Habitual GPS use negatively impacts spatial memory during self-guided navigation
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
This helps me to stay oriented when I'm not using a maps app as well, because I already know which roads intersect with which, where, and how to take them to get from A to B.
Sadly, Google Maps does everything they can to prevent you from doing this, e.g. not showing street names at all unless you zoom in to ridiculous levels (and often not even then) as well as not showing you which roads are one-way, which roads allow bicycles, etc.
That's why I mostly rely on Open Street Map and similar actual maps.
Also, if I've got additional time to get somewhere, I'll get lost on purpose, taking roads I don't know yet, then looking at the maps to figure out where I am (which is super useful to discover hidden paths and shortcuts).
It's so funny when I'm with someone and navigating, they see me using Google maps and then are bewildered when I don't turn on the turn by turn yet still get where we're going. They almost can't believe it's possible.
And one-way streets almost always allow cyclists to take them in both directions, so that's not an issue either :)
My habit is to look at a map days or weeks before going somewhere unfamiliar, usually that’s plenty. If I get turned around on the day, I pull over and have a look at the map again for 30 seconds, done. My family has gotten used to it, agree it’s a valuable skill requiring maintenance, tolerate my occasional mistakes as an opportunity to see something unexpected, and even brag about me to their friends.
We do use Google maps when traveling for the local restaurant recommendations, though. That’s a value it really does add.
This has been my pet peeve as well. I do use Gmaps to show me the route and then I ride it on my bike without looking at the phone but if it is a route that I don't know yet I would like which street to turn at, all the while Gmaps refusing to be a map and telling me what the name of the street is.
Gmaps seems to be less of a map, more of a directory of locations and instructions how to get to those, so the actual streets on which the locations are is not interesting to GMaps at all and it doesn't put any effort into that usecase.
Using a map app as an app(vs for directions) doesnt have the same deteriorating effect on your spatial navigation, because you are still conceptionalising your position as moving
Our brains are wired to wayfind by landmarks and understanding our location relative to them. Navigation mode in the app flips this on its head - your position is always center of the screen and the map context moves around you, so it is harder build that landmark association on a trip because you dont get a sense of how far you are through your journey relative to landmarks.
I know land nav, celestial navigation, LORAN, at one point I knew the math for GPS. yada yada. As a practical matter, GPS is magic. It's the reduction of stress in new places that is such a game changer.
Edit: I used to live in a small city where traffic used to grind to a halt on rainy days or if there were delays or construction works at certain locations.
― Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society
One of the advantages of aliens in Sci-Fi is that they can provide such an outside perspective of humanity. I wish it was utilized more and to greater effect. It's rather interesting. Sadly most Sci-Fi either is so out there that humanity seems to dull in comparison and you'd not waste a thought reflecting on it, or it lacks peaceful interactions and alien perspectives.
(W)e have been rather slow in recognizing that in solving the information problem, we created a new problem never experienced before: information glut, incoherence, and meaninglessness. … Like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, we are awash in information, without even a broom to help us get rid of it. The tie between information and human purpose has been severed. … it comes indiscriminately, whether asked for or not, directed at no one in particular, in enormous volume, at high speeds, disconnected from meaning and import. It comes unquestioned and uncombined, and we do not have, as (poet Edna St. Vincent) Millay said, a loom to weave it all into fabric.
- Neil Postman, Science and the Story that We Need, 1997
ive done my share of mediocre landnav in the army,and used to be OK in it (for a 2nd lt)
now i cant navigate in field for the life of me ,and have to look up every damned for in the road on a relatively simple trail
can't say im gonna do the effort of switching back to maps,but dang do i feel stupid sometimes
I personally find it more secure and also more engaging towards the path I’m taking.
Also Google Maps often spouts partly weird routes for no reason, and checking+correcting them mentally helps a lot.
Case in point: 9 times out of 10 Google Maps will navigate me out of my neighbourhood via a backstreet that crosses a main road.
The suggestion saves a minute or two because you are able to avoid two sets of lights. This route doesn’t seem obvious, because intuition dictates waiting to cross a main road at an uncontrolled intersection will take longer. Miraculously, it doesn’t.
It might if you are driving a slow commercial truck.
Or if you are one of those "timid to the point of hazardous" drivers.
The thing is, why bother? I always have my phone. If I'm within a few miles of my house, I can figure out where I'm going, but maybe it takes me a little longer, and I don't come up with the optimal route, and now I and have the risk of getting caught in unexpected change in traffic patterns. If I'm somewhere unfamiliar, spatial memory is irrelevant and I have to rely on it regardless.
Actually I feel like GPS makes me a better than navigator. Having the "top down" view makes it feel like a video game, and that's one area where I have a ton of practice looking at a 2D map, relating it to 3D environment, and so on.
Until you don't. It's probably a generational thing but I tend to have non-electronic backups when it's relatively cheap and easy to do so. And for relatively routine places I walk/drive, I much prefer to have the route in my head.
If you're someone who learns your routes in terms of facts/numbers, then I can see GPS hurting your memory, but in my case, the GPS won't tell me to turn at the Walmart, or get off at the train station with the green tile. So after a few GPS trips, I've learned the route in the way my brain will remember. This especially helps when I don't know the traffic patterns or alternate routes that a navigation app does.
These days, for routes I don't know really well, or have high traffic variance, I'll check GPS to verify a route, and then use the route without using the app directly.
Relying exclusively on the phone's turn-by-turn directions without having any spatial awareness of your own or knowledge about the planned routes has a strong tendency to make you do stupid, dangerous stuff in traffic any time there's the slightest ambiguity or delay in the phone's instructions to you. This is mitigated somewhat by newer cars that can show you the map on a display that's not too small or too far out of the way of where your eyes should be pointing. But the responsible way to prevent those problems is to pull up the directions and study them for a minute before releasing the parking brake—that way, the phone is more reminding you than controlling you.
This makes sense intuitively. But I’d like to see evidence. I’ve often been in a car with someone navigating from memory behaving erratically (or taking a route that made sense twenty years ago) than someone taking turn by turn directions from a map.
For example, if I find out too late that I have to go left, I might already be stuck in a lane where I'm only supposed to go straight or right. In this situation, I can only take a detour (can be long if I get on a highway!), block the lane until it's safe to switch or try a dangerous maneuver.
Nothing dangerous happened -- we'd just have wasted time having to turn back at the next intersection -- so it wasn't really serious. It still baffles me how or why someone would literally become so reliant on mechanical instructions that they neither see the clear direction signs nor seem to pay any other attention to directional clues or the fact that the southward branch was approaching. (It's often hard to tell in a complex intersection where you need to turn in order to get into a particular direction, but this case was fairly obvious.)
I can also see how a sudden reaction to a late navigational instruction could cause dangerous situations.
I understand the convenience when travelling to unfamiliar places but I'm not really that keen on having GPS entirely replace directional awareness of one's surroundings.
The challenge is that it can be hard to simultaneously navigate by some combination of signs, instinct, and memorized route and follow directions being fed to you (whether by a computer or a person). This is not always the case of course but often there is some ambiguity so you just do what you're "told" if you don't know the area.
Personally, I can remember the last bit of the car journey and it's easily reversed. Then I just follow the "Copenhagen" signs until I'm near enough the city that I know my own way home. It's nicer than having a robot voice interrupt us every few minutes with "Take the left two lanes to continue on the motorway to Copenhagen".
This is why in the Netherlands you are tought to drive using a satnav, and it can even be required to navigate using one during your driving exam.
I find that if I don't use my phone, I'm more likely to look around and try new routes.
Not always. I live a little bit northeast of a city, and when I have to work south of the city, Google always gives me a route through town on lower speed roads with traffic lights. I usually take a different route with no stops and higher speeds and save about 10 minutes and a splash of fuel.
There's an option to avoid highways, but not one to prioritize them. I would much prefer to spend an extra 10 minutes on my 6 hour drive to the beach if that means I can stay on a 4 lane divided highway the entire time.
Almost universally guides and mountain rescue people will advise that people should carry and have knowledge of how to use a map and compass, inform that a phone with GPS is to be used as a backup with no advice given on how to use it.
Navigating with a map and compass is a difficult skill that takes a lot of practise, Scottish munros are very regularly subject to almost zero visibility where even the most advanced navigator would have difficulty. Almost none of the receipients of this advice actually want to navigate, they want to be able to follow a route for duration of their journey. A task that is very simply done with a phone if someone has been given the correct instruction.
When people have an appropriate route downloaded on their phone to work offline ensuring they have enough charge and suitable backup devices alongside told someone their route and expected time of return they have covered most of the situations that get people in trouble in terms of navigation.
Instead they are routinely told to bring a map and compass by people who generally seem to be enthusiastic volunteers who have a deep interest specifically around navigation.
>and suitable backup devices
First of all, I wonder how many people actually have suitable backup devices.
Secondly, stuff does happen. There are a lot of circumstances where a very simple compass and map--and knowledge that doesn't require elite M&C navigation skills can be the difference between "Um, I have no idea where I am and how to get home" and "Damn, I guess I need to do this the old fashioned way." Yes, there are conditions and locations where the "old fashioned way" is really difficult to do. But often there are trails and some visibility and you just need some basic ability to read a map and know what direction you're headed in.
Do I bother when I know an area and the weather is good? Nope. But for anything more advanced, I carry a map and compass as pretty cheap and easy insurance.
Virtually every group of people will have multiple backup devices, for people going solo it something that should (but isn't) recommended.
> Secondly, stuff does happen.
Stuff does and in every case if you want to follow a route having a little dot that shows you exactly where you are in relation to that route is better than having a map and compass. I am not sure why you are replying to my point as if it is not a choice for people to carry a phone with them but somewhat makes the point.
A properly prepared phone is a map and compass, it does everything a map and compass can do and then adds an extra useful feature of "and this is exactly where you are"
I certainly use phone apps--including the Ordinance Survey app in the UK, which is very good. But if I'm hiking in an unfamiliar area, yes, I also do carry a map and compass because that seems like a low cost and effort backup. I'm absolutely not arguing against using a smartphone app as primary navigation. But I do also encourage having backup.
Similiarly I am not arguing against people using a map and compass, but I think the current advice which is entirely focused on map and compass with little guidance for phone users (which if it exists, is always caveated) has a lot more to do with outdoors peoples notions of technological purity and less to do with public health
The ten essentials or whatever you want to call them are probably rather outdated.
I still think throwing a map and compass in your pack and having at least a bare minimum knowledge of how to use them is useful insurance in an unfamiliar area. But understanding mostly simple processes/backups for GPS is quite important as well. Details vary by circumstance/weather/etc. but simple steps in terms of downloading maps/having backup chargers/even a backup device/etc. are useful and I don't think have generally made it into basic hiking safety advice.
It's really hard at this point to credibly argue that "the ten essentials" don't include a smartphone.
I do it all the time and never met anybody else do it. Rather everybody happily relies on online maps.
Do you think widespread offline use is the case?
I agree that to most map and compass are rather useless, but still slightly more useful compared to a phone with drained battery or no network coverage.
That's a good example of one way to reduce a pretty common failure mode.Lack of cell phone service is probably a lot more common than a dead phone especially if you carry a backup external battery. (Outside of extreme conditions but that's a separate matter.)
I think drained batteries and no network coverages are problems that can and should be addressed by advising people properly. Instead I think some people end up over prepared and most people go in with a map and a compass but still completely underprepared.
That's a serious exaggeration. Navigating with a map and compass was taught to 10-year-old kids in elementary school when I was that age, and then it was practiced a few times every year. Probably to ensure that men didn't waste too much time learning basic skills in mandatory military service.
I’m still not sure which one is more correct.
It really isn't. I did all that as a kid and still get hopelessly lost. Source: Experienced hiker, backpacker and mountain runner, over several continents.
Makes me think there is more to this. I suspect there are other major variables in play. I get hopelessly lost. My brother is exactly the opposite. He has special awareness and a sense of direction that is natural and innate. I think my issue is Aphantasia.
This makes me think the training is both reasonable and natural for some, and extremely difficult for others.
Pre-technology, tracking/navigation was a highly valued skillset, and seemingly evidence that some people were just much better at it than others if accounts of famous trackers/navigators are to be believed.
That implies that, while talent for it varies, it's difficult to do well.
You compete as pairs or more, so you always confirm compass bearings with each other, then confirm a target on the landscape.
Up thread, someone talks about low visibility in fog, but it's probably not too different from using a headlamp. You pick a bush or a stick if you have to, and try not to take your eyes off it.
The 24-hour events are the majors (state/national/international championships) but they also have 6-15 hour events plus 3-hour urban events for newcomers/families. Plus a cycling version. The 6 hour events are usually in pine forests with logging/walking trails so can suit rookies as well.
Two of my kids (9yo and 6yo) and I won the family category last year (no other family entered the 24 hour event! ;)) in our state championships. 40km in 24 hours. I let them sleep from 11pm until 6am, though to be honest my ankles needed the rest too.
It's not all brawn either. People stay competitive into their 70s. Mixed or female teams are always at or near the top. Some 13yo girls came second in one 6hr event a few years back (they just ran the entire time but got beaten by semi-pro marathon runners). You can finish near the top by walking quickly or trotting, but picking a good route, being careful with map and compass, etc - no one characteristic wins the 24 hour events.
Actually, i was agreeing with the GP, so it's at least 2 v 1 ;-)
But I'll also note that I only know a handful of people that drive around without putting on their GPS. The people that use GPS tend to be bad at navigating without it. The people that don't use GPS tend to be better.
I'm not sure why this is controversial, given that we could rewrite the headline as "Study shows that those that practice spacial skills are better at spacial skills." The fact that everyone is arguing here seems a bit silly to me.
Some people are talking about situations that would be very challenging without GPS--low visibility/no trails--and I'd just say that I'd definitely want backup in those conditions. I wouldn't want to depend on a single phone.
That's definitely an interesting anecdote. Just to double check - I assume this is when you're on the same trail, right? So the terrain/trail difficulty isn't a factor here?
I do a lot of casual hiking, and can see places that have basically no affordance and no permanent paths for kilometers. I would be completely lost without GPS giving me my current position, and can’t see what I would use to derive that just from a map and a compass. People doing it the old fashion way probably keep track of the sun position as they walk and somewhat have a sense of the distance they moved, but that’s way beyond “just use a map and a compass” territory.
Then a lot of people hike in the mountains with named paths and a clear view of the other peaks, which makes it a lot more trivial than other situations, for instance.
As my partner put it when discussing a group of fell runners - they all talk about navigating via compass, but in reality they just use gps all the time.
Until fairly recently I navigated entirely by map. The maps in the U.K. are slightly inaccurate despite their reputation, so even on a good day I’d make small mistakes. I switched to a phone map so I didn’t have to carry a big cumbersome physical map with me, and then I realised the value of gps. I’ve hiked in low visibility since when I would have definitely have gotten lost without gps - a gazillion criss crossing trails, high erosion, long flat featureless moorland with no landmarks whatsoever… challenging on a good day.
And the other one is adults getting lost while hiking in difficult terrain/weather.
Teachers have genuine interest in all kids getting back reasonably fast and all kids learning something. Teachers try to pick terrain with just right difficulty for kids. The kids get to exercise a bit of navigation, learn something in safe setup. That is not the same as adult hiker in random place.
Last month I took a trip to the swiss alps, and planned out a route with a topo map to try and link up some minor peaks off trail. Got to the first peak and realized the section I thought was a fairly steep, maybe tricky 3rd class, was actually well in to 4th class terrain and I had no chance. All because I misread the map!
Sure, it's different, but it's hardly difficult. I was a boy scout and was doing it regularly at 10 years old. The scoutmasters would hide caches of things (candy/toys/etc) in the woods somewhere and we were given compasses + paper maps only, not that there was anything else we would have reasonably had back in those days.
I was never much of a scout, but the best advice I ever got was go downhill. If you find water, follow the water down. People live downhill. people use water. Finding somebody, anybody, means food and shelter. There are a handful of box canons in the world where this doesn't work, but like, you should know that there is one nearby before the outset. And even if you fall into the box canyon trap, you know where you are.
Yeah, for any casual hiker that goes way off into the woods, first, you're and idiot. Second, why are you wearing cotton? Third, go downhill.
Do you climb up to an exposed area in the mountains to figure out where you are? While a storm rolls in?
Or, do you stay roughly where you are, lower down, and try to use map to locate yourself?
Regardless, yeah, wandering off in the woods unprepared is dangerous. and it's easy to get hurt and have worse things happen.
A lot more expensive than using a GPS.
There is no “navigate by gps” sport, because that is the easy one.
When I was in school, in the 90s and 00s, in Australia, we did this maybe a handful of times throughout my entire education. Not a single time that I can recall we actually managed to navigate correctly.
Theoretically navigating with a map and compass is not hard, but I sure as shit would not want my life depending on my ability to do so.
Navigating with a low resolution map without a good view of peaks/valleys is hard enough... but if you don't realize magnetic north is off (or correct the wrong direction), it's easy to end up lost.
Would you rather rely on your phone that hasn't been charged for two days?
Actually, the situation is not even a trade-off. There is no dichotomy. When you use both, you simply gain a convenient extra layer of redundancy.
Yeah, but most of them still consistently sucked at it. The elementary school terrain was picked so that it is as easy as possible, with zero possibility to get lost or confused.
Just following a route is easy, in comparison.
You can still get a little lost if you happen to find a road that's not on the map on your way to the road that is or something of the sort, but usually it's pretty obvious.
This indeed, when navigating a city I always found that I understood 'distances'.
When navigating in nature I tend to really overestimate how much ground I have covered. You are usually moving at snail speed on the typical scale of a topo map.
Getting some intuition on distance covered per unit of time is in my view the missing skill to have when orientering. You need to have a good estimate of casual hike velocity and fast hike velocity to better not underestimate distances.
If your devices become available or unusable, a map and compass are way more likely to get you home safe. Also, it's not that hard to read a map.
Yes, maps can blow away or you can simply be in conditions where it's difficult to read them. But there's a lot of casualness in this thread about how "I'll always have my phone" that seems unwise for anything that's not very casual.
For the vast majority of situations we're not talking GPS vs. Olympic level orienteering. We're talking about whether you should take trail A or B and whether you're headed approximately N or S.
no one seems to realize now-a-days that using devices has that same skill window.
my father would be useless with a phone and gps app, but with the right charts and a sextant he can find his way around the sea.
in other words : navigating is difficult, and the tools you choose to use, be it GPS and electronics or the sun/compass/sextant require practice regardless.
There is a huge difference in how hard it is to look at map and figure out where you are with a compass than it is to look and a map and figure out where you are because there is a big dot exactly where you are.
Expanding, most navigation apps in the name of preserving "user experience" will actively hide when they fail to work. They won't mention that signal is lost and instead they'll dead recon you within the confines of the road or path you were last in. GMaps will go a step further and simply guess where you just turned at a junction... which is extremely confusing when wrong and the main reason I'm no longer using Gmaps for my car.
I guess what I'm trying to say is this: do not, under any circumstances, mistake your consumer smartphone with stock navigation apps as a reliable navigation device. Especially when getting lost might cost you your life.
Navigating an urban area with named streets doesn't even need a map and compass, just a map is fine, and it is something most people in developed countries did up until about two decades ago when car GPS units began to roll out.
I've walked in Scotland, including in low cloud/fog/torrential rain, and would suggest that to be following a phone screen's "directions" while walking in almost zero visibility would be foolhardy in the extreme.
Can you expand on that? I have done this using mapy.cz and AlpineQuest dozens of times in the last ten years. The only exceptions for me has been in sub zero conditions where I want to keep my phone battery warm and on mountain tops, so I take compass bearings from the phone app and follow the bearing. I have found following anything on a phone sketchy on mountain summits in the past because you will have turned around and lost your orientation. A bearing resolves that.
All other times though, I find it incredibly useful. Also, I like to use AlpineQuest to track where I have been in a low power way by recording my location once a minute - this helps me to keep a mental picture of where I am on the map should the phone die. I also have a paper map which fortunatelly I've only needed a couple of times when the temperature is too low for the phone.
I've just pulled up the summit of Snowdon on mapy.cz[0] to find something we can compared with a traditional 1:25000 walking map of the same area, an extract from the OS Explorer map can be found on page 5 of this PDF[1]
To my mind, the difference is very striking.
If you are stuck in the outdoors in poor visibility, every feature on the map can be useful. mapy.cz gives a good overview of the summit and the routes to and from it, but compared with the OS map there is a lot of detail missing. Not least contour lines!
[0] https://en.mapy.cz/zakladni?x=-4.0756102&y=53.0701102&z=17 [1] https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/documents/resources/map-rea...
Heres a screenshot from the app [0]. I wouldn't normally have it in landscape, but I've tried to make it as similar as possible to the Ordnance Survey example you gave.
In my opinion, the only downside is that mapy.cz uses the local place names, so you get Yr Wyddfa instead of Snowdon. Fortunatelly, you can still search for Snowdon and get taken there. But the local names can be confusing - I wish they had the option to have English names.
I also should add that mapy.cz doesn't give you bearings so I still have AlpineQuest for that.
I know someone who can go anywhere once without GPS and recall directions 10 years later even if they never drove near that area again. It's like their memory can recall it the same as the first time they went there. At the same time watching them type on a keyboard is about the same as what it must have been like to witness humans using basic tools for the first time.
I've always been bad with driving directions, the idea of navigating in 3D from the first person doesn't mesh with how I think for recalling directions but if I look at a top down 2D map and split things into a grid then it's not too bad. I only just started using GPS the other week but I feel like it has helped me retain information a lot better, I can visualize the route in my mind and trace the turns with street names in a way that I could never do before.
Interestingly enough I don't think it's necessarily first person vs top down on its own too. I've played a lot of FPS games in the past with games that never had a top down map and I can still run through them mentally like 15-20 years later. I don't know what it is, it doesn't make sense to be tuned for navigating a virtual world vs physical world but I do think GPS clicks some checkbox in my brain that makes it be perceived as virtualized even though it's mapping the physical world.
Love this quote, and many others by MM. Utterly blows my mind how we seem to be failing to apply and extend his teachings to help understand this modernity beta test we're participating in.
Similarly you could say remembering phone numbers is a useless skill that many had pre smartphones - you just knew your 30 or so most used numbers. Now we all depend on our phones and once the battery is dead many people don't seem to know any number by heart.
There is Twitter for that
If I tweet, I can shoot out all of that nonsense to the world, secure in the knowledge that the filtering labor will be done in combination by some subset of potential recipients (whose choices to engage or not will provide the fodder that the Twitter feed-building algorithm can use to determine whether it's passed the filter).
This might then indicate that a skill that might be atrophying is the ability to filter one's own writing for relevance/value, not just to produce it in cursive.
I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine what other signs they would look for to confirm or disconfirm this hypothetical atrophy.
Email's interesting because there's traditionally been very little of that social-media-feed-style automatic sorting / filtering outside of spam (not that the "priority inbox" concept isn't trying) so the weight still properly lies on the sender to make the missive easy to handle. I too edit the bejesus out of all my work emails, but it's a different skill than having to compose a coherent first draft without easy edits.
The actual hardest thing to go paperless is math. When they teach strategies and ask to "show your work" there's no easy way to type it.
Reminds me of Tips for Mathematical Handwriting:
Ellul, Mumford, McLuhan, Postman and Illich constitute (accessible [1]) Technological Critique 101. I think they are essential reading for anyone who claims to be a "technologist" and wants to deeply understand the anthropological relations of humans and our technology.
[1] Without digging into Heidegger and more difficult stuff.
I get the point, but I think "amputates" is the wrong word, like user "tootie" below who said "obviates" is the right word, but was downvoted into greyville. Tootie is right: it alleviates the need for something. It doesn't kill it entirely.
When the technology breaks, we still need to communicate. So yes, teach people how to write their language (or more!) But cursive writing has always been notoriously riddled difficulties due to individual hiccups in style. I agree everyone should know how to write in the simplest form: printing English/European languages, simplified Chinese, etc. But flourishy cursive is only readable by people who wrote it with artistic skills, or kids that were drilled for hours and hours on end, when there is plenty of other more important stuff for them to learn, IMHO.
Personally, I use GPS almost every time I drive, so that I get advance notice of slowdowns and congestion. And yet I know the region I live in better than most other drivers I know.
Similar to this is the fact that it is always easier to navigate home than to a new place. In the former, you are aiming for the web of roads that you recognize. In the latter, it is a specific point.
And then we got into the French roundabouts. I gave up close to Orleans. We wanted to get off the highway and use a smaller road, for sightseeing, it's only that I literally re-created this infamous scene [1] with the only difference that there were 3 or 4 roundabouts in quick succession involved, not a big one. I almost had tears of frustration, I'm not exaggerating, but thanks to my SO who started co-piloting me with "take the second exit in the next roundabout" and stuff like that we managed to get out of it all. After a few days driving through France I think I managed to get the hang of those roundabouts without using GPS, but it wasn't easy.
Another fun one from a different trip. We were in a French town that had an underground parking garage. We enter the garage, it's packed with cars and we think 'great, we'll be here a few days and won't need the car'. A few days later is a Sunday and we head over to the garage to leave and...the whole garage is sealed up like a bomb shelter. It's closed on Sundays. I had never seen this in a US garage b/c normally if they closed at all they would just open the gates.
After walking around a bit, I was able to translate enough French to find a call button. 20 minutes later I managed to get an attendant to come let me out. The garage looked like something from a zombie movie - pitch black dark and 1 or 2 cars left.
I always check the times on parking garages now.
The first time I turned three corners and ended up in a different place it feels like my brain threw the desk up at the idea that 3D space had euclidean rules, and I’ve been struggling ever since.
Of course I still continue to enjoy those types of games, so it’s not like a single game did all the damage.
Another great one is The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe. [1] Initially, the game doesn't play around with spatial disorientation much, but certain branches of the narrative really lean into it in a delightfully satirical way.
Finally, Superliminal [2] explores some similar concepts to Antichamber but with a very different approach.
There a plenty more examples, but hopefully that gives you a jumping off point to see that gameplay in action. I thoroughly enjoyed all three!
[0] - https://store.steampowered.com/app/219890/Antichamber/
[1] - https://store.steampowered.com/app/1703340/The_Stanley_Parab...
[2] - https://store.steampowered.com/app/1049410/Superliminal/
So fascinating to see such opposite recommendations for these games! I'm not sure whether to try them, or run away haha.
I also have aphantasia, so perhaps that's somehow related? I don't physically create a map in my head, I just have an innate sense of where things should be after familiarizing myself with a particular area.
Perhaps since I don't physically create a map in my head, the disassociation between what is expected and what is actually happening in front of me for games like that doesn't create the same level of cognitive dissonance? Just spitballing here haha.
Personally, if I could go back and change it I’d still play them knowing what I know now. I would probably also keep a better eye on my brain and try to teach it to play games and trust euclidean space, but besides getting lost “in the old days” it hasn’t hurt me that bad
Unfortunately I looked and can’t figure out it’s name or even which system it was on (hopefully others can help), but here are the details that I still have:
It had blocky graphics but decent for the time. 3rd person over the shoulder. For some reason the image of a Roman helmet comes to mind but was the character wearing it? Was it a prop?...
You were in (a house?) and it seemed normal for most of the game. But then bit by bit your character went insane and you saw the world the way they were. It genuinely caught me off-guard when a bust on a shelf suddenly moved enough to be noticeable. Then other things changed, and paths didn’t lead where they were supposed to. I don’t know if I even passed that game, but it sticks out as possibly the first time my internal “rules of available directions” were broken.
Since then I’ve played with all sorts of non-euclidean things. From 4D Rubik’s cubes to VR environments that are nothing like the real world. Great fun, fascinating, and at times an enjoyable kind of confusing.
“..allow players infinite movement within their own place.“
You have to play roomscale and with only walking (+ elevators) for movement you explore huge procedurally-generated structures. It even adapts to the size of your play space.
Do I remember a lower percentage of the facts I have encountered in life than others? Almost certainly. But I also bet that I have encountered vastly more as a result.
Correct. And that's a problem.
The "wishing you had it" part is actually really important.
Creativity and understanding isn't just assembling a jigsaw puzzle of discrete information facts. Holding together a mental model, including many partial and missing pieces of information, is how innovative leaps occur.
A Google driven life, treading over popular, permitted pathways is comfortable and convenient but requires only some small fraction of the adult human brain. More is not necessarily more when it comes to information.
So, I don't think that "kids these days" negativity towards GPS is entirely justified. Navigating by compass and map isn't trivial, but you can learn it if you need to.
Without GPS, I can navigate to places several hours from where I live currently, that I would go frequently in high school, before I had a smart phone or standalone GPS. I kept a printed set of MapQuest directions to popular destinations under my passenger seat in those days.
I recently purchased a bare bones GPS for my motorcycle [0] that only displays the direction of the next turn, how far away it is, and roughly how far along the trip I am. I've found that after going to a destination once or twice with that method, it's much more committed to memory.
I am reminded of the pilot control handover procedure, where you exchange control explicitly by saying "Your airplane", "my airplane". If you were giving me directions and then assume I have got the rest if the way, you have hand the task back over!
I want to speak German, I don't want to use Google Translate.
I want to know where Hackney is, I don't want to just plug it into Citymapper.
Works for me. Some people don't like self actualization, so be it.
As soon as I forced myself to find the way without using the GPS it was completely different, I actually figured out the landmarks in my head.
We still use the GPS a lot but it's always worth knowing that you don't really know where something is until you can drive there without the GPS.
Each mission starts with an npc giving you the location of your target (safehouse 2 miles east of shanty town, outpost south of lumber yard). Sun can be used as a compass (when it's not raining). After a while you start to recognize the landmarks and don't need the map anymore.
Personally, I don't ever use GPS unless I'm lost. When I'm going someplace new I plan the route using mapping software before I get in the car. I sketch a quick map of the important parts of the routes (particularly street names, major intersections, exit numbers, etc.) Sketching this map commits the major details to memory, then I put the map in my pocket. If I need to refresh my memory then I'll pull over to check my sketched map. I only need to use GPS if I find myself outside of my map. In these cases I'll pull over to use the GPS to locate myself and plot a route back to my planned route. I never use turn-by-turn directions, because I think driving like that is unsafe.
I know this is unusual. Somebody once called me a psychopath because I don't listen to music or the radio while driving either. I don't want to zone out while driving, mindlessly following turn-by-turn directions or listening to some song. I think everybody else is just too cavalier about distractions while driving.
How does this answer the other commenter's point?
If the grocery store is 2 miles away, wouldn't you rather be routed an alternative route at one mile distance away by GPS that "knows" there's terrible traffic congestion the remaining two blocks of the current route? Especially if those two blocks are after a couple of turns which block your view of them?
Anyway, I think you probably burn more time dicking around with your phone than you could ever save by avoiding traffic on the way to a grocery store that, if you're in a city, is probably within walking distance anyway.
The way you describe it, I would think your "route" is just one long stretch on a single street. In almost every normal case, I may not know there's an accident at one intersection until I turn onto the street two blocks away.
Also, opening Google or Apple maps with traffic mode turned on takes maybe half a minute at most, which is about the amount of time it takes my car to finish its cold start warm-up before I can start driving.
I decided to try my luck with the regular route, thinking it couldn't possibly be that bad. Every exit, the map tried to get me off the highway but I just kept on driving the normal route, nervously hoping that I wasn't dooming myself to a 20-minute traffic jam.
I made it home in the normal amount of time without encountering any unusual traffic and only then did I realize I had accidentally enabled "no highways."
Maybe typesystems negatively impacted my ability to reason about dynamic code? (I'm actually a bit torn on this)
I think type systems definitely make your brain less paranoid about doing all the manual checking that you'd need to do with dynamic code. Whether that's a net positive / negative depends on the overall results: Can / will the mental effort you would have spent being paranoid about dynamic code be usefully spent somewhere else? Are there other side benefits to the effort you have to make with dynamic code that you're losing when you used a type system? Are you less thorough about testing, for instance? Does keeping the entire system in your head mean you are more aware of the overall architecture? Does it help encourage you to keep the architecture simple? Or does the that fact that you have to keep it simple limit the possibilities?
In programming I prefer the most sound route to get to my destination. I think typesystems greatly help me with that by giving me warnings and errors when I take the wrong path.
In real life I usually only prefer to get to a destination so I use the GPS as I know it can get the fastest route better than me most of the time.
If I want to explore a city to find interesting places I don't use a GPS and resort to walking around. When I found an interesting place I will mark it down in google maps and maybe use a GPS next time I go there.
If I want to explore an idea with programming the code I write tends to be less sound and more dynamic, when I know what I want I'd refactor the code to be more sound and less dynamic.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/june-huh-high-school-dropout-...
Still, idk how people were driving here before gps maps, what with five-road crossings, and six-lane ‘guess your lane’ junctions with exits in non-obvious directions, and the old districts with streets packed tighter than GPS accuracy (of yesteryear), and the one-way streets going whatever which way.
However, even so I find it very amusing that the literal only place where I'm very confused by the map is the town where I grew up. I'm very not-used to seeing it from above, can't find the landmarks on the map, and usually I'm not sure where north is exactly. I can't recognize it. Any other place where I lived I have learned on the map first, so it's fine. But not my hometown.
So obviously the reverse would probably be true.
I remember I used to chunk numbers in 3 to 4 digit groupings because back in the day that was how I naturally memorized phone numbers, successive generations probably can't rely on that tactic as much simply because there's so little need to retain the phone numbers in memory with the invention of smart phones.
I feel like the implication of a lot of these articles is "people aren't learning X thing that's not essential now, and instead are learning TikTok Memes." Which may not be wrong, but how much of a problem actually is that? Obviously, a century ago, there was no slack for almost anyone to not carry their weight in society. Everyone needed to know how to farm and start a fire, and plenty of other things most people don't know any more. Pre-teens had to work important jobs because otherwise people didn't eat. Obviously things have swung away from that, but the question is how far away from that is a good thing vs. just allowing people to indulge in vices.
It's not that you can't do it, but I think we learn why bother with it when the little box does it. At some subconscious level?
But this begs the question why is losing this is bad when we can use our brains for something completely different or make peoples jobs more productive
The first five or ten times, I use the GPS because the path is unusual or new.
After that, I know it and don't need GPS anymore.
GPS is like the teacher, that shows you the best routes. You learn the lesson and go on.
There's also the old movie/TV trope where, typically, the guy refuses to stop at a gas station to ask for directions if they're lost. Which has now (mostly) joined the trope of not being able to reach someone just because they're not in the physical location you expect them to be.
Yes, you'll get lost occasionally, but that's ok. You'll still have the GPS if you get hopelessly lost and give up.
[1] Socrates.
Myself, I don't feel need to remember a route I'm going to take once or twice in a lifetime. Also in Europe cities aren't easily navigable and one actually has to spend a lot of effort to navigate big city without nav.
It doesn't make a lot of sense, especially if city is constantly changing either. If you visit some place every 3 months you're mostly guaranteed that you're going to have to take other route to the destination (construction work, film crew locking roads, infrastructure changes etc.)
Nowadays GPS providers react much faster to the changes in infrastructures than city does, too (re-routing due to blockage is good example).
Anecdotally - if I drive somewhere as passenger I have no memory of the route neither. In order to get to know place I need to drive there by myself (without GPS) or, best, walk around or study map.