Navigating with GPS is making our brains lazy
By Rob Verger April 4, 2017
A map of Manhattan showing a metric called "closeness centrality" that describes how connected a street is to the whole larger network of streets, with red indicating more connections and blue the opposite.
Navigation apps like Google’s Waze reduce the amount of mental power it takes to get from one place to another—and researchers can now literally see the difference in brain activity. A recent study is helping scientists get a better grasp of just how our brain function changes when navigating from memory versus following turn-by-turn directions.
To learn more about how our brains process networks like city streets, neuroscientists and cognitive scientists from University College London (UCL) and other institutions conducted a study in which two dozen participants first walked around the London neighborhood of Soho. None of the participants were familiar that busy neighborhood, which is a “really dense pack of streets with lots of cafes and bars—really colorful place,” says Hugo Spiers, the study’s senior author and a neuroscientist in the department of behavioral psychology at UCL. The subjects then took a test to see how well they’d learned the urban landscape. “It’s pointless scanning someone who is completely lost,” he says.
http://www.popsci.com/navigating-with-gps-is-making-our-brains-lazy
