There’s a not-so-sacred ritual I practice almost every time I drive somewhere. It happens before I put on my seat belt, check my mirror and turn on the engine. I type in the address of wherever I’m going into my phone. I have a terrible sense of direction, so without the seemingly omniscient guide of GPS — the Global Positioning System — not only would I be lost, I’d feel lost.
It makes me wonder: Is there anything I can do to improve my navigation skills? The answer is yes, say researchers who study this topic. Let go of your fear of getting lost, be observant and practice keeping “a sense of direction in your head as you travel,” says Mary Hegarty, a cognitive psychologist at the Spatial Thinking Lab at University of California, Santa Barbara. “When you have GPS on, you’re probably not thinking of any of that.”
An over-reliance on GPS can also lead to a narrower view of your surroundings, she says. “You’re not paying attention to the broader environment that gives you cues” of where you are in space — what’s on your right or left and what it means to be “here.”
In fact, people who have a good internal compass may have a deeper connection to the world around them, says Hugo Spiers, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London. He studied the brains of London cab drivers, who are required to memorize about 25,000 street names in the city in order to get the job. And he found that once the cab drivers mastered the names, “they had a real sense of ownership of the city” — and greater power over their environment.
If you want to gain confidence on the road or be less reliant on GPS to get around, here are some steps you can take to boost your sense of direction.
Turn off your GPS and get lost on purpose
If you’re not pressed for…