‘How Do They Just Know?’

Dads seem to know it all—a woman online is desperate to know how.

In a viral TikTok video, Meg (@meganflint_) revealed that her father drives without a navigation system. On a five-and-a-half-hour car trip, she said that he hadn’t once relied on maps, prompting her and those in the comments to wonder how. Since it was posted, the video has received 6.9 million views,1.2 million likes and over 2,200 comments.

“Literally, how do dads know the way to everywhere,” she captioned the video. “We’re on a five-and-a-half-hour car journey and not once has maps come out.”

Meg seemed to point to a common phenomenon, judging by some of the comments.

“They go somewhere once and remember the way 20 years later,” @_jaelyn_5 wrote.

“My dad has memorized the whole way to Texas. We live in Michigan. It’s 18 hours,” @bri331581 wrote.

“My dad has memorized the whole country,” @laiba.ashraf10 wrote. And mia wrote: “facts, it’s like [they’re] the map,” to which Meg replied: “like how do they just know??”

Some had stories of their fathers expecting them to operate in the same way. “One time I was on a solo trip out of state and my maps starting glitching, and I got lost, and my dad’s response was, ‘This is why you know your route before you leave,’ like, ‘Yes, dad, let me memorize,'” @siut444drpepper wrote.

“This was my grandpa on their way back from my house. He followed me until we got into Missouri and then he was like, ‘I know the backroads from here.’ We still got six hours to drive, what!” @fl1ppin_h3cc wrote.

While dads and grandfathers are pros at navigation, their memories don’t always extend to the basic things. “And they still don’t know how old you are or when your birthday is,” @x_sienna_x08 wrote.

People Who Rely on Navigation Have Worse Spatial Memory

A 2020 study published in the journal Scientific Reports revealed that people might be at a disadvantage with their belief in Global Positioning System (GPS) devices.

Scientists examined the GPS experiences of 50 drivers regarding their spatial memory and found that greater GPS use was associated with decline in a particular type of spatial memory. Interestingly, the people studied who used GPS more said they did not do so because they felt they had a “poor sense of direction”—further contributing to the idea that greater GPS use leads to worsened spatial memory, not the other way around.

As people come to depend more and more on GPS systems to get around, these findings are relevant, and might come as a surprise: If Meg and other commenters were to use GPS less, their spatial memory may actually be impacted.

Some are saying Meg’s revelation is not that radical, though, after all. “If you look at the side of the road there are these big green flat signs that have directions and places on them,” @wiiltyler wrote.

Newsweek reached out to @meganflint_ for comment via TikTok.