Is Google Maps making you 8% unhappier?

The weird link between spatial cognition, testosterone and depression.

Here’s my crazy idea: Google maps is making people unhappier.

"We have a brain for one reason and one reason only, and that's to produce adaptable and complex movements. There is no other reason to have a brain.” -Daniel Wolpert, Neuroscientist

Daniel Wolpert explains in his TED talk that the only reason you have the faculties necessary to generate a consciousness capable of perceiving yourself as a human with a past, future and perhaps a meaning to your life is because you have the need to move through space. Then, he brings up the sea squirt.

Early in its life, the sea squirt has a nervous system (a rudimentary brain) that allows the sea squirt to produce effective and purposeful movement. The sea squirt embarks on a daring journey under the sea to fulfill its main life aspiration of finding a partner to cultivate a meaningful and fulfilling relationship with. The partner the sea squirt seeks is of course, a rock. Once it finds its soul rock, it will spend the rest of its life there. The sea squirt realizes that all that desperate movement it had been doing was all to find that special soulmate. Once it find its rock, it realizes it no longer needs to move and it promptly digests its own brain for energy.

Humans have an amazing capacity for awareness of the space around them. You likely orient yourself and talk about the locations of things based on relative orientation. That is, you’re probably saying “walk straight with the convenience store on your left,” or “give me the book next to the green armchair.” The Guugu Yimithirr, an aboriginal community in the far north of Queensland, Australia, talk about location using absolute orientation. That is, they would say “walk north,” or “give me the book on the eastern table.” This constant keeping track of absolute orientation has yielded the Guugu Yimithirr some very impressive navigation abilities.

A 1997 study describes how a researcher traveling with ten Guugu Yimithirr adult men would randomly ask the men to stop and point in the direction of some landmark that they knew of but was out of sight.

"the distances of these locations ranged from a few kilometers up to several hundred... the method consisted of halting at some spot with restricted visibility (e.g., among trees), asking the men to point to a series of locations... It was made plain that an accurate rather than an instant response was being asked for, but in most cases the response was within a couple of seconds, often an immediate gesture."

After 120 trials of this, the average degree of error with their pointing was only 13 degrees, or less than 4 percent. This was dramatically better performance than Europeans.

Given the varied nature of the locations where the readings were taken, the different speed of travel (foot, vehicle on good gravel road vs. bush track), the approximate nature of some of the readings due to impatience, lack of time, impending dusk, and so forth, the great distance of some of the locations pointed to, and in many cases their relative unfamiliarity, these are very impressive results (especially compared to the performance of Europeans).

The Guugu Yimithirr can also navigate effectively after dark.

This demonstrates just how fantastic humans’ spatial cognition can become. Spatial cognition is of course, the mental processes associated with perceiving and interpreting spaces, locations, directions, navigating et cetera.

Navigation, Mood and the Brain

Interestingly, studies have found that depressed persons show an impairment of spatial cognition. One study observed specifically that “implicit memory for spatial context is severely impaired in clinically depressed patients.” Another study notes that bipolar depression causes deficits in visuo-spatial memory.