Your brain on GPS

[krissel]

QUOTE

IN JUNE, AL Byrd’s three-bedroom home, built by his father on the western outskirts of Atlanta, was mistakenly torn down by a demolition company. “I said, ‘Don’t you have an address?’” a distraught Byrd later recounted. “He said, ‘Yes, my GPS coordinates led me right to this address here.’” The incident joined a long list of satellite-guided blunders, including one last year in which a driver in Bedford Hills, N.Y., obeyed instructions from his GPS to turn right onto a set of train tracks, where he got stuck and had to abandon his car to a collision with a commuter train. Incredibly, the same thing happened to someone else at exactly the same intersection nine months later. In Britain, an insurance company survey found that 300,000 drivers have either crashed or nearly crashed because of GPS systems.

QUOTE

Navigation underlies the transformation of an abstract “space” to a “place” that has meaning and value to an individual. For the GPS users Leshed and her colleagues have observed, the virtual world on the screens of their devices seemed to take over from the real world that whizzed by outside. “Instead of experiencing physical locations, you end up with a more abstract representation of the world,” she says.

QUOTE

... has more concrete worries. She fears that overreliance on GPS will result in our using the spatial capabilities of the hippocampus less, and that it will in turn get smaller. Other studies have tied atrophy of the hippocampus to increased risk of dementia.

http://www.theweek.com/article/index/10250...ur_brain_on_GPS

I also ran across this:

QUOTE

Following GPS instructions at all costs
A Polish bus driver drove his bus into a lake because his satellite navigation system told him to. The driver was able to call police before the bus went fully underwater, and rescuers arrived to find the driver and his passengers balanced on the roof of the half-submerged vehicle. “There used to be a road there until last year,” said a police official. “It seems that the GPS hadn’t been updated.” Nevertheless, said the official, “it’s a huge lake, and it’s hard to imagine how you could ignore or not see it.”

[jwboyd]

It amazes me how some people so willingly turn their brains over to these devices. Using a GPS does not absolve one of the responsibility of paying attention to his/her driving.

Even scarier, some people seem willing to let other people do their thinking for them. "Nuff said, lest I get too political and violate our TS guidelines.

(My 2¢)

[Xairbusdriver]

I didn't understand all of what you quoted, Kriss. How does a GPS stunt the grow of  hippopotamus'?! OTOH, I have heard that they kill more people in Africa than any other cause! I guess we can just be glad that we don't have many of them in most of our area! But, if they get small enough, maybe they could become a new source of red meat, leather and ivory! See, there is always a silver lining to any dark cloud! Unless it's a computing cloud, of course...