The human brain has not meaningfully changed in roughly 300,000 years (Stringer, 2016), and before you come after me, I’m talking about the neural systems responsible for things like how humans navigate space, process visual information, form memories, and build trust.
What has changed enormously are things like language, culture, and knowledge, and humans have adapted in countless ways, as we are evolutionarily wired to do.
But the core neural architecture? Not so much.
Where things get interesting is the speed of change in the external world versus internal biology. In the last thirty years, the tools and products we have built have changed faster than at any prior point in human history.
As it has become faster and faster to build anything, remembering human fundamentals has implications for every design decision you make in anything you build, produce, or create for other people.
The best-performing tools and products aren’t the ones that taught users something new. They are the ones that matched what the brain was already wired to process.
The Back Button
The back button is an example of what it looks like when a tool gets this right without trying to.
Introduced in Mosaic in 1993 as basic browser navigation, it became so reflexively relied upon that every browser and eventually every mobile operating system was built around it.
What users were reaching for was something the brain already does: treat information environments like physical spaces, build a spatial model of where you have been, and move back through it when needed.
When Spotify removed the back button from their web player, their own community forum filled with complaints. Users didn’t describe a missing feature but something “absolutely absurd,” as if something was fundamentally broken. One user called it their most used button in the entire interface (Spotify Community Forum, n.d.). That reaction is disproportionate to the removal of a single button, which is exactly the point.
The back button works because it matches a spatial instinct the brain is already running. Removing it created disorientation as much as it created inconvenience.
The Brain Navigates Information Like Physical Space
The disorientation that comes from a broken back button isn’t a preference or a habit but moreso the brain’s spatial memory system registering a contradiction.
Here is what is actually happening when the back button breaks.
The brain doesn’t store information the way a filing cabinet does in a categorized, labeled, and alphabetized fashion.
It stores it spatially.
Neuroscientists call the cells responsible for this place cells (O’Keefe & Dostrovsky, 1971; Moser et al., 2008).
The brain is constantly building a map of where you are and where you have been, not just in physical space, but in information space too.
When you move through an app or a website, your brain is doing the same thing it does when you walk through a building, tracking location.
When the interface contradicts what the brain just recorded — sending you somewhere unexpected, reorganizing between visits, or ignoring where you just came from — what you feel is not just frustration but disorientation. The brain expected one thing and got another.
This is also why a map works better than a list for finding something in a physical location. A list asks your brain to read, scan, and remember. A map asks your brain to do something it has been doing for hundreds of thousands of years: find things in space.
Eleanor Maguire’s research on London taxi drivers found that years of navigating a city actually changed the physical structure of their brains; the region associated with spatial memory was measurably larger than in non-drivers (Maguire et al., 2000).
The brain is so invested in spatial navigation that it restructures itself around it. Interfaces that work with that get the benefit of a system the brain already runs automatically. Interfaces that don’t ask users to do extra work to get the same result. Video is of the Find Your Good Place. directory, a project collaboration between Ruoom Inc. & Hi From Business Camp.
Sources:
Maguire, E.A., et al. (2000). Navigation-related structural change in the hippocampi of taxi drivers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 97(8), 4398–4403.
Moser, E.I., Kropff, E., & Moser, M.B. (2008). Place cells, grid cells, and the brain’s spatial representation system. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 31, 69–89.
O’Keefe, J., & Dostrovsky, J. (1971). The hippocampus as a spatial map: Preliminary evidence from unit activity in the freely-moving rat. Brain Research, 34(1), 171–175.
