It's the mobile phones-and-number-remembering thing all over again

Can it be true? Can GPS really cause Alzheimer's?

No. Of course it can't. And the paper doesn't say that. Hell, the article doesn't say that. Of course, the Daily Tech is one of those sites that tends not to overegg the pudding too often, but every site that reports on breakthroughs in science gets a little overenthusiastic at times. So why pose the question? Because I fully expect to see a plethora of reports making just that claim in the days to come. There are already a few darkly hinting at such things; I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to dig them out.

But on the report itself (or, rather, the report of the report), I'd like to vent my spleen for a few moments.

First of all, though it doesn't mention it, watchers of science will be familiar with the concept of the hippocampus adapting itself; the 2003 Ignobel award for medicine was conferred on those who showed that taxi drivers have a bigger hippocampus than most.

It makes sense, therefore, that there'd be some degree of atrophying in those whose need for spatial awareness in the context of navigation is diminished. But... memory problems? Really?

I'm not denying the possibility. However, one has to remember that regular travel beyond one's home home town is a recent innovation; far too recent for the brain to have adapted itself. It's for this reason that I find the concept of a diminished capability somewhat hard to swallow. The most I'd be willing to accept is that our memories have improved, and that GPS goes some way to resetting that capability to pre-car levels.

Of course, Alzheimer's was hardly a problem a couple of hundred years ago; people died long before the brain had a chance to melt for the vast majority of people.

I'll just make one point about 'memory' in this context; presumably the researchers are familiar with the work others have done in field, and have therefore read the paper on cabbies and their enlarged hippocampus. One has to wonder, then about this line from the above report:

researchers are unsure as to whether using spacial strategies causes the hippocampus to grow, or if having a "robust" hippocampus causes an individual to use spacial strategies

I'm no neurologist, but even I know that the brain is a massively more complex organ than we understand, and that however much the hippocampus is associated with spatial strategies, there's a lot more to the tale than that. Are taxi drivers masters of memory, capable of memorising pi to a godzillion digits at a single sitting? Are inveterate GPS users always leaving the house with no pants? I doubt it.