The Price of GPS: How Our Sense of Place Is Eroded by Tech
The piece argues that widespread GPS use over the past decade and a half has shifted most people from a hippocampus-driven cognitive map to a caudate-driven, autopilot navigation style. Those who still rely on memory maintain a relational, map-like understanding of their environment and a continuous sense of being oriented in space, while others gain efficiency at the cost of declining spatial memory. Reversing this would require deliberately navigating without GPS in selected contexts to exercise the cognitive map and reclaim a felt sense of location.