The idea is that when you store memories, you actually kind of store different bits of the memory in different parts of your cortex. Brian ResnickĪnd is there a simple way to think of what the hippocampus is doing overall when it comes to navigation? Kate Jeffery I’d be pretty surprised if we started seeing hippocampal atrophy as a result of GPS, to be honest. My sense is that their hippocampi are probably still pretty busy. People now may not spend as much time navigating the real world, but they spend a lot more time navigating the online world or in the virtual world. You give people new technology, and yeah, it makes something easier but it opens up other games. Whenever a new technology comes along, everybody always predicts the end of humanity.īut my feeling about this - which is not informed by a huge amount of data, admittedly - is the human brain seems to like to be busy. What do you think about this when it comes to GPS use? Kate Jeffery I often see headlines about how technology is ruining our brain’s ability to think for itself. The case that GPS isn’t ruining your brain Brian Resnick And, tantalizingly, she wonders if certain forms of technology might even enhance our brains’ power to think. She points out that there’s still a ton researchers don’t know about how the brain navigates the world, let alone how technology will interfere. To think through how GPS might reshape our brain and mess with our internal sense of direction, I called up Kate Jeffery, a neuroscientist at University College London who studies how brains navigate. It’s possible the opposite could happen: that the less we engage the hippocampi (we all have two), they’ll shrink, and that degeneration could contribute to cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s disease as we age. Presumably, their hippocampi balloon because they’re busy using them.Įver wonder how your mind works? Watch The Mind, Explained, our 5-part miniseries on the workings of the brain. A famous series of studies that found London taxi drivers, who have to memorize the city’s tangled mess of streets for their job, have larger-than-average hippocampi, the size of which seems to correlate with their years of experience. And scientists have found decreased hippocampal activity when we’re led to a destination compared to when we’re charting our own course.Īnd there’s work finding that when people really effortfully engage their hippocampi, they may benefit. It’s generally true that when we don’t use a particular skill, the neural connections that underlie it atrophy. It’s ruining your brain.” The story quickly clarified “what isn’t known is the effect of GPS use on hippocampal function when employed daily over long periods of time.” (Which is to say: We don’t know, for sure, if it’s ruining your brain.)īut there’s some indirect evidence to hypothesize it could. In June, the Washington Post published a viral piece titled “ Ditch the GPS. Now, it’s easy to wonder, are we undermining it? Before the age of GPS, before drawn maps, the hippocampus had evolved (among its many purposes) to help us navigate the world. It helps us figure out where we are, if we’ve been there before, and where we should go next. The hippocampus is a seahorse-shaped structure that resides deep in your brain and functions like an internal GPS.
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