A New Yorker piece by Shayla Love looks at the consequences of our increasing dependence on GPS. It’s nominally about Katherine Dunn’s new book, Little Blue Dot (previously), but it’s one of those pieces that uses the book as a launching pad—talks about what the book talks about, rather than talking about the book in and of itself. Here’s a thought-provoking paragraph from Love’s piece:

Mary Hegarty, a psychologist who leads the Spatial Thinking Lab, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told me that by relying on G.P.S. we neglect an intrinsic navigation strategy: cognitive mapping, which depends on a spatial conception of the environment that is populated with landmarks such as trees or buildings. This approach is supported by “place cells,” specific neurons in the hippocampus, each of which represents a precise physical location. (One could think of them as the brain’s internal blue dots.) G.P.S. is more in line with a very different navigation strategy, stimulus response, which treats navigation as a series of motor responses: turn left, go five hundred feet, then turn right. This utilizes a different area of the brain, one that supports habitual learning. “I don’t think there’s enough research yet to say G.P.S. is terrible, that it’s hurting your brain,” Hegarty said. But it’s clear that turn-by-turn directions prioritize stimulus response over cognitive mapping.

This is one of those lightbulb moments: I’ve never really relied on GPS receivers for navigation because my navigation strategy is pure cognitive mapping. I don’t follow directions when I travel, at least not unless I’ve worked out the general geography by poring over maps of the area first.