This summer's epic blockbuster, "The Odyssey," is a story about getting lost.

• Three thousand years later, we've gotten remarkably good at avoiding it, Natalie Daher writes.

Why it matters: Our dependence on GPS may be making navigation easier while giving our brains less practice doing it ourselves.

• As Shayla Love writes in The New Yorker, navigating without turn-by-turn directions forces us to notice landmarks, orient ourselves in space and build what researchers call a "cognitive map."

🧠 How it works: Mary Hegarty, a psychologist who leads UC Santa Barbara's Spatial Thinking Lab, told Love that cognitive mapping draws on "place cells" in the hippocampus — neurons associated with specific physical locations.

• GPS, however, encourages a simpler habit — to follow the instruction. Turn left. Go 500 feet. Turn right.

Hegarty cautions that there isn't enough evidence to say GPS is damaging our brains. But research cited by The New Yorker has found that people relying more heavily on GPS tend to remember routes and landmarks less well.

🏃🏻‍♀️ I got a tiny taste of this on my fourth annual family vacation to the same house in Springs, N.Y., last month.

• For the first time, I set out for a favorite running trail, wedged between a harbor and a bay, without following a map on my phone.
• It was left, right, left, right. Nothing groundbreaking, but confidence-boosting nonetheless.

🧭 I trusted my internal compass, and I realized it had been quite a while since I'd traveled somewhere less familiar without peeking at a screen to figure out where I was. I took in some familiar sights along the way: leisurely bikers, a Little Free Library, an inlet to a tiny beach.

👀 That may be the bigger point. Love tried something more ambitious: navigating her way from Brooklyn to Queens and then through an orienteering course in Alley Pond Park.

• What struck her wasn't some suddenly awakened superpower, but the exercise of skills that technology can dull: "paying attention, being patient, accepting uncertainty."

📍 The bottom line: We shouldn't throw away Google Maps. But every once in a while, it's worth looking up from the blue dot and finding our own way.

My favorite running trail, hands down, on Gerard Dr. in Springs, N.Y.