Mary Hegarty, a psychologist who leads the Spatial Thinking Lab, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told me that by relying on G.P.S. we neglect an intrinsic navigation strategy: cognitive mapping, which depends on a spatial conception of the environment that is populated with landmarks such as trees or buildings. This approach is supported by “place cells,” specific neurons in the hippocampus, each of which represents a precise physical location. (One could think of them as the brain’s internal blue dots.) G.P.S. is more in line with a very different navigation strategy, stimulus response, which treats navigation as a series of motor responses: turn left, go five hundred feet, then turn right. This utilizes a different area of the brain, one that supports habitual learning. “I don’t think there’s enough research yet to say G.P.S. is terrible, that it’s hurting your brain,” Hegarty said. But it’s clear that turn-by-turn directions prioritize stimulus response over cognitive mapping.

In 2008, a study found that people who walked a route with G.P.S. assistance were less able to draw the path they had taken, or to guess what direction they were facing, than those who walked the same route without G.P.S. In 2020, researchers at McGill University asked subjects to navigate two virtual mazes—one that was easily traversed with cognitive-mapping strategies and one that could be better navigated using stimulus response. The more that people used G.P.S., the worse their spatial memory seemed to be, and the worse they did on the cognitive-mapping maze. The participants who relied more on G.P.S. also noticed fewer landmarks dotted around the maze, such as pyramids and trees, than those who used it less.

Maidenbaum, the neuroscientist, came to see Israel’s G.P.S.-spoofing tactics as a natural experiment in how people navigate. Many people who were accustomed to G.P.S. could no longer rely on it. He wound up surveying nearly six hundred people in affected areas. (He has published his study as a preprint, while it is undergoing peer review.) Some of them complained about grocery deliveries that were directed out of the country, or of matching with users of dating apps across borders. About eighty per cent of respondents still reached their destinations when G.P.S. was disrupted. The rest, however, reported that they ultimately went home. “We’re seeing this group of twenty to twenty-five per cent who are taking this really hard,” he said.

The rise of G.P.S. navigation may fundamentally alter our perspective, according to William Rankin, a historian at Yale and the author of “After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century.” When he was in college, he hung a campus map in his dorm room, and by studying it he found new places to explore, and routes to jog. “Beyond that, I had no idea what was going on, and I needed a different map, or couldn’t get there at all,” he said. But digital maps are essentially infinite; you can keep zooming out until the entire planet is in view. They also place a user’s blue dot in the middle. “The world is always centered around you, and psychologically that seems pretty interesting,” Rankin said. “You don’t necessarily have a sense of how you are in relationship to some larger whole.”

In late July, my husband and I decided to challenge ourselves by navigating from North Brooklyn to Alley Pond Park, in Queens, without G.P.S. Then we would try working our way through an orienteering course—a sequence of place markers that participants must find without assistance, as a sport. On the drive over, I buried my face in a Rand McNally map of New York City and Long Island, examining the tiny street names. Instead of taking the highway, we picked the path that looked most direct. A drive that I expected to take twenty-five minutes stretched to forty. We weren’t lost, but we were stuck in traffic that our guidebook could not warn us about.