Making Topophiles out of Navigational Idiots

I was a FOB graduate student when I heard people all jazzed about something called a "monarch butterfly."  I simply could not understand the hullabaloo.

This was back in the dark ages before Google and Wikipedia and the rest.  One had to talk to people or search for information in the library in order to get questions answered.  I chose the easier route and asked a few people what the deal was with the monarch butterfly.

When they explained it to me, well, I too was jazzed, and I too started talking about it.  And, during my one and only camping experience ever, I even got to see a few of those butterflies.

What is so special about them?  This butterfly migrates. Over thousands of miles.  A tiny butterfly!

We knew little about this remarkable feat until relatively recently, when the Canadian entomologist Frederick Urquhart made his discoveries. After searching for hiding places where his country’s monarchs might be hibernating, and not finding any, he got the brilliant idea of tagging 300,000 butterflies with a number and a request (obviously in minuscule writing) to let him know where the animal had been found. He eventually learned that Canadian monarchs travel all the way to Texas and Mexico. They get there by orienting to the sun’s position in the sky, or if it is cloudy, with the help of polarized light. In 1976, Urquhart made front-page news with his announcement of an overwintering site in the Mexican mountains. Since then more such sites have been discovered, always at high altitude, each one packed with millions of butterflies.

NPR's Ari Shapiro asks David Barrie, who has authored a book on Supernavigators whether humans have  "innate abilities to navigate the way that other animals do."  To which Barrie says:

Well, I believe we do, but we have to cultivate them. The trouble is that we've been civilized now for a little while, and we've become more and more dependent on technology. You know, 800 or 900 years ago, the magnetic compass came into use, and then we had, you know, the sextant and the chronometer and so on. Now we've got GPS.
GPS is a marvel. I mean, it is an astonishing technological achieve, but our increasing and exclusive reliance on it is turning us into kind of navigational idiots. We're losing the ability to exercise our natural skills. And from my perspective, almost more sadly, we're being more and more cut off from the natural world as a result. We no longer look up from our little glowing screens and observe the world around us. And I think we may discover that this has quite profound implications both for our physical health but also for our spiritual health, too.

There is more and more evidence that ditching GPS is good for our brains:

In a study published in Nature Communications in 2017, researchers asked subjects to navigate a virtual simulation of London’s Soho neighborhood and monitored their brain activity, specifically the hippocampus, which is integral to spatial navigation. Those who were guided by directions showed less activity in this part of the brain than participants who navigated without the device. “The hippocampus makes an internal map of the environment and this map becomes active only when you are engaged in navigating and not using GPS,” Amir-Homayoun Javadi, one of the study’s authors, told me.

Given that such brain research is new, and a smartphone GPS is even newer, there is much yet to be understood:

What isn’t known is the effect of GPS use on hippocampal function when employed daily over long periods of time. Javadi said the conclusions he draws from recent studies is that “when people use tools such as GPS, they tend to engage less with navigation. Therefore, brain area responsible for navigation is less used, and consequently their brain areas involved in navigation tend to shrink.”

There are plenty of other benefits, big and small, tangible and intangible:

Finding our way on our own — using perception, empirical observation and problem-solving skills — forces us to attune ourselves to the world. And by turning our attention to the physical landscape that sustains and connects us, we can nourish “topophilia,” a sense of attachment and love for place.

Aha, I can now call myself a topophile too!