I have patients who are very nervous about diving. Some of them get very anxious on highways because the traffic moves so fast. Too much stimulation!!
Others are afraid that some monster truck will jump out of a hidden driveway and eat them up. For a lot of them the underlying worry is that they will get lost. For many, it is not a rational fear, and that can be treated. But for others it is true; they don’t know where they are, and they can’t relate where they are to other places they’ve been. There can be reasons for this; sometimes it’s trauma. Some people just don’t want to go back there again.
There are older studies that show that men and women navigate differently. It has been shown several times that men rely more of knowing directions, like north and south, and also distances, like three blocks or five miles. Women seem to navigate by landmarks They go to the school and take a left and then over the hill to the church and take a right. But all that was before there were electronic GPS systems. Now a GPS is part of almost all of our lives. It’’s in our phones and usually connected right to the speakers in the car. I have many friends who won’t go anywhere without asking Siri how to get to the same restaurant that they went to last week.
My wife and I have taken several long road trips and I am still amazed that the GPS is so accurate, not flawless, but accurate. And since it is in the phone it is linked to other things in the phone. I can find a gas station, a hotel or a restaurant near by. My kids know where we are and I know where they are. CNN can track me too. The weather app tells me the local weather. I get local traffic and local hiking trails. All amazing stuff.
Of course, there is a price to pay, and it may be the the price is more than we think. A recent, 2014, Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2014 was divided, one half awarded to John O'Keefe, the other half jointly to May-Britt Moser and Edvard I. Moser "for their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain”. They found that our brains seem to draw girds, just like maps, and we use those cells to establish a consistent idea of where we are located.
Building on that work other researchers have learned that these cells also link their ability to locate in space with an ability to locate in time. That plays a large role in the way the brain creates and stores memories. It relates to our ability to create, maintain and tell stories. Stories usually involve telling where people are, and what they do there. It is those links that seem to deteriorate from Alzheimer’s Disease. Without those links, people get lost in space, time and memory.
So, when you jump in your car and ask your GPS how to get there, you are letting that part of your brain slip away. You probably remember the study done on the brains of London cab drivers. They have to learn all of the convoluted streets of London without a GPS (I don’t know if that is still true). MRI tests of their brains showed that the hippocampus of their brains had a much thicker cluster of nerve cells and that these brain changes occurred as they were learning the map. Further studies showed that these drivers, who could recall all of the details of the London streets, performed less well than non-drivers on other memory tasks. Later, when they stopped driving a cab, they regained their ability to remember other things.
Knowing all of this a group consisting of a psychologist, a neurologist, a physicist and an oceanographer went off the the Marshall Islands in the South Pacific Ocean to study the wave pilots. They found one man who had the knowledge of the ancient skill of navigating between the islands by reading and riding the winds and currents. He was the last of the non-tech navigators and they wanted to be able to learn his unique skills before they were lost forever. One of researchers had once gotten lost in a fog while kayaking. He was able to find his way back using his sense of direction and finding some landmarks that he recognized. He later learned that two others did not have those skills and drowned. He, and many others, wonder what would happen to any of us if the power goes off?
In just the past fifteen years more and more of us have learned to use machines and electronics to help us get where we want to go, and to do what we need to do. We do this because it is easy and effective. I’m not old-school on this. As I said, these things are amazing and often save hours of aggravation.
But we have to be aware of the effects it could have on us. If we use the time and effort these tools save us to think about other things, such as focusing on the reasons we are gong, then these electronic aids can be very helpful. But if we just drift away and let the electronics do it all, we may just forget why we were going there in the first place. Eventually, we might even forget how to remember.
Or else, some people may develop an entirely new ways of remembering and of creating stories about what happened. I wonder how different those stories will be?
If all this confuses you, try this:
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