Use of GPS causing brains to atrophy

Q: It drives me nuts that so many of my friends are using GPS to navigate.

They never really know where they are or where they’re going! It can’t be good for you to rely on that, can it?

Bruce F., Tappan, New Jersey

A: Ask any police officer from Brisbane, Australia, to the upper west side of Manhattan, and they’ll tell you how GPS navigation systems have instructed drivers to plow into homes, trees and lakes, and drive off cliffs. Rangers at Death Valley National Park in California call it “death by GPS.”

Don’t ask why; you can Google the gruesome details.

But there’s even more physical danger involved in navigating exclusively with those devices!

Information is starting to pile up that GPS navigators are shrinking your brain.

A 2017 study in Nature Communications used an fMRI to show that when you study a map or memorize directions, you’re using your hippocampus, the part of your brain that constructs complex spatial representation as you interact with the environment.

That builds both brainpower and knowledge of your surroundings.

Use a GPS, and you switch off the part of your brain that should be interested in the streets you’re driving on.

That explains a 2006 British study that found taxi drivers, whose licensing requires demonstrated recall for around 25,000 London streets plus historic landmarks, had more grey matter in their hippocampus than bus drivers who simply follow a designated route.

Two additional studies in 2008 from Japan and Cornell University came to the same conclusion.

The researchers who conducted the fMRI study caution that if you don’t use your brain, just like an unused muscle it will start to atrophy and shrink.

But if you stimulate your hippocampus — say, by memorizing the layout of roads on a map — you greatly improve your cognitive abilities at any age.