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OPINION: Monday Musings: Could GPS shrink our brains? [The Montana Standard, Butte]
(Montana Standard (Butte) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Nov. 30--Someday they could be standard equipment on every car and cell phone: global positioning systems to guide drivers and pedestrians through every turn and straightaway from Point A to Point B.
No critical thinking necessary; just blindly follow the commands of the disembodied female voice with the pleasant British accent. Chances are you won't get lost. But you may have no real idea of where you're going.
Welcome to another paradox of the modern world: The navigational aids that promise to help us become smarter travelers just might be dumbing us down.
Puzzling through routes the old-fashioned way, with a paper map and careful attention to detail, is good exercise for our brains. We form "cognitive maps" that tend to stay with us, stored in the hippocampus section of the brain. GPS technology allows us to skip that brain mapping step altogether if we'd like, and researchers fear the hippocampus could start getting smaller from the lack of use, possibly leading to more early dementia.
My source for all this is an article titled "Global Impositioning Systems" by Alex Hutchinson. It first appeared in the November 2009 issue of The Walrus, a monthly general interest magazine published in Toronto, Ontario. Then it was reprinted in the Nov. 13 issue of The Week under the headline, "This is your brain on GPS." The theory stems in part from research showing that the back part of the hippocampus is enlarged in people who must master huge quantities of spatial data. Eleanor Maguire, a neuroscientist at University College London, discovered this by studying the brains of London cab drivers. They cannot join the ranks until they pass a grueling test covering around 25,000 streets and thousands of landmarks.
Prospective cabbies study two to four years for this test and actually alter their brains in the process. But Maguire also found the front part of their hippocampuses were smaller than average, prompting her to conclude "there is a price to pay for their experience." The article didn't get into what the trade-off might be, but it did say humans also store autobiographical memories in the hippocampus and use it to imagine the future. Perhaps the cabbies live in "the now" more often than the rest of us, and that might not be such a bad thing.
Another interesting research finding is that the "cognitive maps" we form by getting to know certain places might actually mirror physical routes of neurons that light up in our brains when we travel to those places.
Researchers don't know this for sure because they can't test the theory on humans, but experiments on rats in the 1970s showed that "place cells" in a rat hippocampus were activated only when the animal was in a certain place.
Researchers discovered this by implanting arrays of electrodes in the rats' brains. "Let the animal wander through a maze, and you could watch a chain of neurons fire in a spatial pattern that exactly matched its path, at a smaller scale," Hutchinson writes.
To think that cells in our brains might fire up along routes similar to those we're physically traveling is mind-boggling. And to think that we humans may be unwittingly detouring away from all that good brain exercise by relying too much on GPS is unsettling.
But one point seems clear after reading this article: Old-fashioned navigating is good for a person. Even if your OnStar or your iPhone offers an "app" to help you find your way, say thanks but no thanks once in a while and let your own brain call the shots.
-- Roberta (Bobbi) Stauffer is The Standard's opinion page editor. She may be reached at 496-5514 or by e-mail at roberta.stauffer@mtstandard.com.
To see more of The Montana Standard, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.mtstandard.com.
Copyright (c) 2009, The Montana Standard, Butte
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
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