“concern that outsourcing navigation to a gadget might somehow compromise our innate abilities and perhaps even change our brains. Bohbot had shown that people who default to cognitive map-based navigating in her tests tend to have more gray matter in their hippocampus21, while those who default to stimulus response have more in their caudate nucleus. Moreover, the two regions seem to directly compete with each other: people with bigger hippocampi tend to have smaller caudate nuclei, and vice versa. Developmental topographical disorientation struck me as an interesting neurological curiosity, like a case study in an Oliver Sacks book. But as I chatted with Bohbot, I got the impression that she saw it as a warning rather than a novelty. “Society is geared in many ways toward shrinking the hippocampus,” she told”
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Alex Hutchinson,
The Explorer's Gene: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map – How Neuroscience and Behavioral Psychology Explain Our Primal Urge to Explore
