"This Way Up" is an enjoyable narrative through multiple stories about maps and their relevance to human advancement. The story about the Pacific Islanders who can navigate by feeling the waves is particularly amazing.
The book ends with a chapter entitled "The map that's never wrong" describing the impact that Google Maps has had. As the authors write, "people were now ironically more lost than they've ever been precisely because of Google maps' ubiquity and success"
They referenced a 2014 study at the University College London that suggested that over-reliance on digital directions affected far more than simply how we navigate. The study suggests that there is a strong connection between memory and spatial awareness. In their tests, they saw similar changes to the prefrontal cortex, which deals with decision making planning and reasoning and the hippocampus, which is responsible for our spatial awareness as well as forming and retrieving memories.
The authors of This Way Up ask the question: if we continue on this GPS dependent trajectory what does the future hold for our species? 100 years from now as we sit in our Wall-E spacecrafts, will we be horrendously specially unaware?
I have often walked into a room and forgotten what I came in for. Apparently this has a name, "the doorway effect" Researchers at UCL suggested that walking through doorways often causes us to forget things for the simple reason that they mark threshold to a new space. Since space and memory shared the same cranial office, it turns out the space is an important dimension of how we form and preserve memories.
I am sure in the coming years we will find more research and evidence about how our screens are continuing to make us less smart
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