Global Impositioning Systems

Of course, they also suggest that we can decline, and that’s why Iaria, too, has reservations about gps. “It’s an amazing tool, and I’m so grateful we have this kind of technology for people that need it,” he says. “At the same time, I don’t think it’s a tool that we may want to use every day for fun. Because then you don’t think about your environment, you don’t look at it, you don’t care about it.” He often encounters people who believe they have terrible navigation skills but who turn out to perform perfectly well on his tests. It may be, for example, that their spouses always drive, so they have no reason to pay attention to their routes and consequently never know where they are. That’s an attention problem, not a navigation problem.

Iaria himself, after years of studying the vagaries of human navigation, has become a good man to have at your side on a trip to points unknown. When he encounters new places, he knows which features to seek out to get oriented. He’ll find the tallest building or landmark, and remember what it looks like from different perspectives. And he can give people good directions in whatever navigational language they happen to speak, whether by referring to landmarks, compass directions, distances, or street names. But that doesn’t mean finding his bearings is an obsession. “You know, I lived in Paris, and to me one of the most beautiful things was just getting lost sometimes in these very small streets, and having a coffee and a cigarette with strangers, and going back trying to find your way,” he says. “These days, there are very few moments you actually have the freedom to get lost.”

Alex Hutchinson received a Canadian Institutes of Health Research Journalism Award to support his research into the neuroscience of navigation.

Online exclusive: “Does my sense of direction suck?” Alex Hutchinson ponders the effect of GPS technology on human sense of direction in this special video report.