interesting note from the NY Times

[+edscott]

October 19, 2009

Can GPS Help Your Brain Get Lost?

 

Today’s idea: Increasing reliance on global positioning systems could damage our own internal sense of direction and have other unforeseen effects on the brain, neurological research suggests.

Neuroscience: The brains of London cabbies have outsized rear hippocampuses, because they are required to painstakingly learn the byzantine lanes and byways of the Old World city. Not true for most of us — and especially not in the age of the GPS, writes Alex Hutchinson in the Canadian magazine The Walrus.

Hutchinson says that with the digital navigational tool well on its way to becoming standard in every car and on every cellphone, “experts are picking up some worrying signs” about brain atrophy “once we lose the habit of forming cognitive maps.” Research is showing people, their heads in abstract spatial realms, flummoxed finding their way around in the real world.

And Hutchinson points, with caveats, to a more troubling possible risk: dementia. He refers to the work of a McGill University researcher, Véronique Bohbot, and Jason Lerch, a researcher at the mouse imaging centre at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children:

Though the data can only be extrapolated so far, Lerch’s mouse studies suggest that human brains begin to reorganize very quickly in response to the way we use them. The implications of this concern Bohbot. She fears that overreliance on GPS … will result in our using the spatial capabilities of the hippocampus less, and that it will in turn get smaller. Other studies have tied atrophy of the hippocampus to increased risk of dementia. “We can only draw an inference,” Bohbot acknowledges. “But there’s a logical conclusion that people could increase their risk of atrophy if they stop paying attention to where they are and where they go.”

 

......Maybe we could all hire ourselves out as lab rats.

Edited November 13, 2009 by edscott

[GOF and Bacall]

And perhaps someone will use the brain cells that aren't busy finding a way to Wally World to contemplate a cure for cancer.

[+flask]

not if they can't find their way back to the lab, they won't.

[+Curioddity]

And perhaps someone will use the brain cells that aren't busy finding a way to Wally World to contemplate a cure for cancer.

Don't be silly. Cancer is far to lucrative to cure.

 

Pete

[GOF and Bacall]

OK folks, then perhaps the can do something truly difficult. Like find out once and for all how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop. I never did trust that darn old owl.

[+tozainamboku]

I believe there is something to that article. However we as geocachers don't have to worry. We may mindlessly follow the arrow to ground zero but once there our brains kick into high gear as we search for that cleverly hidden micro or try to pick out the well camouflaged container from its surroundings. Of course, if all we are finding are 35mm film cans in lampposts ... I forgot what I was going to say.

[+Ambrosia]

I do understand what there are saying, to a point. I mean, I don't remember phone numbers very well anymore, because they are just programed into my cell phone. If I'm out and have to use another phone, I can't remember important numbers.

 

But for me, personally, using a GPS and Geocaching have actually helped me. I've never been able to know where I am or how to get anywhere. Even in my home town (not that large) where I grew up, I couldn't figure out how to get places that I've been many many times. It's a big joke in my family. But after years of Geocaching and using a GPS, I can figure things out on my own, picture where I am, and know which way to go (even without the GPS!). When I've used the GPS on trips, I suddenly can picture how things are laid out, when I could never do that before, even using maps. I don't why it is exactly, although I could probably theorize, but for me, it's completely changed me and now I feel like a more normal, competent person in regards to geography and orientating myself in my world. I don't get lost very often anymore.

[GOF and Bacall]

Some people say the same thing about speel checkers. I speel much better than before I started using one.

[+Sioneva]

Some people say the same thing about speel checkers. I speel much better than before I started using one.

 

Eye still khan spell very well. And eye no how two mined my peas and queues!

[+Sagefox]

......Maybe we could all hire ourselves out as lab rats.

 

Yes. They will need to measure gps user hippocampuses to see if that theory has any merit.

 

Geocachers might be quite different from the run-of-the-mill gps users though because we are constantly adding those maps on the gps screen to our brains as we negotiate our way from cache to cache.

 

We are actually visiting many more areas than we ever would have without this game. We've been to soooo many side streets and back roads. We have a much better sense of what is where around our communities because of using these devices.

[+Taoiseach]

Some people say the same thing about speel checkers. I speel much better than before I started using one.

 

I don't knead a spell chequer two Czech my spelling!

[+Morning Dew]

Well this explains everything!

 

This means, that behind my back, my wife has been using a GPS and probably most of her life! I wish she would have introduced them to me many years ago instead of keeping it a secret.

 

Son of a gun.