Axios: Explore this … and remember. Taxi Drivers in London study is worth noting. Check out Professor Eleanor Maguire, sadly RIP. Also Demis Hassabis worked with her.

Posted on September 16, 2026 by michelleclarke2015
Get a little lost
 
Photo illustration of a navigation icon on an old maritime style map with monsters all along the edges that say
Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios. Stock: Getty Images
 
This summer’s epic blockbuster, “The Odyssey,” is a story about getting lost.

Three thousand years later, we’ve gotten remarkably good at avoiding it, Natalie Daher writes.

Why it matters: Our dependence on GPS may be making navigation easier while giving our brains less practice doing it ourselves. Notice landmarks, orient ourselves in space and build what researchers call a “cognitive map.”

🧠 How it works: Mary Hegarty, a psychologist who leads UC Santa Barbara’s Spatial Thinking Lab, told Love that cognitive mapping draws on “place cells” in the hippocampus — neurons associated with specific physical locations.

GPS, however, encourages a simpler habit — to follow the instruction. Turn left. Go 500 feet. Turn right.

Hegarty cautions that there isn’t enough evidence to say GPS is damaging our brains. But research cited by The New Yorker has found that people relying more heavily on GPS tend to remember routes and landmarks less well.

🏃🏻‍♀️ I got a tiny taste of this on my fourth annual family vacation to the same house in Springs, N.Y., last month.

For the first time, I set out for a favorite running trail, wedged between a harbor and a bay, without following a map on my phone.

It was left, right, left, right. Nothing groundbreaking, but confidence-boosting nonetheless.

🧭 I trusted my internal compass, and I realized it had been quite a while since I’d traveled somewhere less familiar without peeking at a screen to figure out where I was. I took in some familiar sights along the way: leisurely bikers, a Little Free Library, an inlet to a tiny beach.

👀That may be the bigger point. Love tried something more ambitious: navigating her way from Brooklyn to Queens and then through an orienteering course in Alley Pond Park.

What struck her wasn’t some suddenly awakened superpower, but the exercise of skills that technology can dull: “paying attention, being patient, accepting uncertainty.”

📍 The bottom line: We shouldn’t throw away Google Maps. But every once in a while, it’s worth looking up from the blue dot and finding our own way.
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About michelleclarke2015

Life event that changes all: Horse riding accident in Zimbabwe in 1993, a fractured skull et al including bipolar anxiety, chronic fatigue …. co-morbidities (Nietzche 'He who has the reason why can deal with any how' details my health history from 1993 to date). 17th 2017 August operation for breast cancer (no indications just an appointment came from BreastCheck through the Post). Trinity College Dublin Business Economics and Social Studies (but no degree) 1997-2003; UCD 1997/1998 night classes) essays, projects, writings. Trinity Horizon Programme 1997/98 (Centre for Women Studies Trinity College Dublin/St. Patrick's Foundation (Professor McKeon) EU Horizon funded: research study of 15 women (I was one of this group and it became the cornerstone of my journey to now 2017) over 9 mth period diagnosed with depression and their reintegration into society, with special emphasis on work, arts, further education; Notes from time at Trinity Horizon Project 1997/98; Articles written for Irishhealth.com 2003/2004; St Patricks Foundation monthly lecture notes for a specific period in time; Selection of Poetry including poems written by people I know; Quotations 1998-2017; other writings mainly with theme of social justice under the heading Citizen Journalism Ireland. Letters written to friends about life in Zimbabwe; Family history including Michael Comyn KC, my grandfather, my grandmother's family, the O'Donnellan ffrench Blake-Forsters; Moral wrong: An acrimonious divorce but the real injustice was the Catholic Church granting an annulment – you can read it and make your own judgment, I have mine. Topics I have written about include annual Brain Awareness week, Mashonaland Irish Associataion in Zimbabwe, Suicide (a life sentence to those left behind); Nostalgia: Tara Hill, Co. Meath.
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