GPS/Satnav usage switches off the brain..

[Seeking Solace]

My oldest son has lived in the same town for 25 years. He can't find his way across town most of the time and has absolutely no idea about landmarks. Give him an address and good ole Google gets him there.

I have a younger son who's now 11. He's always had a fascination with maps and places. He has spent thousands of hours going to places using google earth and google street view on his android tablet. When we take trips with him he can pretty much give you turn by turn instructions and often tell you everything there is to see along the way.

My observation is that they are very different people. The oldest never got good grades and seemed to suffer from ADD his entire life. He's a good kid, not remotely dumb, but not a scholar. The younger is 3 grade levels ahead of his age group and in "gifted" classes. He's never brought home anything less than a B and is really hard on himself for that much.

The oldest learns by doing and the youngest can read about it and typically do things with confidence the first time.

It's the extreme of both sides of the coin with them. Growing up without GPS and SAT NAV I learned to use the sun, a compass, maps, and landmarks at a very early age. I almost never use the GPS unless looking for a street in a place I've never been, and even then once I know where it is I'll read the street signs.

Everywhere I go I see people glued to their phones. Walking, driving, even at social events. It's like they don't know the world is all around them. Maybe they use them for entertainment. I use mine to look things up and then turn it back into standby mode. I couldn't imagine using anything like that when I was flying. I hated IFR and always felt like it was going to put me into a smoking hole. I can say that they were great for orienting yourself. One of the biggest things I remember was to trust the instruments, there were far more people killed who refused to do so than not.

I truly believe that the younger generation processes information differently than mine did and still do. Calculators were expensive, now they're $0.50 at the corner store. We used a lot of simple rounding and addition/subtraction for dealing with money. I've more than once given back change because someone miskeyed how much I gave them and the machine declared my change was a much larger sum. Likewise I've often had to explain to people how to add tax and that they had over charged me for breakfast. I didn't use higher level math until I was in my 20's and working on my ham radio licenses.

I'm pretty sure that math and navigation happen in different parts of the brain, but they are similar in knowing what methods to use. It isn't always true that when one part shuts off another is turned on IMHO. The more you exercise your mind the sharper it gets, hands down.