This is your brain on GPS
GPS is essential these days. We use it for everything – from a hunter figuring out where the heck they are in the backcountry, to a delivery truck finding a grocery store, to keeping clocks in sync.
But our reliance on GPS may also be changing our brains. Old school navigation strengthens the hippocampus, and multiple studies suggest that our new reliance on satellite navigation may put us at higher risk for diseases like dementia.
In this episode, we map out how GPS took over our world – from Sputnik’s doppler effect, to the airplane crash that led to its widespread adoption – and share everyday stories of getting lost and found again.
Featuring Dana Goward, M.R. O’Connor, Christina Phillips, Michelle Liu, Julia Furukawa, and Taylor Quimby.
LINKS
In 2023, Google Maps rerouted dozens of drivers in Los Angeles down a dirt road to the middle of nowhere to avoid a dust storm.
Maura O’Connor traveled from rural Alaska to the Australian bush to better understand how people navigate without GPS – and sometimes even maps.
Here’s the peer-reviewed study, published in the journal Nature, that found that young people who relied on GPS for daily driving had poorer spatial memories.
Another study, out of Japan, found that people who use smartphone apps like Google Maps to get around had a tougher time retracing their steps or remembering how they got to a place compared to people who use paper maps or landmarks.
CREDITS
Host: Nate Hegyi
Reported and produced by Nate Hegyi
Mixed by Nate Hegyi
Editing by Taylor Quimby and Katie Colaneri
Our staff includes Marina Henke, Justine Paradis, and Felix Poon
Executive producer: Taylor Quimby
Rebecca Lavoie is NHPR’s Director of On-Demand Audio
Music by Blue Dot Sessions
Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio
If you’ve got a question for the Outside/Inbox hotline, give us a call! We’re always looking for rabbit holes to dive down into. Leave us a voicemail at: 1-844-GO-OTTER (844-466-8837). Don’t forget to leave a number so we can call you back.
Audio Transcript
Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.
Nate Hegyi: You're listening to Outside In. I'm Nate Hegyi. The year was 2007, and Christina Phillips was on a road trip with her mom. They were checking out colleges around Washington, D.C., driving a rental car.
Christina Phillips: It was a Volkswagen Bug, and it was lime green.
Nate Hegyi: Christina, by the way, is a senior producer for our sister podcast, Civics 101. And this was before smartphones were really popular. So Christina's mom was using a portable GPS device.
Christina Phillips: We were relying entirely on this GPS because neither of us really knew how to read maps. I learned later, like, I'm never going to survive in an apocalypse if I can't read a map well.
Nate Hegyi: So they plug in the address and start following the directions to another school a few hours outside the city.
Christina Phillips: She's like, entranced by the GPS, and I keep being like, mom, you have to look at the road. Like she's following the GPS instead of the road because she's just like, my car is moving on this map And we go under a bridge and the GPS goes. Recalculating. Turn left. And my mom, like, puts her left blinker on as we're in a tunnel. And I was like, you cannot turn left. We are in a tunnel. And she was like, oh, whoops. I was watching the GPS again. Eventually we get out of DC and we're driving through the countryside and the GPS, just randomly as we're on the like a country highway goes, take the exit. So we're like, okay, we'll take the exit. We have no idea where we are. We take the exit and the GPS puts us on a dirt road that is parallel to the highway. I'm like, mom, I think we can just get back on the highway. And she was like, no, no, no. If we get off this road, I'll never find our way back. So she insisted on driving. We were driving like through little towns on this dirt road, like over train tracks in this tiny, like VW bug. And it's just like her driving, looking to the left to look at the GPS and then looking back at the road and me being like, you have to look at the road, you have to look at the road.
Nate Hegyi: This trip, it took five hours longer than they thought it would, all because Christina's mom was so afraid to not listen to the GPS. Nowadays, almost everyone from Christina's mom to UPS drivers to the pilots flying Air Force One rely on satellite navigation systems. Which means we are essentially outsourcing one of the most basic skills of all living creatures - navigation - to this:
GPS Voice: Recalculating.
Nate Hegyi: Today on the show, what's all this reliance on GPS doing to our brains? And what would happen if it disappeared? Stay tuned.
Nate Hegyi: It is pretty amazing to think that a singular moment can change the course of history. Henry Ford putting the first model T on the road. The Wright brothers first flight. And then this.
NBC News: Today a new moon is in the sky. A 23 inch metal sphere placed in orbit by a Russian rocket.
Nate Hegyi: In 1957, the Soviets launched the world's first satellite, Sputnik. Yes, this sparked the space race and eventually led to humans landing on the moon. But it also marks the birth of satellite navigation. As Sputnik circled the globe, it transmitted a radio signal. Scientists at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. They were listening in on these beeps, and they noticed that as Sputnik came over the horizon and passed Overhead, the beeps changed frequency. That's what's known as a Doppler shift. You hear the same thing when an ambulance goes by. And the scientist realized that if they measured the difference in those frequencies, they could figure out where Sputnik was in space.
Dana Goward: And then pretty quickly after that, they realized that if they knew where a satellite was, they could use the broadcast from the satellites to determine where they were. So thus began satellite navigation.
Nate Hegyi: Dana Goward is the president of the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation.
Dana Goward: Which is kind of a horrible name for most people. But essentially we advocate for policies and systems to protect the GPS, satellites, signals and users.
Nate Hegyi: Dana says while the technology behind GPS was born out of tracking Sputnik, it wasn't until near the end of the Vietnam War that the military went whole hog on the project.
Dana Goward: And in fact, a young Air Force colonel named Brad Parkinson was given the task of developing a system that would allow the military to put five bombs in the same hole.
Nate Hegyi: He and his team sent up four solar powered satellites. They were each equipped with an incredibly precise clock that was connected to a radio.
Dana Goward: The radio sends the very, very, very precise and accurate time to your receiver on the Earth. When your receiver gets all of the different time signals, they arrive at very slightly different moments. Your receiver measures the difference between those moments. It knows where the satellites are, and through a miracle of math and and computer processing, it can tell you exactly where you are on the ground and how high above or below the ground you are.
Nate Hegyi: Allowing the military to send five bombs into the same hole. The government named this constellation of satellites the Navstar Global Positioning System G.P.S., and over the next couple of decades, they sent a total of two dozen GPS satellites into orbit. That way, they could cover the entire globe. Now, originally, this was only supposed to be used as a tool of war government. Only kind of hush hush. That all changed in 1983.
NBC News:: The plane with 269 people on board, was on a heavily traveled flight path from Anchorage, Alaska, to Seoul, South Korea, called Red Route 20. For some reason, this flight strayed 300 miles off its course.
Nate Hegyi: This passenger plane had somehow gotten lost and flew directly over a Soviet military base, and the Soviets shot it down. Everyone on board was killed, including a US congressman. Tensions between the Soviets and the Americans ratcheted up. Ronald Reagan gave a prime time address, calling the incident a massacre.
Ronald Reagan: This crime against humanity must never be forgotten here or throughout the world. Our prayers tonight are with the victims and their families in their time of terrible grief.
Nate Hegyi: Bilateral talks between the two countries were suspended. The UN Security Council convened an emergency meeting about it. And amidst all of this international outcry, Reagan also signed an executive order, one that would help pilots stay on course in the future. He announced that GPS would be made available to the public once it became fully operational in 1993. And that's exactly what happened.
Dana Goward: As more and more people began to study this wonderful, free, highly precise signal from space and what people could do with it. There was more and more incentive to make it better, make the equipment better, and to reduce it from what was something that had two chairs and a bunch of equipment on a pallet in front of them, down to just a microchip that can fit inside of your phone in terms of what's needed to receive the signal.
Nate Hegyi: Nowadays, we have 31 satellites that make up our Global Positioning System. Other governments like Russia, China and the European Union also have their own satellite navigation systems. And your phone or smartwatch, it needs to connect to three of them to figure out where you are on Earth.
Dana Goward: Sometimes in urban canyons, you know, the GPS signals will bounce off the buildings and come, and then that messes things up. But generally it works pretty well most of the time.
Nate Hegyi: The government estimates that there are 900 billion GPS receivers in active use in the US, and not just in our phones and cars.
Dana Goward: It's used in telecommunications, for example, to synchronize cell towers so that they can talk to each other and you can talk to people that are outside of your immediate area. It is it is used to time transactions at ATMs to synchronize electrical grids. It is so pervasive that a member of the president's National Security Council is called GPS, a single point of failure for America. So if it were to go away, we would be in a near existential crisis, because there are just so many things that we depend on that depend upon GPS that folks don't realize.
Nate Hegyi: But for many of us, especially younger people who grew up with this tech. Gps just means getting from point A to point B, it's replaced those big books of maps people used to buy for long road trips. It's replaced the paper directions we used to print off of MapQuest. It's even replaced asking for directions. A few months ago, my New Hampshire Public Radio colleagues, Julia Furukawa and Michele Liu were on a reporting trip. A source they were planning to interview gave them directions to his house.
Michelle Liu: But we decided that we wanted to follow the GPS because that's what we know.
Nate Hegyi: I'm just curious, was this like, was this source like an older person?
Christina Phillips: He was.
Julia Furukawa: Yeah. And I have to say, the directions were quite specific, but we decided not to use them.
Nate Hegyi: I have to say, I have done this tons of times. Somebody gives me directions to their house and I say, yeah, but what's your address? I'm just going to plug it into Google Maps. And this is exactly what Julia and Michelle did. The algorithm gave him a route and they followed it until the road turned very, very bumpy.
Julia Furukawa: We both had this moment where we looked at it and we were like, gosh, that is. I don't know about that. And then just proceeded to follow it because the map said to. It was like just a bunch of boulders. Yeah. And mud patches and felled trees. And to be clear, we were driving the work vehicle, which is a Subaru Forester. It's like a 2015 Subaru Forester with company plates and logo on the side. Um, and there was some scraping of the undercarriage. And then, if I remember correctly, the road was not quite wide enough to fully turn around on. No. So there was reversing and then tail between our legs. We called the guy. And he was just like, why didn't you follow? Like I literally gave you the most specific instructions. Why did you not follow them? But he knew the exact road name. We were like, oh, we're at this very rocky, like, quote unquote road. And he's like, oh, you're on Old Pond Road, aren't you, or something?
Michelle Liu: He was like, do not take that road.
Julia Furukawa: But it kind of was that like moment from the office where Michael Scott, like, drives his car directly into a pond.
From the Office: It can't mean that there's a lake there. I think he knows where it is going. The machine knows. Stop yelling at me. Stop yelling. There's no road here.
Julia Furukawa: It wasn't that bad, but it was pretty bad.
Nate Hegyi: We put a ton of faith into apps like Google Maps to take us where we need to go. But this kind of GPS, WTF? It happens a lot. Last year in Los Angeles, Google Maps redirected a bunch of cars off the interstate to avoid a dust storm, and after driving up an unpaved desert Road. The drivers ended up stranded in the middle of nowhere. There is a TikTok video that we linked to in the show notes. It is wild, but most of the time GPS works so well, in fact, that we could be going to a place and have no idea how we actually got there. People don't get lost anymore. The GPS gets lost. So what could that be doing to our brains? That's next. After the break.
Nate Hegyi: Hey, this is outside in. I'm Nate hegy. A few years ago, author Maura O'Connor was on a vacation in New Mexico with her partner, and they wanted to check out these hot springs near Taos.
M.R. O'Connor: I put the name of the hot spring into the GPS and then, you know, followed the directions, and it literally just took us to the edge of the Rio Grande River. And then this pretty giant cliff. A killer cliff if you went over the edge. It was. That was going to be it. We just stopped and looked over the edge. We were like, well, there's no way we're getting down there, particularly in a car.
Nate Hegyi: They were lost. But getting lost is something that Mora has thought a lot about. She is the author of a book called Wayfinding The Science and Mystery of How Humans Navigate the World. She says there are good kinds of lost and bad kinds.
M.R. O'Connor: When the stakes aren't very high. Getting lost is kind of an exciting experience and one that can open you up, I think, to new and surprising encounters and adventures and experiences. But on the other hand, I think when the stakes are higher, getting lost is absolutely terrifying. And I remember a source for my book. A scholar at Harvard describing, you know, panic as Pan like the voice of sort of chaos whispering in your ear and creating this feeling of, um, of fear.
Nate Hegyi: We've all been there. Maybe it's late at night, your phone is dead. You're by yourself in a strange city, and you can't find your way back to your hotel. Or you took a wrong turn on a hike. There's no cell service, and you have no idea where you are. The panic starts creeping in. This is not supposed to happen.
M.R. O'Connor: If animals were prone to getting lost, it's likely they wouldn't survive or their species wouldn't likely have survived. So built into almost like every species you can possibly imagine, is some system for locating themselves in space and knowing where to go and how to get there. But the actual mechanisms of how each species does that is still slightly mysterious.
Nate Hegyi: For example, monarch butterflies, they travel thousands of miles to the exact same breeding spot year after year. We think that they used the angle of the sun to help find their way, but we aren't entirely sure. And for a long time, we thought that pigeons had tiny iron balls in their ears. That helped them sense the Earth's magnetic field. Turns out that is not the case. But they can still always find their way home. And we're pretty sure that dung beetles use the light of the Milky Way to navigate. As for us.
M.R. O'Connor: What makes humans special in a sense, is that we are uniquely capable of getting lost. We're actually terrible at navigating, and there's been these really interesting experiments in the past trying to show how that works. So, you know, sometimes researchers will put like blindfolds on people and then tell them to walk in a straight line and it's something like after 60ft or something, we're walking in circles, but we don't even realize it. Um, so really, really bad.
Nate Hegyi: We don't have a special organ or a sixth sense that tells us where to go. Instead, what we have are big brains and very good memories.
M.R. O'Connor: As we're moving through space, we put things into our memory like this rock, this body of water, um, these certain environmental, um, features. And then we know as we're coming back, we can remember them, we can recognize them and know that we've been in that place before.
Nate Hegyi: So even if you are lost, you might remember that the sun sets in the West, that that one tall church was right next to your Airbnb, that your grandma's house is two blocks past the McDonald's MacDonalds. This is how we got around for eons and it's how some societies still do.
M.R. O'Connor: I had the opportunity to go to the Arctic and speak to some of the local hunters in a town called Iqaluit, and that's exactly what they do, is they use dominant wind directions, they use landscape formations, and they have an incredible, according to them, ability to record vast amounts of information about the landscape in order to find their way over places that someone like me goes and is like, this just all looks the same. There's nothing here.
Nate Hegyi: This is all thanks to our hippocampus. That's the memory center of the brain. And science has shown us that the more you use it, the more powerful it becomes. Take taxi drivers in London. For a long time, they had to pass a test before they could get a license. It required them to memorize all of the roads in the city.
M.R. O'Connor: You had to have what's called the knowledge. And the knowledge was, you know, how all of the roads intersect and, and and basically a mental map of the city. And so they looked at the size and the volume of their hippocampus and then compared it to a control group and found that they actually had greater volume and sort of more gray matter in the hippocampus, so very vigorous hippocampus.
Nate Hegyi: But when we take that job of mentally mapping and offload it to GPS, where it's just.
M.R. O'Connor: Saying turn left at the light, turn right, you know, at the next block, etc., and we're just sort of almost mindlessly following these directions. Um, we're just not engaging the hippocampus. And so if there is a cost to using GPS, it seems to be just in the lack of engagement with our surroundings and the fact that we're just not using that part of our brain in a way that we would if we were having to actively find our way, you know, whether it's on roads or through a forest or on a hiking trail, etc..
Nate Hegyi: The research on this phenomenon is still early, but there was a peer reviewed study in the journal nature back in 2020. It found that young people who relied on GPS for daily driving had poorer spatial memories. A group of adults who were all under the age of 35 were asked to navigate a virtual maze, one that looked kind of like an old N64 game. They found that the folks who used GPS a lot struggled more with the maze. Another study out of Japan found that people who used smartphone apps like Google Maps to get around had a tougher time retracing their steps or remembering how they got to their destination compared to people who used paper, maps or landmarks. In other words, they found that when you're just following a line on your phone, you aren't really registering everything else around you, like the tall building you just passed or the Starbucks on the corner. And that makes it harder to navigate a place without your device. Honestly, that's not very surprising to me. I feel like a zombie every time I'm in a strange city, head down, staring at my phone, following GPS directions to a coffee shop a half mile away.
GPS Voice: In 500ft, take a left.
Taylor Quimby: I have to stare at the stupid little rectangle in front of me and then, like, turn around waiting for the GPS like monitor to show me what direction I'm walking.
Nate Hegyi: I actually asked our show runner, Taylor Quimby, about this. Taylor has been trying very hard to wean himself off of GPS, but his son isn't too pleased about it.
Taylor Quimby: So every time I'm driving with my Almost 13 year old son. And we're going somewhere like, particularly like around town. And I don't put on the GPS like I can see him kind of like, look over at me, like, what are you doing? I could see him like, dad, just use the GPS or he'll say he'll be like, are we lost? Yeah. And I'd be like, no, we're not. We're not lost. Lost? Yeah. Like we're you know, I'm on. I'm definitely not sure where the hardware store is, but you know, we'll get there. I actually talked to him about this. And you know, he he said like, no, he's really scared of being lost. And he mentioned that, you know, he got lost in the woods once on a hike. Um, and I think it just really, it really like set in. But I also think it shows you that like, we, um, particularly probably young people and obviously this is just anecdotal, but they're just less comfortable with the idea of not knowing where you're going.
Nate Hegyi: Obviously, this is an important skill for him to have. How do you develop? How do you help him develop that skill? Now, do you have any ideas of like, all right, actually, this is something we need to deal with.
Taylor Quimby: I have no idea because he obviously finds my obsession with it super annoying. Yeah.
Nate Hegyi: But it's important. It's important. If I was a dad, I think I'd be like, hey, man, like, we gotta we gotta work on. We gotta figure out. Figure out this, uh, this lost business. We need to get you, like, safely lost.
Taylor Quimby: Yeah. It's important to me. And I do think it's valuable. But at the same time, like, the kids are gonna be fine. Probably eventually.
Nate Hegyi: Eventually He'll get lost, and he'll realize it's not the end of the world.
Taylor Quimby: Yeah, as long as it isn't the actual end of the world. If it is, you know that that'll be a steep learning curve.
Nate Hegyi: The idea of satellite navigation suddenly disappearing does feel a little Black mirror like great fodder for some dystopian Netflix show, but it turns out these satellites are actually very vulnerable. Remember Dana Goward says national security officials call it a single point of failure for America. That's because anything from hacking to jamming signals to space missiles could shut the whole system down.
Dana Goward: It's not a day I want to live through. Let me put it that way.
Nate Hegyi: Satellite navigation systems. They don't just tell us where we are. They also tell us what time it is. Ensuring that all of our clocks agree with each other. You knock that out. And the precise, perfect dance of planes. Landing of stocks. Getting traded, grocery stores getting delivered. Fresh food. It all falls apart.
Dana Goward: We would rapidly find out all the many ways that we have restructured our society, reduce staffing, reduce the amount of equipment we have, reduce the amount of trucks for delivering because we have this incredibly accurate, highly precise and up to now reliable service that lets us know when and where we are pretty much at wherever we go. So it's a it would be a near existential crisis.
Nate Hegyi: Putting aside for a moment the dire apocalyptic vision of our entire economy lurching to a halt. What would we do without GPS? Would people suddenly go back to paper maps and be fine? Or would we struggle to remember how to navigate the world without being told to take the exit, even if the worst doesn't happen? I do think we're missing out on something big about the human experience when we lean on GPS to get us everywhere. Getting lost. It can be terrifying, but it can also be kind of thrilling. Like, I remember when I was a teenager, I would ride my bicycle around for hours. On those endless summer days, I'd get myself lost on farm roads, eventually looking for the city's water tower in the horizon to point me back home. This kind of wandering, no destination in mind is something that author Maura O'Connor tries to do daily to keep her wayfinding skills sharp.
M.R. O'Connor: Every morning I step out with my dog and now my four month old baby, and we go for an hour walk in this 500 acre park across the street from us in Brooklyn, and I. I purposefully try to find new places and new routes through this park, even though I've lived here for 13 years and pretty much feel like I know it by heart. And I've read some researchers that I interviewed for the book talk about that, about the importance of even going to a museum and kind of just, um, not following the map, just opening yourself out to find your way around a museum and then find your way back to the front door as a, as a kind of really pleasurable way of exercising this part of our brains that is responsible for mapping space. And I find it to be really gratifying to do that, just to be taking new routes.
Nate Hegyi: I am sure that we all have stories about getting lost, about faulty GPS directions, about the annoying parent that always plugs in directions to Starbucks even though they've been going there for seven years. I'm looking at you, dad, I love you. Sorry. We want to hear your stories. Send us an email or better yet, a voice memo to Outside In at npr.org, and we'll try and feature it in some of our later episodes. Shout out to the folks in our Facebook group for having a conversation with me about GPS. You can join that group. It's a fun hang. Just search outside in.
Nate Hegyi: This episode was written and produced by me, Nate Hegyi. It was edited by our showrunner Taylor Quimby, with some help from Katie Colaneri. Our team also includes Justine Paradise, Marina Henke, and Felix Poon. Rebecca LaVoy is our satellite in the Sky head of on demand audio here at NHPR. Fun fact by the way, Sputnik. Only the size of a basketball battery lasted less than a month. Music from blue Dot sessions. Our theme music is by Breakmaster cylinder. Outside in is a production of NHPR.