Don't Get Lost: How GPS Changed EVERYTHING

You can’t get where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been! Nowadays, we’d probably just use GPS. The Global Positioning System (GPS) has been available for civilian usage for 26 years and has since been so integrated into our daily lives that our system would collapse if it faltered. From its initial use for military strategies to current-day climate monitoring, GPS has become more than an everyday navigational system. Although GPS has become an indispensable part of how we travel, it’s also reshaped our relationship with space, time, and our own brains. From the first maps on caves to Sputnik’s Doppler Effect, atomic clocks, and cell phones, let’s take an in-depth look into how we went from landmarks to radio signals, and what that means for our brains and roadways.

The first maps date back as far as 16,500 BCE, using stars and landscape features carved onto rocks and wall caves. The oldest map of the Earth is credited to the Babylonian World Map: a 15-square inch clay tablet created 600 BCE, using symbols to indicate areas. When the astronomer and astrologer Ptolemy wanted to produce better horoscopes, humanity made its first huge leap in map-making in the second century AD. Ptolemy used documents of town locations with travelers’ tales to eventually devise a system of lines that would lead to our current-day longitude and latitude lines. Using these lines, he was able to plot 10,000 places between Europe and Asia, demonstrating that the world was round and could be represented in two dimensions. When the Roman Empire fell, this advancement was lost for a period of time. Gerardus Mercator formed a cylindrical map in 1569, also depicting the world in two dimensions with a North and South pole, but it was still longitude and latitude that would provide more accurate travel. (We’ll get more in depth on the history of maps at a later time.) These maps required humans to activate parts of the hippocampus, honing their spatial navigation, spatial memory, and mental mapping. How has our country evolved since GPS technology emerged, and what are the implications for our cognitive abilities today?

When Russia launched Sputnik, the first satellite to orbit the Earth, in 1957, scientists at Johns Hopkins discovered what would later be called the Doppler Effect. This is when a satellite’s radio signals increase and decrease as it moves toward and away from a specific area. With this, scientists realized that radio signals could track satellite movement from the ground, and conversely, track the location of a receiver on the ground based off of its distance from the satellite. A year later, the Advanced Research Projects Agency developed Transit, the first global satellite navigational system. Launched in 1960, John Hopkins University APL was able to provide navigation for military and commercial users. Between 1960 and 1968, the program transitioned to the Navy with 36 fully operational satellites, providing accuracy down to tens of meters. In 1963, Phillip Diamond led an Aerospace study where he, along with the Air Force, formed a new program called 621-B. Three years later came the development that would lead to the biggest innovation in GPS technology.

Two Aerospace engineers, James Woodford and Hideyoshi Nakamura, discovered that measurements from four satellites would eliminate the need for high-accuracy clocks in the receivers. At the time, each satellite had its own clock, periodically updated via ground station signals. When the clocks were moved from the ground stations to the satellite, GPS devices could eventually be shrunk down so much that they would fit inside a cell phone. The developments during this decade of time include solid-state microprocessors, computers, and bandwidth utilization techniques, crystal oscillator clocks and eventually, the 1974 invention of the atomic clock, which led to a much more exact and accurate system. Transit was in operation for 26 years until the Defense Department officially replaced it with the Global Positioning System—the birth of our GPS.

In 1983, President Reagan authorized the use of Navstar, improving commercial airline navigation and air travel safety. This led to GPS being available for civilians, and in 1989, handheld commercial units were available for $3,000. When GPS first appeared in a cellphone in 1999, it also showed up in automobiles. A year later, the government approved GPS signals for civilian use, adding three additional GPS signals, making GPS 10 times more accurate overnight, as well as dropping the price of processing chips and receivers from $3,000 to $1.50. Now GPS could be used in any and every industry. Since 1980, GPS satellites have generated $1.4 trillion in economic benefits, and have been using to optimize farming, study earthquakes, volcanoes, and tectonic plate movement. In the decade prior to 2017, a 2019 study showed that Americans saved 52 billion gallons of fuel and drive over one trillion fewer miles.

Once GPS was put into the hands of civilians, the world changed. Americans themselves use over 900 million GPS receivers, over 100 million vehicles have car navigation systems. Trucks, ships, planes, and drones all use GPS for location services and safety. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) relies so heavily on GPS for all navigation that if there’s an outage, the FAA grounds all planes: over 7,600 commercial aircraft, 167,000 general aviation aircraft, and 34,200 experimental aircraft. GPS also measures climate change by providing information for reflectometry, measuring changes between snowfall, vegetation, ice coverage, and soil moisture. John Deere even makes GPS-enabled tractors that help farmers sow seeds in specific locations, decreasing waste by having farmers water and fertilize exactly where the seeds are located.

With satellites measuring and monitoring so much of our daily lives, protecting GPS from vulnerabilities is more critical than ever. Electromagnetic storms or hostile military action are big concerns that can completely eliminate GPS signals. In 2019, Iran was able to successfully meddle with GPS tracking to have it appear as though it was operating correctly while sending inaccurate information—an act called “spoofing.” According to Forbes, “three separate laws, most recently the Frank LoBiondo Coast Guard Authorization Act of 2018, tasked the Transportation Department with providing a backup to GPS. The LoBiondo Act required the Secretary to put in place a backup system for GPS by the end of 2020, subject to Congressional appropriations. But Congress has so far not appropriated the funds for backup.” This feels even more dire when we consider the way that GPS has altered our brain chemistry.

Scientific research has not been limited to just the benefits of GPS for the modern world but also how it can negatively affect the human brain. According to research, navigation is one of the ways we utilize and strengthen our hippocampus—an area in the temporal lobe that supports episodic and relational memory, honing spatial navigation, spatial memory, and mental mapping. The more often drivers utilize GPS, the less they recall on their hippocampus for navigation. Two separate studies were conducted in Montreal. The first was to observe hippocampus-dependent spacial memory and the second was to observe stimulus-response strategy. A hippocampus-dependent spacial memory strategy is when a person uses a landmark or feature to direct their navigation. An example of this is when someone knows to turn left whenever they cross a bridge or see a specific mailbox. A stimulus-response strategy is when a person isn’t using cognitive energy but instead has learned how to navigate habitually. This type of wayfinding uses the caudate nucleus in the brain, which is also responsible for learning habits. It works as a sort of “autopilot” that doesn’t allow for too much change and something as simple as a new landmark can throw a traveler off their route. Like any muscle, the hippocampus weakened in participants that employed more GPS usage over the next three years, as a result of decreased hippocampus usage. According to the study, “ they exhibit a reduced use of spatial memory strategies, reduced cognitive mapping abilities, reduced landmark encoding, and as they have more difficulty learning navigational information.”

Another important characteristic of GPS is its egocentric navigation, which doesn’t inform the user of their location based on the context of the whole but instead only dictates the next immediate move. This type of navigation trains the user to disregard landmarks and their relation to each other, since the focus is only on the next direction. Strengthening the hippocampus and being aware of navigation is important for the formation of memories. London cab drivers are required to pass a test regarding their “Knowledge of London,” which has resulted in them having “outsized hippocampi.” These cab drivers have been recruited for Alzheimer’s research and studies show that strengthening our own hippocampi through decreased reliance on GPS can help strengthen our ability to hold onto memories formed by engaging in spatial navigation. The detrimental effects of GPS aren’t the only criticisms for the system.

Another issue critics have found with GPS systems is the disconnection between the system itself and public road authorities. While GPS location systems have the ability to monitor satellite images and street-level information, congestion conditions, and divert traffic to increase efficient driving time, there is little published information on how this has improved our actual roadways and highway system. While the UK has numerous findings on traffic diversion and the effects it has on smaller roads, congestion, and route optimization, the US has yet to follow suit. Studies have shown that there is a definite increase of van traffic, due to the growth of online shopping and home deliveries. Van traffic accounts for an increase in motorists on urban and rural minor roads, resulting in faster wear. Another factor that’s increased the amount of vehicles on minor roads is the popularization of apps such as Uber and Lyft. Digital navigation also led to an increase of drivers of minor roads, which is beneficial for reducing congestion on major highways and diverting congestion—but there is again little research on how this has affected local public road improvements. Said another way, this information has not resulted in an increase of minor road improvements nor have there been extensive studies on the effects of this increase in traffic volume in order to even begin a plan for minor road improvements.

Aside from the first map of the Earth in 600 BCE to the first two-dimensional representation of the world in the second century AD, our biggest navigational advancements have been in the last 68 years. It’s hard to argue that our world would be better without GPS, as it provides travel freedom to everyday users as well as highly specific information for scientists and military personnel. However, the effect that this system has on our own mental capacities should be studied further and not taken lightly. Since GPS isn’t going anywhere, we should also make sure that our information is being protected and that the system is safeguarded against hacking or failure, and that the information we’re collecting is being utilized to its maximum potential for our benefit. Whether or not you use GPS or rely on your old-school paper maps, just remember that Interstate Signways marked the way!