Finding your way – Is using GPS a good thing?

The hippocampus is not a homosexual hippopotamus, although if such a beast exists, I think this should be its official title. No, the hippocampus is a major component of the brains of humans and other mammals. At least we now know that a hippopotamus has a hippocampus. The hippocampus plays important roles in the consolidation of information from short-term memory to long-term memory and spatial navigation. In Alzheimer’s disease, the hippocampus is one of the first regions of the brain to suffer damage; memory problems and disorientation appear among the first symptoms.

In various studies conducted over the last few years by scientists as far afield as University College London and McGill University in Canada, it was found that the hippocampus in people who rely too heavily on GPS to get around was actually atrophying.

But the researchers also found a greater volume of grey matter in the hippocampus of older adults who used spatial strategies, such as London cabbies. And these adults scored higher on a standardized cognition test used to help diagnose mild cognitive impairment, which is often a precursor to Alzheimer’s disease. These findings suggest that using spatial memory may increase the function of the hippocampus and increase our quality of life as we age.

And what has all this got to do with me and these posts? Either I have a point to make or Alzheimer’s is starting to set in! I’m going to pick the former option (even if others keep telling me that latter is the more probable). And the point I have to make is that just like trying to navigate through the myriad streets of London requires either the expertise of a London cabbie or a GPS, navigating through a technical manual requires navigational aids as well. In fact, not providing some form of navigational aid for the readers can be as detrimental to their health as using GPS is to the brain. Readers become more and more frustrated with their inability to find the information they so sorely need and this in turn can lead to increased blood pressure and worse. Of course, if the reader has Alzheimer’s, he’ll have forgotten what he is looking for before frustration sets in.

In the case of a technical manual, the navigational aids come in a number of guises, the main ones being:

• Table of contents
• Page numbers
• Chapter numbers
• Index

The table of contents is akin to a corridor in a building with offices on either side. You want a specific office and so start walking along the corridor looking for a department name on the doors as you walk past which is closest to what you want. Once you have found the right door you can get what you want done. If the manual needs this type of navigational aid, then include a TOC, whether the manual is ten pages or a hundred pages or a thousand pages long.

Page numbers help you find the specific point in a book without turning each and every page. You know that page 347 in a 700 page manual is just about in the center of the book, so you can open the book in the middle and then go a few pages in either direction to find the exact page.

Chapter numbers work in the same way as page numbers but with less granularity. For example, if I have a manual with thirteen chapters and I want information in chapter eleven, I’ll start looking towards the end of the book and use the chapter numbers to guide me. I also know that the information I seek is to be found within the bounds of chapter eleven so I can focus just on these pages. Many technical writers employ a system of restarting the page number with each new chapter: Ch1-p1 to Ch1-p24 and then Ch2-p1 to Ch2-p12, etc. This makes the manual easier to maintain because a change in one of the chapters only impacts on the page numbering of that chapter only. However, this totally negates the ability to use the pages as a navigation device outside of the chapter which is not a good thing for the reader. For this reason I am against this system and prefer the overhead of repaginating a whole book because of a page change in one chapter. It is what I am paid to do and making my life easier at the expense of the reader is definitely not what I am paid to do.

Finally, the index is used by the reader who knows exactly what to look for and needs exact instructions on how to reach that topic, or when there are a number of related topics, all dealing with the topic of interest, where specifically to look over multiple pages and chapters. Indexing is a subject that deserves more space than the couple of sentences here. I presented a very brief overview in Tunnel vision: the way forward but one of these days I will spend more time on this fascinating subject.