GPS Actually Makes You a Worse Navigator

Find out what it’s really doing to your brain

using gps bad for brain
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Technology has made navigating unfamiliar places infinitely easier—but that could come at a cost. Using a GPS doesn’t fire up your brain the same way finding your own way around does, according to a study in Nature Communications.

In the study, 24 people navigated a video simulation of Soho in London, a city notoriously difficult to get around, with and without a satellite navigation system. When people didn’t use the digital aid, their hippocampi, which stores mental maps of our surroundings, and their prefrontal cortex, which helps us make decisions, became more active when they had to choose which streets to go down.

But their brains didn’t show that same activation when they used the GPS. Then, their brains looked the same whether they were at a fork in the road or continuing on the same path.

Study author Hugo Spiers, Ph.D., said in a press release that the hippocampus helps us picture what’s in front of us, and the prefrontal cortex helps us decide on a path.


Still, this does’t exactly mean that relying on your GPS, instead of finding your own way, is necessarily making you dumb. In fact, it likely frees up those parts of your brain to focus on other skills and development instead, study author Amir-Homayoun Javadi, Ph.D., told Live Science.

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