[BlindTlk] FW: [GTTsupport] Ditch the GPS. It’s ruining your brain.

Tue Jun 18 21:34:56 UTC 2019

She is forwarding them.

--- blindtlk at nfbnet.org wrote:

From: Pamela Dominguez via BlindTlk <blindtlk at nfbnet.org>
To: "Blind Talk Mailing List" <blindtlk at nfbnet.org>
Cc: Pamela Dominguez <pammygirl99 at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [BlindTlk] 	FW: [GTTsupport] Ditch the GPS. It’s ruining your brain.
Date: Tue, 18 Jun 2019 15:56:00 -0400

Are you forwarding these?  Or responding to them?  If you are responding to 
them, then you are bottom posting.  Pam.

-----Original Message----- 
From: Madison Martin via BlindTlk
Sent: Monday, June 17, 2019 6:55 PM
To: 'Blind Talk Mailing List'
Cc: Madison Martin
Subject: [BlindTlk] FW: [GTTsupport] Ditch the GPS. It’s ruining your brain.

-----Original Message-----
From: GTTsupport at groups.io [mailto:GTTsupport at groups.io] On Behalf Of Albert 
Ruel
Sent: June-17-19 10:28 AM
To: GTTsupport at groups.io
Subject: [GTTsupport] Ditch the GPS. It’s ruining your brain.

Ditch the GPS. It’s ruining your brain.
Author:
Date Written:
Date Saved: 6/17/19, 8:27 AM
Source: 
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ditch-the-gps-its-ruining-your-brain/2019/06/05/29a3170e-87af-11e9-98c1-e945ae5db8fb_story.html?noredirect=on

(Washington Post illustration/images by iStock) June 5 M.R. O’Connor is a 
journalist who writes about science, technology and ethics, and is the 
author, most recently, of “Wayfinding: The Science and Mystery of How Humans 
Navigate the World.”
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 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.
In a study 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 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 famously have 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 disorder and Alzheimer’s 
disease. Stress and depression have been shown to dampen neurogenesis — the 
growth of new neurons — in the hippocampal circuit.
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 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 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 rote memorization or typewriting. 
But for them especially, independent navigation and the freedom to explore 
are vital to acquiring spatial knowledge that may improve hippocampal 
function. Turning off the GPS and teaching them navigational skills could 
have enormous cognitive benefits later in life.
There are other compelling reasons outside of neuroscience to consider 
forgoing the GPS.

Over the past four years, I’ve spoken with master navigators from different 
cultures who showed me that practicing navigation is a powerful form of 
engagement with the environment that can inspire a greater sense of 
stewardship. Finding our way on our own — using perception, empirical 
observation and problem-solving skills — forces us to attune ourselves to 
the world. And by turning our attention to the physical landscape that 
sustains and connects us, we can nourish “topophilia,” a sense of attachment 
and love for place. You’ll never get that from waiting for a satellite to 
tell you how to find a shortcut.
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Thx, Albert

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