Ditch the GPS: Analyzing an Argument

From “Ditch the GPS. It’s ruining your brain.”

By M.R. O’Connor (The Washington Post, June 5, 2019)

It has become the most natural thing to do: get in the car, type a destination into a smartphone, and let an algorithm using

GPS data show the way. Personal GPS-equipped devices entered the mass market in only the past 15 or so years, but

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hundreds of millions of people now rarely travel without them. These gadgets are extremely powerful, allowing people to

know their location at all times, to explore unknown places and to avoid getting lost.

But they also affect perception and judgment. When people are told which way to turn, it relieves them of the need to

create their own routes and remember them. They pay less attention to their surroundings. And neuroscientists can now

see that brain behavior changes when people rely on turn-by-turn directions.

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In a study1 published in Nature Communications in 2017, researchers asked subjects to navigate a virtual simulation of

London’s Soho neighborhood and monitored their brain activity, specifically the hippocampus, which is integral to spatial

navigation. Those who were guided by directions showed less activity in this part of the brain than participants who

navigated without the device. “The hippocampus makes an internal map of the environment and this map becomes active

only when you are engaged in navigating and not using GPS,” Amir-Homayoun Javadi, one of the study’s authors, told

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me.

The hippocampus is crucial to many aspects of daily life. It allows us to orient in space and know where we are by

creating cognitive maps. It also allows us to recall events from the past, what is known as episodic memory. And,

remarkably, it is the part of the brain that neuroscientists believe gives us the ability to imagine ourselves in the future.

Studies have long shown the hippocampus is highly susceptible to experience. (London’s taxi drivers famously2 have

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greater gray-matter volume in the hippocampus as a consequence of memorizing the city’s labyrinthine streets.)

Meanwhile, atrophy in that part of the brain is linked to devastating conditions, including post-traumatic stress

disorder3 and Alzheimer’s disease.4 Stress and depression have been shown to dampen neurogenesis—the growth of new

neurons—in the hippocampal circuit.5

What isn’t known is the effect of GPS use on hippocampal function when employed daily over long periods of time.

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Javadi said the conclusions he draws from recent studies is that “when people use tools such as GPS, they tend to engage

less with navigation. Therefore, brain area responsible for navigation is less used, and consequently their brain areas

involved in navigation tend to shrink.”

How people navigate naturally changes with age. Navigation aptitude appears to peak around age 19,6 and after that, most

people slowly stop using spatial memory strategies to find their way, relying on habit instead. But neuroscientist

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Véronique Bohbot has found that using spatial-memory strategies for navigation correlates with increased gray matter in

the hippocampus at any age. She thinks that interventions focused on improving spatial memory by exercising the

hippocampus—paying attention to the spatial relationships of places in our environment—might help offset age-related

cognitive impairments or even neurodegenerative diseases.

“If we are paying attention to our environment, we are stimulating our hippocampus, and a bigger hippocampus seems to

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be protective against Alzheimer’s disease,” Bohbot told me in an email. “When we get lost, it activates the hippocampus,

it gets us completely out of the habit mode. Getting lost is good!” Done safely, getting lost could be a good thing.

Saturated with devices, children today might grow up to see navigation from memory or a paper map as anachronistic as