There's a not-so-sacred ritual I practice almost every time I drive somewhere. It happens before I put on my seat belt, check my mirror and turn on the engine. I type in the address of wherever I'm going into my phone. I have a terrible sense of direction, so without the seemingly omniscient guide of GPS — the Global Positioning System — not only would I be lost, I'd feel lost.
It makes me wonder: Is there anything I can do to improve my navigation skills? The answer is yes, say researchers who study this topic. Let go of your fear of getting lost, be observant and practice keeping "a sense of direction in your head as you travel," says Mary Hegarty, a cognitive psychologist at the Spatial Thinking Lab at University of California, Santa Barbara. "When you have GPS on, you're probably not thinking of any of that."
