GPS and the Lost Art of Getting Lost: What Turn-by-Turn Directions Did to Our Brains

The last time you drove somewhere unfamiliar, did you actually learn the route? Or did you follow a soft, confident voice through a maze of turns, arrive at your destination, and realise you couldn't retrace a single step of it?

Most of us, if we're honest, would tick the second box. In a little over two decades, satellite navigation has gone from a novelty bolted to the dashboard to something so embedded in daily life that we barely notice it. Google Maps opens itself. Apple Maps whispers the next turn. Even walking to a cafe three suburbs over now begins with a phone in the palm.

And, as a run of recent essays and reporting has argued, something in us has quietly changed to match.

The brain has a map — and it needs exercise

The scientific case against GPS dependence keeps coming back to one small, seahorse-shaped region: the hippocampus. As the CBC recently reported, neuroscientists have long known this part of the brain plays a central role in spatial navigation, and that using it — actively working out where you are and where you're going — appears to keep it in shape. Rely on turn-by-turn directions, and you essentially outsource the workout.

The New Yorker's recent essay on how GPS changed the way we think leans on the same body of research. When we navigate by following prompts, we're not building a mental model of a place. We're executing a sequence of instructions. The city, the bush track, the shopping strip — it all reduces to a series of blue arrows on a grey background. The richer cognitive map, the one earlier generations built almost involuntarily by getting lost and correcting, never quite forms.

The consequences aren't hypothetical. Studies cited in the coverage suggest heavy GPS users perform worse on spatial memory tasks and are less able to reconstruct routes without help. It's a familiar pattern: a tool that removes friction also removes the practice that friction demanded.

A very short history of never being lost

It's worth remembering how recent all this is. GPS was a Cold War military project, opened to civilians in stages through the 1980s and 90s and only really made portable in the 2000s. Before that, Australians drove interstate with a Gregory's or UBD street directory wedged between the seats, argued about which exit off the M1, and occasionally pulled over at a servo to ask.

That wasn't romantic — it was often stressful, and sometimes dangerous. But it demanded something. You had to hold the shape of a suburb in your head. You noticed landmarks: the pub on the corner, the odd-shaped roundabout, the jacaranda that flowered every November. You built, without meaning to, a working knowledge of the place you lived in.

The Spectator's essay on the lost art of getting lost makes the point that this kind of knowing wasn't just utilitarian. Wandering — genuinely not knowing where you were, and having to figure it out — was one of the ways people came to feel at home somewhere. Take away the possibility of being lost, and you also take away a particular kind of discovery: the wrong turn that leads to the good bakery, the shortcut through the park, the accidental view.

What we gained (and it's not nothing)

Before this becomes a lament, it's worth being honest about what GPS has given us. Fewer arguments in the car. Ambulances that find the right address. Rideshare drivers who can work a city they've only lived in for a month. Tourists who can walk out of a hotel in Tokyo or Rome without a phrasebook and a folded map.

For people with poor natural sense of direction — and there are plenty of us — GPS has been quietly liberating. It has made travel less intimidating and made unfamiliar places accessible in a way they weren't before. As several of the recent think-pieces acknowledge, the technology isn't the villain. The question is what we do alongside it.

The Big Picture's weekend reading round-up grouped the GPS story alongside other pieces about attention and cognition — a hint that this is part of a wider conversation about which mental muscles our devices are quietly retiring. Calculators, spellcheck, contact lists we no longer memorise, playlists we no longer curate. Navigation is just one more skill we've offered up in exchange for convenience.

The Australian angle: big country, small screen

There's a particular reason to think about this here. Australia is enormous, sparsely populated, and full of places where mobile coverage drops out without warning. Anyone who has driven the Nullarbor, taken the wrong track in the Flinders Ranges, or lost signal somewhere between Broken Hill and anywhere else, has been reminded that the little blue dot is not, in fact, infrastructure. It's a service that can fail.

The bush walking and four-wheel-driving communities have never really trusted it. Paper maps, compasses and PLBs remain standard kit for a reason. But for urban Australians — the majority — GPS has become the default even for trips of a few kilometres. Ask a Sydneysider to sketch the actual layout of their own suburb and the results can be humbling.

None of this is an argument for throwing your phone in the harbour. It is an argument for noticing that outsourcing navigation has a cost, and that the cost falls hardest in exactly the environments — remote, unmapped, weather-affected — where Australians most often find themselves.

How to give your inner compass a workout

The good news, as the CBC piece emphasised, is that spatial memory responds to training. You don't have to give up GPS to get some of it back. A few practical experiments:

The point of getting lost

The Spectator essay's title lingers because it names something most of us feel without articulating: being lost used to be part of being a person. Not lost as in stranded, but lost as in unsure — of where the street went, of what was around the next corner, of whether the pub was still open.

That uncertainty was uncomfortable, and it was also the raw material of a lot of ordinary discovery. It slowed you down. It made you look up from whatever you were carrying. It occasionally forced you to speak to a stranger.

GPS hasn't destroyed any of that. It has just made it optional, and most of us, most of the time, opt out. The interesting question — the one worth carrying into the next unfamiliar trip — is whether occasionally choosing the harder path might give back something the smooth one keeps taking.

Your hippocampus, for what it's worth, will thank you.

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