How GPS Is Shrinking Your Brain (And Why Getting Lost Makes You Smarter)

David Carson: 00:00

[Bright music playing] A lone moped sputters through the chaos of Piccadilly Circus in London's West End. Its rider, a would-be London cabbie, jerks left, then hard to right, then some secret third direction only quantum physicists and wayward pigeons can truly understand. On his fluorescent yellow safety vest hangs a battered clipboard that says, "The Knowledge Test, Route Number 118." 25,000 streets, every pub, every plaque, every kebab stand must be engraved onto his brain before Her Majesty the Queen will let him be a London taxi driver.

It is known as one of the most brutal tests on the planet. Our would-be cabbie driver gets lost six times in 11 minutes. But with each accidental detour, his brain is actually beefing up new gray matter, and MRI scans can prove it. We'll meet the white coats later. Hi, I'm David Carson. Welcome to Dumbify, the show that knows the fastest way to getting smart is sometimes the scenic route through abject chaos and confusion. Today, we're looking into the science and silliness of purposeful wandering, strategically spacing out, wandering so willy-nilly you'd never think it's raising your IQ. So, strap in, dumb-dumbs. We're taking the long way home.

Theme Song: 01:24

Dumbify, let your neurons dance. Put your brain in backwards pants. Genus hides in daft disguise. Brilliance wears those googly eyes. So honk your nose and chase that spark. Dumb is just smart in the dark. Dumbify. Yellin' like a goose. It's thinking wrong on purpose with juice.

David Carson: 01:50

Okay, personal confession.

I'm not naturally a line follower. As a kid, I could navigate the woods behind my friend Terry's house using nothing but instinct and sugar-fueled optimism. Then came adulthood, smartphones, and the turn-by-turn tyranny of Google Maps. My dependence peaked last year as I drove into New York City from my place in Connecticut, a journey I'd made hundreds of times with Google navigation on. Because what if the Earth's crust rearranged itself overnight? Halfway there, the app chirped, "Rerouting to avoid traffic." I obeyed and got to my destination faster, the benefits of outsourcing my spatial brain on full display. And in that moment, I realized, "I've been doing this for years." I've been outsourcing my spatial brain to a Silicon Valley company that takes my travel data and sells it to advertisers who wanna sell me socks and snacks. In return, I get efficiency and the convenience of not having to think about how to get where I'm going. I don't know why that made me angry, but it did. It was like that little kid in me who prided himself on not being a line follower had suddenly found out that his older self had sold him out for magic beans. And it didn't help that I was also listening to a discussion on the radio about a new study claiming that outsourcing our brains to technology has made our brains shrink. Is that true? Has my quest for efficiency and convenience using technology inadvertently created the real-life version of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, but instead, it was my own brain? Hold the phone. Literally. So in that moment, I decided I would stage a tiny rebellion. I decided to put away my phone and deliberately travel without it. In addition, I would also take time out to travel more with no destination in mind, and no timer. Just me and the vague hope of finding tacos. 45 minutes later, I'd collected two new shortcuts, a flyer for samba lessons and an idea for today's episode. And also, yes, tacos.

n. It was about research from: 2020

[SFX]

Woohoo!

[David Carson]

entific Reports back in April: 2020

It was led by a brilliant Montreal-based researcher named Veronique Bobot, who, for the record, sounds like the kind of woman who could guide you out of a labyrinth and critique your decision to wear hiking boots with jeans.

[SFX]

Huh?

[David Carson]

Bobot had a theory. She suspected that over-relying on GPS might be making us navigation stupid. So she rounded up 50 healthy drivers between 19 and 35 who drove around Montreal at least four times a week.She asked them intimate, almost romantic, questions about their GPS usage. How long, how often, how committed the relationship was. Then she tossed them into virtual mazes filled with mountains, trees, pyramids, and other objects designed by scientists who clearly never played Minecraft, but had seen a lot of screensavers.

Each maze was crafted to reveal which part of your brain you favor when you try to find your way. Are you a hippocampus person, mentally mapping the landscape like a tiny explorer with a compass in your frontal lobe? Or do you lean on the caudate nucleus, your brain's habit hamster, which follows the same turn left, turn right patterns without thinking? Then, three years later, 13 of the original guinea humans came back for a follow-up. That's where things got really interesting. And if you're a GPS super user like me, mildly horrifying. People who used GPS more over those three years showed a clear decline in their ability to navigate without it. They formed fuzzier maps in their minds. They noticed fewer landmarks. They relied more on the autopilot part of the brain and less on the one built for flexibility and adaptation, the one you'd want, say, in a zombie apocalypse or trying to find the bathroom in a house that has too many hallways. Now, you might be thinking, sure, but maybe those people were always bad at navigation and just naturally leaned on GPS. The researchers thought of that, too. They tested it. There was no link between how good people thought they were at navigation and how much they used GPS. In other words, it wasn't that directionally challenged people were using GPS more, it was that using GPS more was making everyone worse. According to Bobot, each time you let your phone do the navigating, you're skipping the mental reps your hippocampus needs to stay in shape. Like handing the dumbbells to Siri and wondering why your brain can't lift anymore. The takeaway? Navigation is a use it or lose it skill. And every time you zone out while a soothing robotic voice guides you to the Trader Joe's, you're not just avoiding traffic, you're quietly surrendering your inner explorer to early retirement. So next time you head out, maybe try finding your own way. Worst case, you get lost. Best case, you remember where Terry's tree fort is.

David Carson: 08:32

All of this kind of reminded me of stories about Darwin and his sand walks, how a daily stroll rewired evolution. It's 1842 and Charles Darwin is carrying the weight of the world in his 30-something brain.

Six years earlier, he'd returned from his epic Beagle voyage with notebooks crammed full of observations that were slowly crystallizing into the most dangerous idea of his time, that species weren't fixed creations, but evolved over time through natural selection. The problem, this wasn't just controversial, it was heretical.

[SFX]

Fire!

David Carson: 09:10

In Victorian England, suggesting that humans descended from apes was tantamount to calling God a liar.

[SFX]

Oh my God.

[David Carson]

So there's Darwin holed up in Down House, a former parsonage he'd bought 30 inconvenient miles south of London, trying to figure out what the hell to do with his explosive theory. His stomach is a perpetual wreck, partly from chronic seasickness he picked up during five years aboard the Beagle, but mostly from the stress of sitting on intellectual dynamite. His mind ping pongs between meticulous barnacle dissections, his day job that kept him respectable, and the existential terror of knowing his ideas could destroy everything people believed about their place in the universe.

Making matters worse, his deeply religious wife Emma is already worried about his soul. She'd written him letters before their marriage expressing her fears that his scientific pursuits were leading him away from God, and therefore away from any hope of reuniting in the afterlife. The man is literally torn between his love for truth and his love for his family. So what does Chuck do with all this psychological pressure? He builds a walking loop. It isn't elaborate, just a scruffy zero point three mile oval he hacked out of woody scrub at the back of his garden. The family dubbed it the Sand Walk, though Darwin preferred calling it his thinking path, Victorian code for I'm going to walk off this mental chaos before I have a complete breakdown. This became his daily ritual, rain, shine, or that persistent British drizzle that can't make up its mind. Darwin would amble this loop five, sometimes six times.

ood what was happening. In an: 1858

13:00 SONG

My walking has been of greatest service.

In other words, walking is the bestest, most productive

part of my day. And my day is hella productive already.

So walking's like supersizing fries and a soda.

But for my brain and its ability to be awesome, with a side of awesome sauce. Ooh, ooh.

With a side of awesome sauce.

David Carson: 13:48

He could've sat at his desk like a proper Victorian scholar, but instead he chose to think with his whole body, letting his hippocampus sketch cognitive maps, not of terrain, but of ideas that would reshape human understanding. The results speak for themselves. Modern research backs up what Darwin discovered through necessity. A 2014 Stanford study found that walking sparked roughly a 60% jump in creative thinking compared to sitting. And 2017 research from New Mexico Highlands University showed that each footfall sends pressure waves through arteries, boosting cerebral blood flow by up to 15%. Darwin had accidentally built the perfect creativity machine, powered by nothing more than mud, questions, and the courage to keep walking when the answers weren't immediately obvious. The man who was too nervous to publish his theory for over 20 years had found a way to think through the most complex problems simply by putting one foot in front of the other. In a world that would soon be transformed by his ideas, the Sand Walk became the unlikely birthplace of modern biology. So what's the takeaway for our strategic spacing out curriculum? Perhaps it's this. Uh, carry a question, not a map. Let your brain meander toward answers while your feet pump it full of nutrients. Do it daily, and who knows? You might not reinvent biology, but you'll at least remember where you parked. And in a world increasingly navigated by algorithms, that might be revolutionary enough.

If Darwin's muddy loop proved that wandering can unlock revolutionary thinking, our next story shows how the same principle, getting productively lost, would eventually reshape how millions of people exercise their spatial memory. But this time, the revolution happened pixel by pixel. We'll be right back.

15 minutes till my frontal lobe melts. Strap on my Crocs, tighten cognitive belts. Gonna power walk like a duck on speed. My neurons chant, "This is what we need." Stomp, stomp, stomp. I'm gaining IQ. Waddle like a genius in a track suit, suh. Every janky step rewires my fate. Speed walking's the hack your brain appreciates. Ooh, ooh. Ooh,

[SFX]

ooh.

David Carson: 16:36

Welcome back. Let's fast-forward 130 years and halfway around the planet to the rural town of Sonobe, Japan. It's the early 1970s, and this restless kid named Shigeru Miyamoto is growing up in a world that's about to change dramatically. Japan is in the midst of rapid modernization. Rice paddies giving way to suburbs, traditional crafts replaced by factory jobs.

But young Miyamoto is more interested in what hasn't changed, the tangled countryside that still surrounds his family's traditional house. While other kids are glued to the newfangled television sets, Miyamoto keeps slipping out with nothing but a stick for a sword and pockets full of curiosity. This isn't casual play. It's systematic exploration. His parents assume he's headed for the neighbors, but he's actually mapping every unmarked trail, every hidden grove, every secret the landscape has to offer. The defining moment comes when he's around 12. Deep in a bamboo thicket, following a path that seems to lead nowhere, he stumbles onto the mouth of a limestone cave. Now, any sensible kid might peek inside and head home for dinner, but armed with a flickering lantern and the kind of fearless logic only children possess, if there's treasure, it's definitely behind that shadowy rock formation. He ventures deeper and deeper until the daylight behind him shrinks to a postage stamp.What happens next would echo through his entire career. As he explores the cave's winding passages, Miyamoto experiences something profound. The space feels impossibly vast, mysterious, almost infinite, precisely because he doesn't know its boundaries. When he finally emerges, dust-covered and heart hammering, he's enchanted. That feeling of productive disorientation, of being small in something larger and unknowable burns itself into his memory.

Fast-forward to the early: 1980

What Miyamoto intuited, neuroscientists would later confirm.

SONG: 20:58

This kind of free-range exploration

engages the exact same spatial memory circuits

that Darwin trained on his sunwalk.

An eyeball bot found to be declining, age GPS users.

Brains hip, campy, light up as they forge mental maps in The Legend of Zelda. Encode landmark relationships and develop flexible navigation strategies.

David Carson: 21:42

Without a single fMRI machine, Miyamoto had built a digital gym for millions of brains. He doubles down on this philosophy 30 years later with Breath of the Wild, creating a vast kingdom where almost nothing is prescribed. Climb any mountain, glide from any tower, tackle challenges in whatever sequence your curiosity dictates. When reviewers hail it as the gold standard of open-world design, Miyamoto simply shrugs and says he wanted to recapture the wonder of that childhood cave. Here's the deeper connection. While GPS technology was quietly atrophying our spatial navigation skills, Miyamoto was creating virtual worlds specifically designed to exercise them. His games became accidental training grounds for the very cognitive abilities that turn-by-turn directions were replacing. Millions of players spent hours strengthening their hippocampal circuits, building mental maps, and learning to navigate by landmarks and spatial relationships, exactly the skills that make our brains more resilient and our sense of place more robust. But was this just speculation, or could you actually measure the brain benefits of Miyamoto's wandering-focused design philosophy?

[Singing]

Yes, yes, yes, you can.

[David Carson]

In: 2015

Two weeks later, the results were startling. The Super Mario wanderers showed a 12% increase in hippocampal volume, enough to reverse roughly two decades of age-related cognitive decline. These students had literally played their way to younger brains. The Angry Birds players and the meditation group?... flat, nothing. No measurable brain changes whatsoever. "It's the spatial buffet, not the boss fights," explained co-author Craig Stark, summarizing what would become a landmark finding in gaming neuroscience. The rich 3D environments of Mario's world had tricked participants' brains into building robust mental maps, even when they were just casually exploring. That gentle, goal-free wandering, the exact experience Miyamoto had tried to recreate from his childhood cave, turned out to be precisely the kind of workout the hippocampus craves. It was proof that his games had accidentally become therapeutic tools. While GPS was training millions of brains to be passive passengers, Super Mario was training them to be active navigators. The cave explorer had unknowingly created a digital sandwalk, a virtual space where getting lost was not just fun, it was literally good for your brain. So if Darwin's story shows how purposeful wandering can crack open scientific understanding, Miyamoto shows how getting playfully lost can crack open imagination. And as it turns out, accidentally preserve and strengthen the very navigation skills we're losing in our GPS-guided world.

SONG: 25:39

Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb word of the day. Dumb word of the day. It's a word, it's dumb. Use responsibly.

David Carson: 25:48

Next up, my favorite part of the show. Yes, it's time to unveil the dumb word of the day. Why? Because no matter how serious the science gets, a properly ridiculous word can yank us back to the joyful realization that language is basically improv night for the tongue. Today's linguistic confetti cannon is

coddiwomple, spelled C-O-D-D-I-W-O-M-P-L-E, coddiwomple. Definition: To travel with purpose toward a vaguely defined destination. Think of it as marching confidently into nonsense. It's the spiritual cousin of, "I'm just going out for milk," and returning with a kayak and a story about a goat named Nigel. Why this word this episode? Because Darwin coddiwompled his sandwalk and Miyamoto coddiwompled that bamboo maze. Strategic disorientation with intent, exactly what we've been hammering on. Let's use it in a sentence. "We coddiwompled into the thrift store intending to buy a fork, and emerged with a sequin jumpsuit, a Bulgarian accordion, and startling self-awareness." If that doesn't belong on a coffee mug, nothing does. So the next time someone accuses you of wasting time wandering, tilt your chin, adjust your imaginary monocle, and reply, "I'm coddiwompling, thank you very much."

Okay, that was weird. So let's return to where we began, back to London and those moped riders circling Piccadilly with clipboards flapping in the wind. Those moped riders aren't just sightseeing. They're preparing for what London cabbies call, with a mixture of reverence and dread, The Knowledge. It's not just a test, it's THE test. The official name for the most grueling spatial memory examination on Earth, a legendary ordeal that has been breaking would-be taxi drivers for over 150 years. Londoners speak of it the way mountaineers speak of Everest, something so notoriously difficult that it requires no further explanation. And this discovery, made years before anyone thought to test Super Mario players, would fundamentally change how neuroscientists think about human potential.

First, the stakes. To earn a coveted green and yellow London taxi badge, a trainee must internalize every one-way alley, every pub, every tube entrance, and every statue within a six-mile radius of Charing Cross, roughly 25,000 streets and 20,000 landmarks. No GPS allowed, no notebooks on the dashboard, no digital crutches of any kind. The test has been called a degree in street anatomy and the hardest exam on Earth, and for good reason. Here's what makes it particularly brutal. There are essentially two ways to tackle this legendary test, and only one of them actually works. Some trainees try the classroom approach, sitting indoors with maps spread across tables, memorizing street names like vocabulary words, drilling routes through flashcards and repetition. It's the kind of rote learning that got them through school, so why not here? But the veterans know better. Real preparation borders on monastic ritual. Successful candidates mount little scooters and spend the next three to four years just riding around the city, creating neural pathways. Rain or shine, day or night, they're out there turning London into muscle memory. The difference between these two approaches would prove crucial in ways no one anticipated. Only about half of all trainees finish. The rest tap out after failing one of the four grueling oral exams known as Appearances. They sound absolutely terrifying. Picture sitting across from an examiner who's spent decades memorizing London's every quirk. They fire rapid-fire prompts. "Pentonville Prison to the Ecuadorian Embassy, go." And you must instantly recite the quickest legal route, naming every turn, every emerging road.... every notable building, and every cab rank along the way. Hesitate, take a wrong turn, or miss a landmark, and you're one strike closer to elimination. Slip up twice, and it's back to the scooter for another year [screaming]

David Carson: 30:30

In 1999, neuroscientist Eleanor Maguire at University College London had a brilliant idea. What if this extreme spatial training was actually changing peoples' brains? At the time, neuroscience dogma held that adult brain structure was essentially fixed, you got the neurons you were born with, and that was it. But Maguire wondered if the knowledge might be intense enough to prove that conventional wisdom wrong. She recruited 79 wannabe cabbies at day one of their training, plus 31 age-match controls who worked normal jobs in shops and offices. Everyone got detailed structural MRI scans and batteries of memory tests to establish baseline brain measurements. Then Maguire sent the cab hopefuls off into London's drizzle to begin their years-long ordeal while she waited to see what would happen. Four years later, the results were in. 39 had earned their licenses, 20 had quit, and the rest were still grinding through the process. When Maguire scanned them all again, what she found was jaw-dropping and would reshape neuroscience. The qualified drivers, those who had spent years physically exploring London on their mopeds building spatial relationships through real-world navigation, showed a measurable bulge in the posterior hippocampus compared with both their own baseline scans and the control group. Their brains had literally grown new gray matter in the region responsible for spatial memory and navigation. These were the riders who had traced those 320 routes over and over, getting lost and finding their way, building mental maps through direct exploration. But here's the crucial finding that connected back to our GPS story. The trainees who failed the test showed no hippocampal change whatsoever.

[SFX]

Aww.

[David Carson]

meat. This study published in: 2000

David Carson: 36:25

All right, let's put this wandering wisdom to the test without even leaving your apartment. I call this little experiment the 10-minute blindfold shuffle. It's a pint-sized version of The Knowledge, minus the drizzle, the mopeds, and the terrifying examiner who smells like Corinthian leather and Scotch eggs. Step one, grab a scarf, sleep mask, or the cleanest T-shirt on the floor and tie it gently over your eyes. Yes, right now. Trust me, your couch will forgive the theatrics. Step two, stand in the middle of your living room and spin yourself until you feel like a polite cocktail. Don't cheat. Our hippocampus has an excellent lie detector. When the world stops wobbling, start walking. Slow, careful shuffles, arms out, toes testing the landscape like diplomatic envoys. You're not trying to map every throw pillow. You're listening for clues, the thud of a coffee table, the brush of curtains, that LEGO brick you've sworn to pick up since April. Each object becomes a landmark, a tiny Big Ben for your mental London. Your hippocampus is taking frantic notes in the dark. If a roommate or bewildered child asks what in blazes you're doing, explain that you're renovating your brain in real time, like installing new RAM but sweatier.

Keep wandering. After roughly 10 minutes, stop. Remove the blindfold and notice where you are versus where you thought you were. Surprise. Your mental map is either eerily accurate or hilariously off by a hallway. Both outcomes are excellent data. Now grab a notebook and sketch your apartment from memory. Sofa, lamp, rogue houseplant, that mysterious cable you refuse to figure out. Fill in as much detail as you can without peeking.

When done, walk the space again with eyes open and see what you missed. Every discrepancy is a muscle that just got a micro workout. Neuroscientists call this active spatial encoding. I call it adult hide-and-seek against yourself. And unlike the childhood version, no one gets grounded for knocking over a vase. Do it once a day for a week and you'll start noticing weird side effects. Quicker recall of where you left your keys, a sudden ability to picture three grocery aisles at once, maybe even a twinge of smugness when your phone dies and you still find the exit. That's your hippocampus flexing like it's back from summer boot camp.

[SFX]

Woo! Yeah!

[David Carson]

store aisles that smell like: 1987