Really good essay about GPS here:

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publicatio…

Used to be that navigation was built into the act of driving - being aware of your surroundings, checking your mirrors, looking at landmarks. Now for GPS users, navigation is unbundled from the attentiveness. That leads to some distraction, sure, when trying to follow your GPS directions, but it also has a more interesting implication on the notion of driving somewhere to enjoy the drive, the mystique of the open road, or even getting to know a place as Charles suggests.

Anyway, good read.

I originally read this as GSP and wondered why Charles was making a post about MMA.

Some problems with this:

Cabdrivers are not normal people. My hippocampus isn't larger than normal, by definition.

Also, London cabbies are not even normal cabdrivers. They are required to undergo a very long, very rigorous exam process called "The Knowledge" that can take as long as a decade to acquire. You see prospective ones, going around the city on scooters with A-Zs open in front of them. They are expected to be able to know the best route between literally ANY two of the thousands of streets in London, and will be extensively tested. It is a larger amount of sheer information than most professions, including a lot of doctors and lawyers. It's not surprising that their brains are altered. Doesn't say anything about me, or even about a Seattle cabbie.

Cabdrivers may use GPS in unfamiliar areas but are unlikely to ever depend on it in places they know well, because personal knowledge is always better than GPS.

Personal knowledge is better than GPS for normal people too. The first thing I did when I got my GPS-enabled phone was try it out on my usual routes, just for fun. It got them mostly wrong, even for the most basic routes, like "U Village to home" (spectacularly wrong for that one). But even when it was right, why would I use it? I already know how to get to the Ballard Market. Net effect on my brain: nil.

I love using Google Navigate on my phone, which is the spoken turn-by-turn directions. For one, I often will know how to get near a place but not know the last few turns well. I also like intentionally fucking it up and making it re-route beause, well, that's really cool.
But mostly I like how it helps me learn a place when I don't have to frantically pay attention to my badly handwritten notes or printed out directions and can pay attention to landmarks and the like. I feel I've learned much more about how to get around my city with the aid of the GPS, and that I don't rely on it for routes after I've learned them.

While moving into my dorm room a year or two back, my parents and I were asked by a cabdriver in which direction the Red Line was.

You mean the cab driver actually spoke English, VL? That's a new one on me.

Good thing they don't have accents like the ones in America.

But too much MDMA will do that to you.

This whole BBC study further begs the question of what sort of deleterious effect the use of spiral bound road atlases and foldable city maps have on the human brain. Perhaps it can be broken down to a comparison between the degrees of cranial atrophy incurred by using said street maps and their digital counterparts.

Urbanity is just as artificial as computability.

One requires the other.

But without the first, the second is irrelevant.

If the cabbies in Seattle didn't have gps, they would all just drive in circles around belltown regardless of where you told them to go. Worst cab service of any goddamn city.
@4, that is verrry interesting about London cabbies. Explains quite a bit.