The headline seems like the most obvious thing in the world to me. I'm glad it's proved by science, but I have never been able to find my way home without Google, if Google told me how to get here, or if my friend in the passenger seat did the navigating.
As a parent, if I only do things for my kids instead of watching them do it themselves, then I will always be the one doing.
> if I only do things for my kids instead of watching them do it themselves, then I will always be the one doing.
Honestly, if I had a dollar for every time a student (this is a college) who was unable to function in a classroom or public space, because their parents either bulldozed every obstacle, or (and this happens more than you'd think) did their actual homework for them starting at an early age, I'd have like $200.
I know it doesn't sound like a lot.
But, there are a number of parents who prescribe to the parenting tradition of - the child should never meet an obstacle, for fear of their self-esteem. This includes homework, negative feedback, or any extra-curricular the child is not immediately amazing at.
By the time these kids get to me, they are literally unable to function as adults in a public space.
> I have never been able to find my way home without Google, if Google told me how to get here, or if my friend in the passenger seat did the navigating.
Are you able to say "I came from the west, I'm going to go west until I find a road I'm familiar with, and then follow that to an area I'm familiar with, and then get home from there"?
I can understand not being able to find a place you've been before if you weren't navigating the first time, but to find it difficult to get back home seems very alien to me. But then I don't use a GPS very often.
These navigating skills are something you typically develop when either navigating yourself or using a static/printed map. You learn how things are relatively positioned to one another and spatial relations, relative directions, absolute directions and so forth. These are sometimes referred to as 'cognitive artifacts' -- skills you've developed or inherited from some device where the information/knowledge and techniques somewhat been embedded in the system and your brain sort of develops these as base skills. Those devices often instill many years of knowledge and evolved over time give you the best ways of navigating yourself, from generations of other navigators.
When you use a modern GPS navigation system does all of these processes for you (albeit a bit differently because computer mapping typically navigates a bit differently than your brain would navigate). I now have literal verbal directions when I should turn left. I have no idea what's around me or what I should expect to see in terms of global landmarks or reference points. I rarely even pay attention to the position of the sun. I have no relative or absolute orientations I'm keeping track of, I only have decision points on a network where something tells me which branch to take when I come upon it--highly localized. Much of the useful cognitive artifacts from a standard map are completely lost in these contexts. You never needed to develop the skills and therefor never did.
I grew up well before the GPS age so it also seems foreign to me that there are people who can't navigate without one. I generally know to a pretty good degree of accuracy the cardinal directions (N,S,E,W) and if I've been somewhere once I can generally find it again. It would be interesting to do brain scans on people of different ages while they're doing spatial navigation to see the differences in the brains of those who grew up with GPS vs those who didn't.
Not the OP, but I grew up in a mountainous Appalachian town. I always thought I was terrible at navigating, until I moved to a Midwestern town with a grid layout. Suddenly, I'm pretty good!
In my hometown, it was incredibly difficult for me to make a mental map—a westward turn on an unknown road could very easily have you going East! The road layouts were haphazard and organic, something I love when walking, but much more stressful when driving across the rural sprawl. I basically only drove between places that I'd already been, and relied on a GPS for anything else.
No I'm not saying to blindly go where no man has gone before.
Just... just give it a try. I think you'll surprise yourself. Besides, having a GPS in your pocket at all times makes it safer to get lost than it was in the Rand McNally days.
I don't understand your point. I never use a GPS to navigate, and I've gotten plenty lost. Six months ago, while aimlessly exploring westward on my motorcycle to get some air at the beginning of quarantine I went down a road I was familiar with a different segment of. I did not realize the road went through some strange twists (with no exit) where I got on it this time, and by the time I was able to get off of it, I was completely disoriented. My attempts to correct got me even more disoriented, to the point where I was relying on the sun so I would at least know the cardinal direction I was heading in. My original thinking that getting my bearings would be trivial caused me to make quick decisions that left me so confused that I couldn't even retrace my route back to the road that originally discombobulated me. I didn't want to ask for directions because I was afraid of the virus. I ended up pulling into a hardware store's parking lot, and calling my mother who lives in a different state asking her to google map the hardware store by name so she could point me back in the direction of the city where I live. I had managed to get over an hour away from my house, meaning that almost every decision I made was wrong.
I can't say it wasn't a nice ride, though. But my point is that people are not homing pigeons. I'm very good at navigating generally, but a couple of bad decisions can compound. That's how people get lost in the woods. If your commute is complicated, the way you actually end up memorizing it is by screwing it up a bunch of times.
For your original question, I guess it's a little bit hyperbolic to say that I can't find my way home. I like to think that my sense of direction is fine. It would be more accurate to say that I can't find my way to an unfamiliar place a second time, if I didn't manage my own navigation the first time.
Totally. Just recently I started showing my kid how to get somewhere they goes often. I lead the way the first 5 times and the 6th made them lead. They had no clue where to go, so instead I made them guess and if they were wrong I would correct them. 7th day they took me on their own without any assistance.
I only did this because of what you said; anytime I rely on Google Maps to get me somewhere, I never really know where to go until I find my own way there.
I think it’s similar to how teaching something makes you understand it better.
You can get the same effect much less painfully by having your kid go there themselves, without you.
When I was learning to drive, my dad was remarkably disturbed that, despite never having had to go anywhere myself, I didn't know how to go anywhere. So he made me try to find my way home while he sat in the passenger seat watching. In a totally predictable development, I ran a red light under stress and got a ticket, months before even getting a driver's license.
As a parent, if I only do things for my kids instead of watching them do it themselves, then I will always be the one doing.