Maps

Before GPS navigation became universal, people navigated with maps. Paper maps, mostly, and the particular skills required to use them: orienting the map to your direction of travel, identifying landmarks, estimating distance, accepting that you might need to stop and look around.

Those skills are now largely unused. I notice this in myself. I can reach almost anywhere in a city I have never visited by following instructions from a small screen. I arrive efficiently. But I have no mental model of where I have been. Ask me to describe the route or draw it, and I cannot.

There is evidence that this matters. Research on spatial cognition suggests that navigation by landmark, by active attention to the environment, builds the kind of mental map that GPS navigation does not. The hippocampus, a region associated with spatial memory, shows measurable differences between habitual GPS users and those who navigate more actively.

I am not suggesting that people should abandon useful technology for nostalgic reasons. But I do wonder what else we lose when we outsource attention to our environment. And I have started, occasionally, to leave my phone in my pocket and find my own way.