and truck drivers rely on GPS everyday

Does it do something to their minds?

[Rozlee]

8. My husband was a pilot. Jet fighter in the military.

For what it's worth, he was recently diagnosed with dementia at age 72.

[Mojorabbit]

14. .

[bemildred]

19. Hang in there, he needs you now.

[Populist_Prole]

10. The ability to dead-reckon navigate VFR is the sign of a good pilot

It's one of the basics. That IRS/GPS is very useful doesn't make knowing the basics any less so.

[enlightenment]

2. Use your head first

and tools after that.

There's nothing wrong with GPS, but when you rely on it - and only it - you're going to suffer the consequences.

Years and years ago - long before GPS (right after WWII) my dad was adding pilot to the three ratings he already had in the AAF, soon to be AF. He'd been training at Kelly Field and had soloed a number of times when he was told to report to the field to ferry a bigwig to Wright Patterson in Ohio - a distance of about 1200 miles or so, I guess.

Said bigwig was a multi-starred general, a veteran pilot of WWI and II. He climbed aboard the plane and told my dad he'd fly co-pilot. Dad pulled out his maps and flight computer (the manual kind, of course) and started to plot his course. The general told him, "son - put that down. You're going to fly by the seat of your pants."

Dad hadn't been trained to do that over any distance, but he dutifully took off, flying by visual reference, with the general pointing out landmarks along the way. Obviously, they got there in one piece - and back to Texas the same way. Dad flew for another 30 years in the AF and didn't have much call if any to fly that way again, but the lesson stuck because he realized how important it is to know what's around you - and below you - as much as you possibly can.

Technology is great, but nature gave us a pretty impressive piece of equipment right between our ears. We should use that, too.

[mgc1961]

7. +1

[Gormy Cuss]

22. After the recent SFO crash, new rules were put in place for foreign pilots

because the go-around rate for same has been high ever since the glide-slope system was shut down as part of other construction. The consensus was that some foreign pilots weren't skilled enough in visual approaches. The pilots are being told to use a secondary GPS system to make their approaches until the glide-slope system goes back online. Foreign carriers also can't land in parallel with other aircraft on 28L and 28R.

So it seems that for some foreign pilots, relying on instruments has made them "dumber."

[drm604]

3. As a counterexample...

When I begin working at a new office, I'll use GPS for the first week or two. After that I know the way, turn it off, and have no problem. Maybe the author of that article should just have used it a few days longer. It always takes some time to learn a new route whether you have GPS or not. For me, GPS makes that learning easier, not harder.

[bemildred]

4. GPS is lousy at route finding around town. Out in the open, it's OK.

It does not, in general, give you the best route, it gives you a route.
It can be handy to find out where you are, like out in the woods.
I never use it (but I used to write UTM mapping programs ...)

[SunSeeker]

15. Yup, GPS blows when trying to get around L.A. traffic. nt

[bemildred]

18. Ah, someone who knows. nt

[Curmudgeoness]

5. That part about mental maps being individual

is so true, but I have noticed it is more about male/female brains. When I get directions from a female, I usually get landmarks....turn right at the Shell gas station, go to the second light, etc. But males usually tell me to go west on Route 62 to Route 433, turn right, etc.

I have never used a GPS, so I cannot comment on whether it substitutes for my learning the route or not. I do know that if I am the driver to a new place, I can remember how to get there, but if I am a passenger, I learn nothing. Maybe with GPS, we react more like the passenger.

[Ilsa]

27. Same here. I have to be driving to remember

the route. Performing the exiting and turning tasks provides both mental and muscle memory, I think.

[Atman]

6. I learned to drive on the streets of Boston.

Storrow Drive is a crazy place to unleash a 16 year old! (It was the 70's). Now our son lives in Cambridge, and last time we visited my wife drove. She insisted on using the Garmin. She never believed me when I told her to ignore it! It took us an extra fifteen minutes just to get from the Watertown/Cambridge town line to Harvard Square, just because she didn't believe I had better recollection of the city I grew up in than the computer on the dashboard! It truly dumbs us down...swallows still find their way home to Capistrano. We fought about what should have been a ten minute trip down Albany Avenue.

[SheilaT]

9. Some years back my husband got a GPS

unit for his car, after a business trip to California and a rental car that had one. I can certainly see the utility of a GPS when driving in an unfamiliar area that you're not likely to be returning to.

But after a couple of months he was using it when driving to places he already knew very well. I found that weird.

The next year my brother bought me a GPS for Christmas and I found it spectacularly unhelpful. Especially when I was going to drive from the Kansas City area to Tulsa, and it insisted I should go via Wichita. And I could never get the GPS to remove those instructions. It was convinced that I needed to make that trip and wouldn't give up on it. So I gave the GPS away, can't even remember who to.

I have not broken myself of my habit of looking at maps before I set out on a trip, and perhaps writing brief instructions to myself, such as: take Highway 10 to exit 450. Or a series of road names or numbers to get me to my destination. Works for me.

[Populist_Prole]

11. It does tend to make one geographically duller witted

I disagree with the above poster about GPS's open vs urban merits. Out in the open one can use geographical cues of the landforms in conjunction with sunlight ( if available ) and basic navigational horse sense. One is often denied this in large urban areas where one can't see the lay of the land much further than the next block. Here a GPS can be helpful., but I digress:

I too have noticed a tendency for people over time to use a GPS even when they know damned well the route. One of my friends is pathetic. I laugh at relatives who "need" them yet ignore the directions given because they don't want to take a particular road for this reason or that. I just visited one in S. Florida and though it was the first time I was ever there I found navigating a snap since roads ran in north-south / east-west grids and the place was so freaking flat. We were ready to return to their home from a coastal attraction and they couldn't go before they fiddled with their TomTom. I was like "Jesus Christ, just head west, AWAY from the ocean till you hit the first north-south road after crossing the intercoastal waterway, turn right and keep going till you hit XYZ boulevard, make a left and your house is right off there!". It was completely above their heads. I didn't know whether to feel sorry or contempt.

[starroute]

12. Before I learned to drive, I had very limited mental maps

My maps included the places I could walk to, or take public transportation, but everything else was a blur. It was only after I started driving that I got a decent sense of where everything was.

So GPS may be reducing us to childlike dependency in some ways -- but I don't think they're permanently ruining our brains. The skills are still there whenever we decide to tap into them.

[bananas]

13. They said the same thing when the printing press was invented. nt

[Populist_Prole]

17. Strawman argument n/t

[ConcernedCanuk]

16. GPS is part of our system now, gotta get used to it.

.
.
.

As a recent and first-time land owner, I only have a slight clue as to where the borders are of my property.

Survey is less than a year old, but this is 28 acres, and was done by GPS from co-ordinates punched into a gps.

Used to be property lines were "blazed" (thats putting a scar on a tree) or literally cut through the bush,

so the surveyor's transit (binoculars sort of) could see through the bush.

Now I'm going to have to pay the surveyor to walk me around my property,

and have my own gps for the future to make certain that whatever I do is on my own property.

However, I won't need the gps to get to town or the grocery store . . .



CC

[JayhawkSD]

20. I lived in Atlanta when the Flames were there...

...and I love hockey. I took my girlfriend to quite a few games. If you don't know Atlanta, it is a navigation nightmare. No two streets meet at right angles, often three streets make a six-way intersection, and 35 major streets are named "Peachtree" something. But I never had any trouble finding my way around, for some reason, and I never had trouble getting to the Omni, which is downtown and is where the Flames played.

When we got there one time my girfriend commented that I was amzing. I said that I knew that and asked why she was commenting on it. She said, "Well, I didn't know there were seven different routes to get to the Omni."

[LongTomH]

21. It can be incredibly useful; but, I don't use it every time

Kansas City can be difficult to navigate in; I use GPS when I'm in an area I'm not familiar with.

I think it can be like any technology: useful, if you don't overuse it!

[jeffrey_pdx]

23. I've noticed the same thing with phone numbers

In high school (the mid 90's) before everyone had cell phones, I knew all my friends phone numbers by heart. Now I couldn't even tell you my dad's or brothers' phone number. I do know my mom's just because its been the same since before I had a cell phone.

[Curmudgeoness]

30. So true.

Sounds like we are going to lose our ability to use our memories. Well, unless we do what the experts warn us to do and have different passwords for all functions we use passwords to access. And since we now need passwords for every freaking thing we do, that will keep our memories keen.

[JoeyT]

24. Having fought a map in

Atlanta, L.A., New Orleans, etc back in the day, I think I'll keep my GPS.

It's much easier for me to learn a route with a GPS giving it to me than it is when I have to keep backtracking because the map was out of date or the print too small to read.

[Demeter]

25. Blame Boston, not your GPS

I swear, if you weren't born there, you have no chance of navigating the streets.

The lack of street signs really doesn't help, nor the tendency to post directions to "Government Center" with no inclusion of a street name....

[mucifer]

26. I have done home nursing since the 90s. I know Chicago really well.

My memory isn't good. Chicago has a grid system that I have memorized much of. I refuse to use a GPS unless I'm really lost. If I am going somewhere in Chicago where I forgot exactly where the street is, I have a small street numbers book. The book tells me how far north, south, east or west the street is. I might have to navigate one way streets or road construction. Other than that it works great. Sometimes in the suburbs that don't have the grid I use maps. If I get desperate (which is very rare) I will pull out my cell phone and use an app to find my way.

I really feel I need to use my brain for driving. I was reading a book about Abraham Lincoln and how much memorizing people did back then and I really think now our brains get lazy. I do lots of really bad stuff to my brain. I don't sleep well. I watch too much tv. I'm on the internet too much skimming articles. I don't read many books. I have lots of bad habits. I think driving using the grid is one good habit.

[unblock]

28. for similar reasons, a long time ago, i stopped taking notes.

i learned that when i wrote something down, i couldn't remember it on the test. the act of writing, for me, was the act of forgetting, because as soon as i wrote it down, i knew i didn't need to remember it, because there it was, safely stored on paper. my notebook served as my memory. works great, except at test time.

when i mustered up the courage to "go commando" and stop taking notes altogether, i found that i remembered everything i needed to. yes, on the odd occasion, there would be a series of dates or figures or whatever that i couldn't possibly remember, but i remembered the context and the point, and remembered enough to know where i could find those numbers if i needed them.

i did better on tests after that.


as for gps, yes, i find it difficult to find my way without it even after doing it multiple times. same goes for being in the passenger seat. i find i have to drive it myself, solo, without gps, and risk getting lost before i can "know" the route.

i think this is because my "mental map" is saying "turn left when gps says 'turn left'", which isn't helpful when gps isn't working....

[mainer]

29. London cabbies have bigger brains

well, hippocampi anyway, because they're expected to know their way around town. Unfortunately, a lot of them are now relying on GPS. So I guess their brains will shrink.

http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2013/05/29/the-bigger-brains-of-london-taxi-drivers/