Saturday, May 13, 2017

Is Technology Changing Our Brains #8 Navigation Skills, Grey Matter and GPS


In 2000, a study found that taxi drivers who acquire The Knowledge – which requires memorizing thousands of London streets – have a greater volume of grey matter in the posterior hippocampus but less in the anterior hippocampus, making them better at memory tasks involving landmarks but poorer at recalling complex visual information. This provided evidence for plasticity in the adult human brain.

Could our reliance on GPS also be changing the way our brains work? Researchers from McGill University in Canada used MRI scans to compare GPS users with non-GPS users. Those who navigated without GPS had higher activity and a greater volume of grey matter in the hippocampus than those who relied on GPS.

In another study, people who drove a route using sat-nav could not remember scenes from the journey as well as those without sat-nav, and were poorer at retracing their steps from memory alone.

It’s possible that reliance on technology could cause some brain areas to grow and others to shrink,” says University College London’s Dr Sam Gilbert. “Something similar was shown in the original taxi driver study. But occasional use of sat-nav probably won’t have as strong an effect as learning The Knowledge and relying on it as part of your job.
(Summarized from BBC Earth Magazine (Vol.9 Issue 1), page 34 by Jo Carlowe)

Verdict: Yes, technology may change our brains when it comes to navigation
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