Reading multiple choice

For most of my adult life I have been, by my own admission, a hopeless navigator. I have walked confidently in the wrong direction out of underground stations on three continents, and I once spent forty minutes looking for a hotel that turned out to be directly behind me. So when satellite navigation arrived on my phone, I greeted it less as a convenience than as a rescue. For the first time, I could arrive somewhere new and simply follow the blue dot, freed from the small daily humiliation of asking strangers for directions I would forget before I had turned the corner.

It was a neuroscientist friend who first spoiled this happy arrangement. Over dinner one evening, she mentioned studies suggesting that people who rely heavily on turn-by-turn directions make less use of the parts of the brain that build mental maps. 'It's not that the app makes you stupid,' she said, seeing my face. 'It's that you're no longer practising something the brain is rather good at learning.' I laughed and said that, in my case, there had never been much to practise. But the remark stayed with me, partly because I suspected she was right, and partly because, when I thought about it, I could not remember a single route I had followed in the previous year.

I decided on an experiment. For a month, I would leave my phone in my pocket whenever I walked anywhere in my own city, using only a folding paper map, and only when I was genuinely stuck. The first week was every bit as miserable as I had feared. I was late for a dentist's appointment, missed the start of a film, and found myself, more than once, standing on a street corner turning the map round and round as if the problem lay in its orientation rather than mine. My partner, who has an infuriatingly reliable sense of direction, was sympathetic in the way people are when they have never had a particular difficulty themselves.

Somewhere in the second week, though, something shifted. It was not that I suddenly knew where I was going; I still took wrong turns with impressive regularity. What changed was what I noticed. Forced to look up rather than down, I began to register the things that make one street different from another: a bakery with a blue awning, a church spire that was visible from surprisingly far away, the way the ground sloped gently towards the river. These became landmarks, and the landmarks slowly began to connect. I realised, with some embarrassment, that I had lived in the city for nine years and had never known that the river was the reason half the main roads curved the way they did.

There were other, less expected rewards. Being lost, it turns out, is a rather sociable condition. I had more conversations with strangers in that month than in the previous year, most of them pleasant and some of them extremely long. An elderly man outside a hardware shop not only gave me directions but walked me halfway there, telling me which of the buildings we passed had been rebuilt after the war. A teenager on a bicycle took one look at my map, said 'Nobody uses those any more,' and then, quite kindly, pointed me the right way.

I do not want to exaggerate what I achieved. I have not become a natural navigator, and I am under no illusion that I could find my way across an unfamiliar city without help. I still use the app when I travel, and I have no intention of giving it up. But I now use it differently: I check the route before I set off, put the phone away, and consult it again only if I am truly lost. It is a small change, and the scientific case for it may yet turn out to be weaker than my friend believed. Still, I find I like the city better now that I have some sense of how it fits together, and I like myself a little better for having made the effort to find out.