Google Maps Has Changed How We Remember Space

Electronic mapping systems are altering how our spatial memories function, with real world implications

Credit: NurPhoto/Getty Images

Google Maps was released just after I turned 10 years old in the winter of 2005. Before that, it was paper maps or printed MapQuest directions for my family. (Who remembers that era?) I didn’t start using Google Maps regularly until I went to college in 2013. Even then, it was mostly limited to vacations in places I had never visited before. I never used Google Maps to guide me through familiar places.

I took a trip back to my hometown back in September, for the first time in more than two years, and it was like stepping back in time — but not quite.

I couldn’t remember what time the local grocery store closed, so I went to Google Maps to look for open grocery stores — my first approach in any unfamiliar place. When my phone loaded the blue dot overlaid on the white streets, I didn’t know what to do.

I didn’t recognize where I was — didn’t know how to find the grocery store I could walk to in my sleep — because I literally had never looked at my hometown from this vantage point. The streets I had spent more than a decade and a half wandering were completely unfamiliar to me because I had never seen them from this…