This raises a troubling question. If our human navigational efforts shape our hippocampus, what happens when we stop using it for this purpose—when we lean too hard on technology such as GPS, which makes navigation a brain-free endeavor? GPS replaces navigational demands with a very pure form of stimulus-response behavior (turn left, turn right). Some scientists fear that overdependence on this technology will shrink our hippocampus. Indeed, when researchers at McGill University scanned the brains of older adults who used GPS and those who didn’t, they found that the people accustomed to
...more
