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Medicine Transportation

Is Our Reliance on GPS Shrinking Our Brains? (heraldnews.com) 121

Posted by EditorDavid from the bad-directions dept.
"Neuroscientists can now see that brain behavior changes when people rely on turn-by-turn directions," says science writer M.R. O'Connor, citing a study of personal GPS devices co-authored by Kent-based cognitive neuroscience researcher Amir-Homayoun Javadi: What isn't known is the effect of GPS use on hippocampal function when employed daily over long periods of time. 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, and after that, most people slowly stop using spatial memory strategies to find their way, relying on habit instead. But neuroscientist Veronique 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 be protective against Alzheimer's disease," Bohbot told me in an email.
This piece originally appeared in the Washington Post's opinion section -- under the headline "Ditch the GPS. It's Ruining Your Brain."
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Is Our Reliance on GPS Shrinking Our Brains? More

Is Our Reliance on GPS Shrinking Our Brains?

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  • it's better then the big local map books they used have.

    • We wouldn't even need maps if American city planners and subdivision developers had used proper grids of roads instead of incomprehensible winding spaghetti road systems with overly generic road names.

      Navigation is damn easy in a place like Manhattan, where it has a grid of numbered roads. In Manhattan you only use a map to figure out where something is on the grid relative to where you are. It's not used to figure out the roads to take.

      • Wat? That is exactly the wrong way around! (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Grids are really the worst possible way to design a city.

        Not only won't you have any kind of real city centers. It will also be harder to tell where you are, since it's all just grids. And it will even be bad for cars, as they have to drive zig-zags like idiots half the time.

        And, don't US cities already consist mostly of grids?

        No, what you need is a fractal hub and spoke system.
        One main center with roads leading towards it, and several ring roads around it. Then when the city gets too big, some outer parts

        • Aside from Manhattan and the pre-1930s parts of larger cities, which are quite tiny, American cities are mostly spaghetti suburbs.

          There is one planned American city like you describe: Washington DC. It is built around a spoke model, and is notorious for its terrible traffic. It's usually worse than Manhattan traffic, despite Manhattan supporting far more people in a much smaller physical area.

          Grids are the way to go.

          • As I said: For *humans*. Not cars. (Score:1)

            by Anonymous Coward

            You forgot to build proper public transport! Where's your public transport?!

            No, not that sorry excuse there.
            Clean trams and stations. A tram station every 500m/1500ft, a bus stop every 250m/750ft, a tram every 5 minutes, or 15 in low traffic areas/hours. And a bus every 15 minutes too. Easy, covenient, and cheap due to *proper* financing, by stopping all the tax cuts for car manufacturers and the industry around it, which will be enough for free fares, and hanging their CEOs and boards from the traffic ligh

        • Hub & Spoke? NO. HECK NO. Dallas is like this--and it has some of the worst traffic jams I've been in. And you stop at *every* traffic light. NO.

      • grid based roads probably shrink your brain too.

    • I had one of those for the cities and towns around the Boston area, back in the late '90s and early 2000s. The lack of street signs for which the Boston area was notorious at the time made it less than useful.

    • no it isn't (Score:5, Insightful)

      by DogDude ( 805747 ) on Saturday June 08, 2019 @10:18AM (#58730640)
      No, it isn't better than the "big local map books". The "big local map books" were cheap, required no internet connection, did not track everywhere you went, and could be looked at once before a trip, and then tossed in the back seat.

      • Until you got lost and then had to find somewhere to pull over and then had to try and figure out what street you were on. It was also very easy to miss your turning as the street name signs are hard to see until you're practically on top of them.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Kjella ( 173770 )

        No, it isn't better than the "big local map books". The "big local map books" were cheap, required no internet connection, did not track everywhere you went, and could be looked at once before a trip, and then tossed in the back seat.

        And constantly getting outdated, I consider them a relic like the phone directory. Even in the most paranoid of settings I'd search for the best route via TorBrowser and print it out for that specific need unless I was running a taxi or delivery service and constantly looking at maps. Bonus paranoia points if you search for a route from your neighbor's house rather than your own.

      • No, it isn't better than the "big local map books". The "big local map books" were cheap, required no internet connection, did not track everywhere you went, and could be looked at once before a trip, and then tossed in the back seat.

        You must have quite the memory that you can say - plan a cross country trip, look at the map exactly once, then go direct from door to door.

        I personally use both GPS and large maps. To me, that only makes sense., as the screen doesn't convey large scale routing - like say a 2000 mile trip.

        But my paper maps don't give me time to end of trip, or road construction or traffic snarling for traffic or instant re-routing to avoid the snarl.

        The GPS guidance is kind of like the Trip-tiks that one can get at A

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • you spew romantic bullshit. no, the maps "could not be looked at once" and driving with one of those things spread across the front passenger area is a hazard. they become near useless with areas that don't have signs for all streets nor address numbers on buildings. And nothing like having a ten year old map that doesn't have current construction nor new things on it...

        GPS is superior in every way

        use your big local map for kindling, it does poorly for anything else

      • required no internet connection, did not track everywhere you went, and could be looked at once before a trip, and then tossed in the back seat.

        Literally all of that applies to GPS units as well.

    • Re:it's better then the big local map books they u (Score:5, Interesting)

      by unixisc ( 2429386 ) on Saturday June 08, 2019 @11:29AM (#58730890)

      Before GPS, when I lived first in LA and then in the Bay Area, I used to use AAA maps. Those were pretty handy: I'd check out in advance where I needed to go, and followed it accordingly. I knew quite a number of cities like the back of my hand, having driven extensively in those places.

      I got my first car w/ built in GPS 4 years ago, and it has been really useful in Charlotte, Atlanta and now Northern Virginia. Since roads on the East coast are less gridlike than on the West, this has been useful, particularly while I changed cities: I'm not sure that it would have been easy following maps. My only complaint is any map upgrade on the car is overpriced at $500, which is stupid given that the newer cars have automatic connection modes to Car Play or Android Auto.

  • It is (Score:4, Insightful)

    by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Saturday June 08, 2019 @09:43AM (#58730532)

    The place that used to be a home for Spacial Cognition has gone the way of the slide-rule, knowing log-tables by heart and the Dodo.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by ilguido ( 1704434 )
      My hippocampus was trained and strengthened by the The Eye of the Beholder, Realms of Arkania and a list of other good old dungeon crawlers for which I was too lazy to draw maps.
      Besides that, I hate GPS navigators: usually I just memorize the route on Google Maps and that's all.

      • "My hippocampus was trained and strengthened by the The Eye of the Beholder, Realms of Arkania and a list of other good old dungeon crawlers for which I was too lazy to draw maps. "

        Funny that you mention this. I noticed lately, that I have problems to find my way in the caves of Assassin's Creed Odysee, I completely gave up entering fortresses that way, because I always end up outside again where I got in.

        Could I have fried my Spatial Cognition with my GPS use?

    • shrinking our brains?

      Read our story now to find out as yours shrinks too!

    • The place that used to be a home for Spacial Cognition has gone the way of the slide-rule, knowing log-tables by heart and the Dodo.

      Oh, I've been swerved OT here. But I really sucked at any sort of math, and then I was introduced to the slide rule. Something just clicked, and my grades went up by a lot.

      But why do you think dildos are outdated?

    • I note that with all this space freed up we're going to have room to build some nice AI neural networks bigger than an amazon instance. Either that or we atrophy to the point of becoming Trumpanzies.

  • Does shell autocompletion do the same? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Does Unix shell autocompletion also make people stupider?

  • Repeated Historical Fake News. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gurps_npc ( 621217 ) on Saturday June 08, 2019 @09:48AM (#58730546) Homepage

    They said the same thing about:

    1) Reading (Don't need to remember anything - you can write it down.)

    2) Radio (People don't read anymore)

    3) TV (People don't talk to each other)

    And about 20 other innovations. Hell, I am pretty sure the people that invented metal weapons got yelled at because people stopped needing to personally flintknap rocks into blades.

    Human brains accommodate to the things we need. When we no longer need to learn something, it frees our brains up to learn new things - such as computer programming.

    I assure you the new things will teach us different skills.

    • > Human brains accommodate to the things we need. When we no longer need to learn something, it frees our brains up to learn new things - such as computer programming.

      Yep.

      > They said the same thing about:
      > TV (People don't talk to each other)

      Well TV may have made us stupider. In one survey a few years ago when people were asked where they got their news, the number one answer was a comedian, Jon Stewart.

    • Hell, I am pretty sure the people that invented metal weapons got yelled at because people stopped needing to personally flintknap rocks into blades.

      While your overall point is valid, I'm pretty sure that division of labor dates back to the stone age, at least the neolithic. Few people were chipping stone :)

      • I will admit that my extensive search for written records of that time for some reason failed to find any real evidence :D, so you might very well be totally correct.

        But think back to that time. There wasn't that much to learn and hunter gathers had a ton of leisure time. (http://rewild.com/in-depth/leisure.html). I bet most people at least learned the basics of flint-knapping as a child. Probably similar to driving - an essential skill that almost everyone learned even if many take public transportation

    • On the other hand: we've got people wandering around staring at their smartphone or tablet screens obsessively to the point that they literally run into stationary objects, people who don't have basic knowledge of things that used to be taken for granted everyone would learn, people who are what I'll term 'digital hermits', because they use so-called 'social media' and rarely if ever interact with live people in person, kids growing up to have 'social anxiety disorders' because their digital devices gave th
  • If using GPS shrinks your brain, makes you stupider and more compliant, imagine what self-driving cars will do! Elon wants a world of imbecilic automatons to do his bidding! UNMASKED!
  • Washington Post at least cited the study of London Taxi drivers done almost 20 years ago.

  • I mean, this headline was obviously coming the moment they decided to 'crack down' on bad stuff. I wonder if people with enough technical wisdom even exist at tech companies anymore to ever prevent stuff like this from happening. You'd have to be pretty myopic not to know your dragnet was going to unintentionally snag a hell of a lot of innocent collateral. Is it just me, or is our collective ability to do anything technically becoming worse over time rather than better?

  • Yeah (Score:2)

    by Dunbal ( 464142 ) *
    Speak for yourself - old age is shrinking mine.

  • Isn't the whole point of having a device in your hand to help make your life easier? This includes the bacteria munching on your food to make energy, its tiring. Of course our brains are going to be smaller for just about any type of thinking replaced by the devices. I'm sure the areas that control thumb and finger movements though will be grande.

    --
    Live neither in the past nor in the future, but let each day's work absorb your entire energies, and satisfy your widest ambition. - Sir William Osler

    • Isn't the whole point of having a device in your hand to help make your life easier?

      Exactly.

      Also, my personal experience runs counter to the headline. I tend to use tools like Waze mostly to find optimal routes to places due to traffic... work (I mostly take transit but occasionally drive), particular stores, some friends’ vacation house. In each of those situations, I’ve found that I still learn the various alternate routes after two or three trips and can subsequently drive them without guidance (I like to test that).

      Of course, I’m one of those crazy people who tries to

  • Idiots already idiots. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Carrot007 ( 37198 ) on Saturday June 08, 2019 @11:26AM (#58730878)

    The sort of peron who blindly follows GPS as it takes them off a cliff is not the sort of person who had a brain anyway.

    I use Google maps 95% of the time while driving. It knows the areas of issue and can often suggest a better route.

    However I am also not afriad to ignore it and do what I want if I feel the need.

    Idiots nearly missing junctions and doing stupid dangerous things would have done the same if someone was reading a map next to them.

    • Idiots nearly missing junctions and doing stupid dangerous things would have done the same if someone was reading a map next to them.

      No, they wouldn't. The simple act of writing down the instructions/map ahead of time means the driver has already rehearsed them once. Modern driving apps are specifically designed, for some reason, to only tell you the very next direction, and then only when you have barely enough time to make said turn/merge.

  • I've always been a paper map person (Score:5, Interesting)

    by spywhere ( 824072 ) on Saturday June 08, 2019 @11:35AM (#58730910)
    When I was about four years old (1965?), I stood in the back seat of the Dodge and watched my father figure out how to get to Maine on a paper map. I remember thinking, "I'm going to have to do that when I grow up... this looks important."
    After that day, in school and out, I was interested in maps. As soon as I started driving, I would take my battered Saab 96 anywhere the roads led: Provincetown, Tucson, wherever. Later in life, I drove deliveries, and spent a few years driving a taxi. I was known for my ability to get to places much more quickly than expected, only partly because of my heavy right foot. In Moscow, I had the translator tell the cabdriver he was turning the wrong way; I didn't need translating to know his answer was... not polite, but he was suitably apologetic when I was proven right.

    That's why there's a 2019 Rand McNally road atlas in my Charger Pursuit. GPS is fine, if you take it as advice instead of instruction. Google Maps can recommend one or three different routes, but it takes experience and "navigation aptitude" to know the best way to get there...

  • ... smartphone navigation for 2 weeks or so, just to get my navigator skills back or at least test how much they have degenerated. It probably wouldn't take look to get then back, but I expect it would take some effort.

  • There are plenty of other things you can do to give your brain a workout. Games like bridge or chess are great for that. Watching TV not so much.

  • Before written language was invented, people had to memorize everything. During the civil war, union officers were amazed at how good the memory of former slaves turned spies who weren't taught to read or write was. There are plenty of stories of cultures without written language having some surprisingly accurate oral histories. If you don't have to memorize everything but instead can write stuff down then your brain shrinks in some ways. So clearly we should stop reading and writing then!

  • The negative effects of offloading navigation to GPS systems is quite well documented, the best fix is to use that GPS to get to a spot where you can practice real navigation, at a difficulty level which is close to your (current) limit:

    I.e. take up orienteering! [orienteering.sport]

    This is THE perfect sport for many nerds, as it is usually individual start, zero spectators, and it involves both your brain and your body when you try to get from the start triangle, via a variable number of controls (all marked with RFID type tag

  • Just for the record, us Pokemon Go players know where EVERYTHING is by memory. That's because it's fastest and easier than looking up each time where a certain building or park is.

  • There's a place for both GPS and traditional maps (Score:3)

    by Kelerei ( 2619511 ) on Saturday June 08, 2019 @02:55PM (#58731834)

    ... at least, for me anyway.

    Back when I was growing up in the late 1980s/early 1990s, I had this precocious curiosity around navigation: my father was a civil engineer with the provincial Department of Public Works based out of Pietermaritzburg, and he'd often need to perform site inspections in far-off rural parts of the province, and often he'd take me (at the ages of 4-5, before I'd started primary school) along for the ride. I always wanted to know where on the road we were, where we were going, and how much further until we could stop for lunch (this was important at age 5!), and I'd "borrowed" (read: expropriated) the road maps from my father's study and taught myself what they meant and how to use them, but I could never read them in the car without getting violently carsick around 15 seconds later.

    Thus, I very quickly gained the ability to memorize the paper maps, and so whenever we were on the road, I would then know exactly where we were, which route we should take, how much further we should go, and where all the rest stops were. Totally from memory. I became good enough at this so that, by age 8, I had officially been promoted to family navigator on our road trip holidays.

    I'm now 34, moved from South Africa to New Zealand, and paper replaced digital (mostly: I still keep paper maps for a fallback) but I still navigate this way. When I need to navigate to somewhere new (and since I'm a fairly new immigrant, this currently happens a lot!), I'll pull out a map (be it paper or OpenStreetMaps) before I head off, look at where I need to go, and then apply this to my pre-existing knowledge of the area. This technique of mine still hasn't failed me.

    I do have a GPS application on my mobile device and will load it up, but for me, it's far more about OpenStreetMaps quality control (I'll observe what the GPS is doing and then use this to improve OSM quality on the route I've been along) and far less about navigation itself.

  • Here are similar claims from 2017 [newatlas.com] and from 2010 [medicalxpress.com], and now 2019.

  • The worst isn't a small hippocampus, it's when back-seat drivers fuck with your hippocampus. The GPS takes the arguing out of the equation and keeps your eyes and mind back on the road.

  • Stop traveling to cold places.

  • Does my brain have the world's maps and a GPS?

  • In fact, this research is nothing new. Our body lives with simple principles. If something comes for free, then there is no point in doing it yourself. We can see such a picture both on hormonal metabolism and brain activity. For this reason, I try to occupy my brain with mental work as often as possible. The easiest way to do this is with logic games: best online real money pokies [bovegas.com], chess and even making puzzles. Many games are available for smartphone use. This is the easiest way for an ordinary person to m

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