Getting Lost Is No Fun

When did it become fashionable to demonize GPS devices and navigation assistance? I have recently seen articles equating the use of GPS with burying one’s face in a smart phone 24/7 instead of connecting with in-the-flesh people, with living a virtual life playing electronic games all day while the actual sun is sparkling on the actual river, or with practicing Satanic rituals in the basement. I have read that GPS does everything from shrinking brain function, to impairing perception of the three-dimensional realm, to aggravating insomnia, to undermining the upkeep of street signs, to causing dementia, to resulting in an obsession with cheese. Even one of my most beloved writers, Rebecca Solnit, believes that GPS has a detrimental impact on our perception of the physical world. She writes that “getting lost and then finding your way out of the terra incognita” is a valuable experience. Sorry, Rebecca, I disagree. Getting lost is no fun. I have struggled all my life with having no sense of direction, and I can attest to the fact that it is a disability and GPS is assistive technology that has greatly improved my life. Without GPS, I would still be wandering around in the basement trying to escape Satan.

I have gotten lost in the women’s restroom in Macy’s and had to be escorted to the proper exit door (by a six-year-old who saw me open the door to the mop closet). I have entered maze-like apartment complexes and had to be extricated by Search and Rescue. I have gotten my car stuck in the mud in the woods in the middle of the night while driving down a creek bed, all-the-while thinking I was on Highway 101 (why aren’t there any other cars on this road?). I have set out to attend a company meeting at a retreat site in the Castro Valley and wound up at a shopping mall in Stockton. I have spent hours driving in circles, hours trying to find the right path back out of a forest, hours trying to assemble a combination of landmarks into some organized pattern. I have arrived late for special events, or sometimes not at all. I have tried my hardest to translate the lines on a map to an understanding of the real web of roads in front of my car. I can’t process “turn South.” Does that mean right or left? I left my sundial in the mop closet. Solnit may romanticize “attentive wandering” (as she calls it) all she likes, but when she finishes with that she can find her way home. I, on the other hand, have to attentive wander my ass into a motel for the night only to resume hunting for the trail of crumbs back to my house in the morning.

I was so incapable of “following my nose” that if we got a bit turned around while traveling, my husband would ask me which way I thought we should go so he could then go in the diametrical opposite direction of what seemed right to me because he could count on my sense of direction to be the complete opposite of the right way, literally 180 degrees off. He could depend on my internal compass to be that consistently busted. I had supremely dysfunctional magnetic energy.

Enter the advent of Mapquest. When it first arrived on the scene, I swooned. I fell in love. Mapquest was my co-pilot. I slept with Mapquest printouts under my pillow. When I had to go somewhere unfamiliar, I would run out a Mapquest with specific directions about where and when to turn and whether right or left. As long as I did not stray from the Mapquest, I could suddenly find my way anywhere. It was like riding a magic carpet. Mapquest was the truth and the truth set me free. Solnit writes: “When people are told which way to turn, it relieves them of the need to create their own routes and remember them. They pay less attention to their surroundings.” That’s simply not how it works for someone with no sense of direction. I wanted Mapquest to tell me which way to turn. I pay such close attention to my surroundings that every street looks like the one I should turn on. Before Mapquest, when I made a decision about my route, I would panic the minute I followed it. What if I had headed the wrong way? It was as if someone told me to turn at the Starbuck’s; seriously, which one?

I was still marveling over Mapquest when my husband bought me a Tom-Tom. It was the quintessential device for the directionally impaired. I fell in love all over again. With my Tom-Tom, I could find my way even if I went completely off-course. Once I set it to my destination, then it would take me there from anywhere. I could find my way from my house to the Taj Mahal if necessary. Suddenly, the world was my oyster, as they say. Meanwhile, out on an unmarked trail in the Sierras, the anti-GPS movement was gaining traction. Neuroscientist Véronique Bohbot declared her research indicates that “when we get lost, it activates the hippocampus, it gets us completely out of the habit mode.” She claims that getting lost is a good thing and that by finding our way without the use of a GPS requires us to use spatial-memory strategies that increase the amount of gray matter in the hippocampus. Stimulating the hippocampus in this way prevents cognitive impairment and dementia. For me, finding my way without GPS, the best case scenario would be that I would make lots of gray matter and therefore remember what my house looks like (no dementia) but I would have no idea how to get there (directional impairment). I would basically retain the cognitive ability to understand that I needed to attentively wander my ass into a motel for the night yet again. But wow, look how much gray matter I made! 

Neuroscientists report that brain behavior changes when people rely on turn-by-turn directions. They consider this a negative thing, and warn that we lose some aspect of brain function when we don’t use our built-in spatial-memory and navigation strategies. But what about someone who was born without a built-in navigation system? What about someone wired to perceive a road sign as a trick question. Honestly, I am not the only directionally impaired person on the planet. I’m not even the only one in my family. It’s a genetic trait. My first cousin, my nephew, and my daughter share it with me, and all of us are eternally grateful for GPS. I assure you that we are painfully aware of our surroundings. We simply don’t recognize them. People use their cell phones nowadays to navigate, while I continue my love affair with my Tom-Tom, which works fine for me. I don’t want a Smart Phone, for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that I don’t want the government to know where I am every second of every minute of every day.

In the past couple of years, however, I have noticed some interesting transformations happening with my ability to find my way. A few years ago, I started learning American Sign Language (ASL), and learning this visual language is changing my brain. I have evolved a distinctly improved sense of direction. Crazy, huh? I’m not perfect, but I’m better than I used to be for sure. (Oliver Sacks wrote about how learning a visual language reprograms the brain in his book Seeing Voices.) Using a visual language has awakened a dormant spatial realm of cognition in my brain. To my shock and delight, I find myself more often knowing exactly which way to turn. Communicating visually has helped me find where I am in the universe. Before I started learning ASL, it didn’t matter how many times I went to a place, I was still liable to totally forget how to find it. Now I tend to better remember what turns I took, the landmarks, how far everything is from everything else. (Hey, I’ve been here before!) Even so, I completely identify with others who have no sense of direction. Unless you have experienced this, you really have no idea how life-changing GPS can be. Go ahead and turn yours off and commune with the world you wander into, but I’m keeping my GPS turned on and arriving at my destination, thank you very much.

Solnit (whom I admire and usually agree with) can rhapsodize about how wandering lost leads us to “knowing places, which is one of the most rewarding things there is” and that “being oriented is a geographical-spiritual necessity for some of us.” She can encourage everyone to turn off their GPS and follow their nose, but she lives in a parallel universe to those of us who lack the ability to conjure spatial-memory strategies or geographically correct mindsets that allow us to figure out how to get from A to B. For us, being oriented is not a spiritual necessity but a practical challenge to overcome. Please help me out of the mop closet and point me toward the exit.

We must recognize that each one of us lives inside our own reality, which we create from the tools given to us, which include our individual brain functioning. Our individual perception defines our world. So let’s be careful about making generalizations about what is good or bad for people’s brains. My brain needs GPS. So don’t tell me that I’m not living my best life because I use GPS. I would rather find my way with GPS than get lost and engage with the world that turns up in front of me when I have no idea where I am or how to get where I need to go. That’s a horrible feeling. GPS helps me live my best life. It prevents me from spending so much of it in “attentive wanderment,” which does not sound like a productive activity to me. For me, getting lost is no fun.