Paper maps versus GPS-Losing one’s way!

In the pre-google maps era, during several sojourns across UK and Europe , my husband and I used city maps, locating landmarks and walked several kilometers down the streets of San Gimignano, Berlin or London and never ever lost our way. My brush with poor navigation occurred in 2018, when I started using the Google maps to visit some places in Goslar. I lost my way couple of times! In frustration, I  wondered if I had a phobia for GPS devices which lead to my poor navigation ! our brain, a remarkable organ, has the ability to create , analyse, and process tons of data each day. The special skill of spatial resolution from the hippocampus in our brains give us ability to find routes in new unfamiliar cities, follow directions to a friend’s house in a new city, or even make midnight visit to the bathroom in a hotel room in the dark. As humans, we use this crucial skill in everyday environments and navigate from point A to point B. In an interesting study in 2013, MRI scans carried out by Mcguire etal. from University College in London found that the experienced cabbies of London with more than 40 years of experience had larger hippocampus structurally compared to younger taxi drivers. They concluded that to accommodate the large amount of navigational experience and store the maps of the city, the grey matter grew and adapted to help the older drivers. Unfortunately, younger drivers who started to use global positioning systems and other geospatial technologies seemed to be losing their map reading and orienteering in unfamiliar terrain. 

Dr.Ishikawa, a cognitive research specialist from INIAD Tokyo university had in his work on spatial learning shown that GPS devices, instead of actually helping the humans , seem to affect the navigating ability of humans. He worked with 3 teams who were asked to find their way on foot through an urban setting, using various means of navigation. One team used a mobile phone with a built-in GPS , the second one a physical map and the last team was shown the route they needed to use if navigating on their own. Their results showed that the team with the GPS walked slower, using more steps and also walked farther than the others making many more errors and took longer to reach their destination. The last team which had been shown the route beforehand did the best. After their exercise, when the team members were asked to draw a route they took and details of the terrain, the GPS users exhibited a poorer knowledge of the topography, poorer recollection of the route they had taken. While a GPS device makes people glued to screen instead of looking around at their environment, paper maps do not rely on getting a signal, and using a map in conjunction with a compass gives people a better feel for the natural world. 

In a new 2020 study , Kitanishi and Mizuseki of the Department of Physiology, OCU Graduate School of Medicine., have shown for the first time that the spatial information received from the hippocampus is actually sent downstream by a region of the brain called the subiculum where processing , planning and action may actually be happening. Studying the brain activity of rats, they have demonstrated that the subiculum behaves like a sorting office of the hippocampus post-office. This seems to help human beings continuously assess and sort land marks, distances to destinations , exact directions as well as other transports on the road. It also seems to help them to plan alternate route while assessing traffic jams. So next time, I lose my way somewhere even with a paper map, I plan to ask my subiculum which way to go !