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Turning off Waze or your favorite GPS app and using an old-fashioned map may be the best way to fight Alzheimer's disease, a new study reveals:
Researchers at McMaster University say orienteering, an outdoor sport that exercises the mind and body through navigation puzzles, can train the brain and stave off cognitive decline. The aim of orienteering is to navigate between checkpoints or controls marked on a special map. In competitive orienteering, the challenge is to complete the course in the quickest time.
For older adults, scientists say the sport — which sharpens navigational skills and memory — could become a useful intervention measure to fight off the slow decline related to dementia onset. They believe the physical and cognitive demands of orienteering can stimulate parts of the brain our ancient ancestors used for hunting and gathering.
The human brain evolved thousands of years ago to adapt to harsh environments by creating new neural pathways, the McMaster team explains. Those same brain functions are not always necessary today, however, thanks to GPS apps and food being readily available.
Unfortunately, the team says these skills fall into a "use it or lose it" situation.
[...] People who participated in orienteering displayed better spatial navigation and memory skills, suggesting that adding elements of wayfinding into their daily routines benefited them over their lifetime.
Journal Reference:
Emma E. Waddington, Jennifer J. Heisz. Orienteering experts report more proficient spatial processing and memory across adulthood, PLOS ONE (DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0280435)
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(Score: 2) by fliptop on Tuesday January 24, @06:34PM (2 children)
My youngest sister (late 20's) has described herself as "directionally challenged." She can't go anywhere w/o her GPS and turn-by-turn directions. When she told me this I remarked I was surprised b/c our Dad was a master at navigating no matter where we were.
I have never used GPS. A few years ago my youngest daughter and I took a 2200 mile road trip to visit her sister in Montana. I glanced at a map and plotted the route in my head, and used a map of Billings I had printed off Google Maps to find her house once we arrived.
On our trip home, there was flooding in Missouri, and my daughter used her phone to navigate around it. It was valuable information to have at the time, as I would have driven right into the trouble area not knowing what was going on. However, the route her phone plotted took us about 100 miles off course (we wound up going almost all the way to Chicago), and I kept asking her, "When are we going to start heading South?" By the time we meandered back down to I-70, we were way past the trouble area, but like I said, we had traveled an extra 100 miles. So while her alert about the flooding was useful information, the route we took added almost 2 hours to our trip. I guess you have to take the good w/ the bad?
To be oneself, and unafraid whether right or wrong, is more admirable than the easy cowardice of surrender to conformity
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday January 24, @07:01PM
There's a section of SR 13 near us which I swear has Google Maps trained to steer people off of it at every opportunity. It's a 2 lane that runs along the river, right in front of all the expensive riverfront homes, and it's the nicest way to get to the next bridge across the river south of us: no lights or stopsigns, 45mph cruise straight through. Granted, the first "detour" is supposed to save 2 minutes (16 vs 18 - easily "in the noise" of traffic light and stop sign performance) and 3 miles (9 vs 12) but it adds a couple of lights, and stop and turns and all in all is just more of a pain to drive. The real kicker for me is when you "miss" the turn for the detour and then Maps tells you later to detour again, this time adding 2 miles and 3 minutes to the trip vs if you just stay the current course.
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(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Wednesday January 25, @05:19PM
There was a story a few years back about three women who decided to take a day trip from Pahrump, NV to Scotty's Castle in Death Valley National Park. They got there all right, but on the way back got lost by listening to their GPS. Somehow they ended up running out of gas on an unpaved road two desert valleys over in the opposite direction from Pahrump. They found water in an old cabin, or they probably would have perished, and had to spend two days there until found. There are literally two paved roads they could have taken to get to Scotty's Castle, all they had to do was remember which direction to turn at a stop sign to head the right way home. Apparently they were incapable of that simple feat of navigation on their own. They complained their GPS kept telling them "turn right", and they just got themselves more lost. I'm guessing the GPS doesn't have a feature that simply says "turn around and go the other way". I can't help but think that if they had a road map a simple glance could have kept them on the right path.