How changing habits of navigation affect us

[thesaltytar]

I posted this link on the "New to Nav" thread because I thought it might be helpful but will repost here.

It's a study about the loss of spatial memory as a result of using GPS navigation over time. I read this article in the r/sailing subreddit and thought it should be shared here:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/art...6/#!po=82.6923

The methodology involves driving cars and is a longitudinal study; but I don't see why it wouldn't apply equally to sailing, and it draws from other studies that include native hunters in arctic conditions and how their time honored methodologies of land navigation are giving way to the younger hunters relying on GPS. So the application is broad.

I find it concerning that some schools are now reportedly (I have not confirmed!) dropping paper chart navigation from their curriculum, but I find this hard to believe. The Navy made the mistake of dropping celestial only to pick it up again later.

I learned on paper charts and my first boats didn't have plotters, as I am sure is familiar for many of you also. Taking multiple fixes close in to traffic and land I often would forego putting lines on paper and just splay my fingers out between the navigational marks and transpose it to paper in a couple of rapid successions, marking an estimated position to let me know how I should handle passing arrangements and where the safe water was.

With paper chart navigation, or piloting to use the correct term, I was constantly tied to observing the environment around me. The chart was reference. The locus of control was internal.

With plotters we turn this on its head. People tend to be tied to the chart plotter. The environment becomes a secondary reference. The locus of control becomes external.

I'm also not against electronic charts. We got spanked pretty hard (100% my fault) and we were sent running for refuge from a storm when, in the spray sodden winds, I lost a number of pages out of a chart book. It was the cell phone that came to our rescue. But then it could have just as easily been the phone that got wet. This underscores the importance to of having separate independent methods (i.e., not a second phone) of redundancy.

Coming back to the cited article, how does all of this change our abilities to navigate in a seamanlike manner? More and more we make technological progress (good!) but I also see this growing belief that this progress is mandatory to go sailing.

The concerning part to me is that if people are relying on this progress to take the burden of sailing from them, then it's true, it IS mandatory, because we've collectively outsourced our abilities and habits, and this in turn is affecting our ultimate capacities.

This can make for a "dumbing down" of the requirements to put to sea even while it means more people are at sea than ever before. Not the best possible combinations of events.