Turn by Turn

…navigating our ways forward

Digitally manipulated photo. Used by permission

A couple years ago I wanted to see what would happen if I went back to my pre-smartphone approach to driving somewhere new. I printed the driving directions instead of listening to the prompts coming through my mobile device. What I found was, something about looking at the map of the route, then printing it, looking at the directions and handling an actual piece of paper, meant that when I got where I was going, I had a much better idea of how to reverse navigate and get home again. I had better recollection of the turns and names of the roads. On the road, I even seemed to pay more attention to the area I was driving through, noticing landmarks and features that helped me orient and remember where I was. Overall I felt I had a better mental map of the territory to be covered when I used printed directions rather than following the audible turn-by-turn from my phone.

Since then, I’ve experimented both ways, with the same results: it’s easier to find my way home when I use old-fashioned, written directions. Now of course, printed instructions are clumsy, they waste paper and ink, and are harder to use. They also require more mental effort. They require the driver to hold the names of the roads in mind, and remember the various turns. But I suspect that these apparent negatives — the creation of a printed artifact that needs to be fuddled with and can be lost, and the increased mental effort — are intrinsic to why the paper method yielded better results.

Further, I am guessing I would learn even better if I had made the process even slower and more difficult, for example, maybe by copying the directions or map by hand. Remember in school how teachers were always telling us to take notes? Same idea here. Use a little more effort, move the hand with the pencil in it, really pay attention to what you’re doing, maybe draw a diagram, talk about it with a partner — in basic terms, engage with the material. All these things tend to result in better learning. Anything but autopilot.

Navigation is a fundamental biological capacity. Look at any animal, all the way down to amoebas under a microscope, and you can see them navigating. Plants navigate too, finding their way to their best sun exposure. So, for some time I’ve been thinking about the risks of depending too much on electronics for this essential function. Here’s a link to an article I wrote published on Resilience.org that goes into this from a different angle, if you’re interested.

The larger point here is that there’s more to navigation than just driving to a place we’ve never been before. We create mental maps of other kinds of pathways: Can we follow a line of reasoning, for example, or the plot of a book we’re reading? Can we track the overall turns of a conversation? Can we build a coherent picture of a sequence of global events? Do we remember well enough, and over long enough spans of time, to make longer-term patterns clearer?

Negotiating these kinds of tasks requires much the same kind of mental ability that road navigation does. In each of these cases, we have to hold one piece of information in our working memory as the next piece of information appears. Then we assemble this information to form a bigger map or picture as we go. Having a strong working memory is key. If we can only remember the last turn we made while driving, or only the last sentence on the page as we read, or the news events of only the last week or two, or month or two, we’re basically lost. We lose the plot, lose the thread, and lose our ways.

Years ago I knew an older couple where the husband had an Alzheimer’s diagnosis and the wife had Parkinson’s disease. At a certain stage of the progression of these illnesses, the man could drive but not navigate, and the woman could navigate but not drive. So, if a light turned red or something unusual happened, the man could respond appropriately in the moment as the vehicle operator. Owing to the motor control issues of Parkinson’s disease, the woman could not do that. But the driver did not always know where he was. He relied on his wife sitting beside him in the passenger seat, giving turn-by-turn directions.

That worked for them for awhile. After a certain point, of course, all driving had to stop.

But sometimes I wonder what’s happening to my own mind as the robotic voice programmed into my navigation software provides turn-by-turn directions. Is my memory function being impaired by this technology much like a healthy, unbroken leg will get weaker if you put it in a cast? And now, try to imagine an entire population whose powers of memory and thus of mental mapmaking are diminished by a variety of means. Seems if we don’t remember and thus cannot track the larger patterns, we might end up at the mercy of those issuing turn-by-turn directions, telling us where we are and where we are going. And these might not be trustworthy people with our best interests at heart.

Yet on we scroll, channel surf, and stream.

And I hasten to add that it’s not just technology and the News / Entertainment / Social Media Complex that help to dumb us down. On a basic level, chronic overwork, poverty, consumerism, poor diet, noise, artificial light, environmental toxins, EMFs, addiction, disease, trauma and other factors can also work together to make it harder to think. One of the more pernicious aspects of all this is that it appears people can be socialized to believe these kind of things are acceptable, inevitable and normal. We might even forget life was ever different than it is now. Personally, it looks to me like all of these factors may need to be addressed if we want to have a better functioning society.

When tuning into a “news feed,” my experience is that scrolling and reacting often replace tracking, committing to memory and subjecting what I am learning to thoughtful consideration. To the extent we engage in this way, we risk finding ourselves in much the same situation as a person relying on turn-by-turn directions:“Turn here! Do this! Feel this way! Pay attention to that! Focus on this!”

And what if some of the prompts we are getting are simply bad information? I mean, I’ve heard of drivers being directed to make four left turns in a row on a city block. That kind of thing can can happen with the news cycle, too. And unless there’s a strong effort to track, remember, and put pieces of information together into meaningful sequences and longer-term patterns, how would we know?

“Gosh, that building looks familiar! Seems like I’ve been here before. Huh.”

It’s just super easy to go into autopilot “react” mode in which the past — be it yesterday, last week, last month, or prior years and decades — becomes hazy or lost to our recollection altogether.

When navigating times like these, a more helpful approach is going to ask a little more of us. Anything but mindless autopilot. And the hope is that we if we can make that shift, we may be able to find our ways toward a better place.