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But it was also possible that The Knowledge selected for people whose memory centers were larger than average in the first place. It seemed that the longer someone had been driving a taxi, the larger his hippocampus, as though the brain expanded to accommodate the cognitive demands of navigating London's streets.
#Make visuals great again taxi sign drivers#
In other words, taxi drivers had plumper memory centers than their peers. In her earliest studies, Maguire discovered that London taxi drivers had more gray matter in their posterior hippocampi than people who were similar in age, education and intelligence, but who did not drive taxis.
#Make visuals great again taxi sign series#
" The Knowledge," as it is called, is unique to London taxi licensing and involves a series of grueling exams that only about 50 percent of hopefuls pass. To earn their licenses, cab drivers in training spend three to four years driving around the city on mopeds, memorizing a labyrinth of 25,000 streets within a 10-kilometer radius of Charing Cross train station, as well as thousands of tourist attractions and hot spots. Maguire wondered whether London taxi drivers also had larger-than-average hippocampi. The hippocampus is a seahorse-shaped section in the vertebrate brain that is crucial for long-term memory and spatial navigation. Researchers noticed that a part of the brain called the hippocampus was much larger in these animals than in similar species that did not secret away their snacks. Some birds and mammals, such as western scrub jays and squirrels, cache food and dig it up later, which means they must memorize the locations of all their hiding spots. Neuroscientist Eleanor Maguire of University College London (U.C.L.) first got the idea to study London cab drivers from research on memory champions of the animal world. Excelling at one form of memory, however, may inhibit another. With the new research, scientists can definitively say that London taxi drivers not only have larger-than-average memory centers in their brains, but also that their intensive training is responsible for the growth. These navigational demands stimulate brain development, concludes a study five years in the making. Yet London's taxi drivers navigate the smoggy snarl with ease, instantaneously calculating the swiftest route between any two points. But London? A map of its streets looks more like a tangle of yarn that a preschooler glued to construction paper than a metropolis designed with architectural foresight.
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In Paris 20 administrative districts, or arrondissements, form a clockwise spiral around the Seine. Manhattan's midtown streets are arranged in a user-friendly grid.
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