What London Taxi-Drivers Can Teach You About Your Brain

It’s way more adaptable than you think.

Image by bzager0 from Pixabay

Let’s say you’re in London and need to get from The Tower of London to Notting Hill. You jump into an iconic black taxi to get there.

Chances are that your driver will not even turn the GPS on. Not only that, they will know every single turn to take on the trip before starting the engine. In fact, they will know the route so well that they can have an intelligent conversation with the passenger without focusing on where they’re heading.

All London black cab drivers must master the 25 000 streets and more than 100 000 points of interests before getting their license. By memorising this, they create a GPS inside their heads. If a road is closed, they immediately know an alternative route to take, and the customer will arrive without ever knowing about the detour.

This extensive map knowledge made London taxi-drivers interesting for researchers, who wanted to figure out if their brain’s looked different from the rest.

Research

The researchers were most interested in the hippocampus, the part of the brain that’s responsible for memory. More specifically, they were interested in the parts of the hippocampus responsible for spatial memory, which helps us…