By Paddy Kamen, Publisher, BetterBrainBetterLife.com
I was driving around southern Ontario with a dear friend last week. She has a classy SUV with a large GPS system mounted on the front dash. I don’t have one and so enjoyed seeing what it can do. My partner thinks we should get a GPS and I can see that it would come in very handy when searching for a specific location in an unknown city. Last winter, I literally ‘drove myself crazy’ trying to find Dr. David Dubin’s place in Los Angeles (we were going to do some LENS neurofeedback together and I did eventually find him after several phone calls back and forth).
I was driving around southern Ontario with a dear friend last week. She has a classy SUV with a large GPS system mounted on the front dash. I don’t have one and so enjoyed seeing what it can do. My partner thinks we should get a GPS and I can see that it would come in very handy when searching for a specific location in an unknown city. Last winter, I literally ‘drove myself crazy’ trying to find Dr. David Dubin’s place in Los Angeles (we were going to do some LENS neurofeedback together and I did eventually find him after several phone calls back and forth).
I wonder, though, what we might be losing by an over-reliance on such devices? Just as speed dial means we no longer memorize as many phone numbers, does relying on GPS dampen our natural ability to navigate? I really enjoy learning to find my way around new places, which is one of the reasons I like to move house and cities fairly often.
Dr. Veronique Bohbot, an associate at the Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery at McGill University in Montreal, studies just this sort of thing. Bohbot presented three related papers at the Society for Neuroscience conference in San Diego in 2010. In short, she found that turning away from our brain’s natural direction-finding, or spatial faculties, reduces the size of the hippocampus. I refer you to an article about her work at: http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-reliance-gps-hippocampus-function-age.html.
Will I get a GPS? It’s tempting, I must admit, but how often will I really use it? One last note: this subject reminds me of my article on Neurobics and suggests that finding ways to create new neural pathways is key to staying cognitively young.
Will I get a GPS? It’s tempting, I must admit, but how often will I really use it? One last note: this subject reminds me of my article on Neurobics and suggests that finding ways to create new neural pathways is key to staying cognitively young.