The following article in the Washington Post has interesting implications for the future of today’s society as we enter the world of 5G and the Internet of Things (IoT), where more and more of our thinking, and most importantly, our children’s, is done for us by our devices. How will, what has been called the Google Effect, change they way we think and our ability to think independently of our devices? A shrinking brain perhaps?… From the Washington Post By M.R. O’Connor June 5 Excerpts: M.R. O’Connor is a journalist who writes about science, technology and ethics, and is the author, most recently, of “Wayfinding: The Science and Mystery of How Humans Navigate the World.”It has become the most natural thing to do: get in the car, type a destination into a smartphone, and let an algorithm using GPS data show the way. Personal GPS-equipped devices entered the mass market in only the past 15 or so years, but hundreds of millions of people now rarely travel without them. These gadgets are extremely powerful, allowing people to know their location at all times, to explore unknown places and to avoid getting lost.But they also affect perception and judgment. When people are told which way to turn, it relieves them of the need to create their own routes and remember them. They pay less attention to their surroundings. And neuroscientists can now see that brain behavior changes when people rely on turn-by-turn directions. In a study published in Nature Communications in 2017, researchers asked subjects to navigate a virtual simulation of London’s Soho neighborhood and monitored their brain activity, specifically the hippocampus, which is integral to spatial navigation. Those who were guided by directions showed less activity in this part of the brain than participants who navigated without the device. “The hippocampus makes an internal map of the environment and this map becomes active only when you are engaged in navigating and not using GPS,” Amir-Homayoun Javadi, one of the study’s authors, told me.The hippocampus is crucial to many aspects of daily life. It allows us to orient in space and know where we are by creating cognitive maps. It also allows us to recall events from the past, what is known as episodic memory. And, remarkably, it is the part of the brain that neuroscientists believe gives us the ability to imagine ourselves in the future.Studies have long shown the hippocampus is highly susceptible to experience. (London’s taxi drivers famously have greater gray-matter volume in the hippocampus as a consequence of memorizing the city’s labyrinthine streets.) Meanwhile, atrophy in that part of the brain is linked to devastating conditions, including post-traumatic stress disorder and Alzheimer’s disease. Stress and depression have been shown to dampen neurogenesis — the growth of new neurons — in the hippocampal circuit.What isn’t known is the effect of GPS use on hippocampal function when employed daily over long periods of time. Javadi said the conclusions he draws from recent studies is that “when people use tools such as GPS, they tend to engage less with navigation. Therefore, brain area responsible for navigation is less used, and consequently their brain areas involved in navigation tend to shrink.”.. SNIP
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