Adult Brains Grow From Specialist Use

Xemu writes "Researchers at University College of London's Institute of Neurology have discovered that taxi drivers grow more brain cells in the area associated with memory. Dr Eleanor Maguire says, 'We believe the brain increased in gray matter volume because of the huge amount of data memorized.' She warns against the use of GPS and says it will possibly affect the brain changes seen in this study. This research is the first to show that the brains of adults can grow in response to specialist use." London cabbies, unlike their American counterparts, have to learn the layout of streets and the locations of thousands of places of interest in order to get a license.

Comments

Like every other muscle

[LiquidCoooled]

If you train it and work with it it will grow and remain strong.

My bulging typing fingers and keen google-foo are testament to that.

Re:Like every other muscle

[Average_Joe_Sixpack]

If you train it and work with it it will grow and remain strong.

My right arm and wrist are stronger than my left ... not sure how it ever got that way.

Re:Like every other muscle

[rolfwind]

Interesting you mention typing. I touch-typed with a regular QWERTY keyboard for at least 10 years, and two years back, I switched to the DVORAK layout. These days, people look at me in disbelief if they know I can program computers, but I start fumble with a regular keyboard. My muscle memory has completely changed over to dvorak and I can't type QWERTY worth a damn. I am a relatively quick learner (learned fluent dvorak by forcing it on myself in 8 hours of concentration) too.

My mother used to be fluent in French, being a translator. She hasn't used the language in 20 years. She has almost forgotten it completely as she can't make sentences so easily. (Though I am sure she can get back into it 100x faster than a newcomer).

It is almost like the brain is a muscle. After Terry Shiavo died, the autopsy found that her brain shrunk to the size of grapefruit.

I wonder if there is a correlation of speed of learning and speed of forgetting and the brains that "erase" (or shove aside) old info faster take in new information easier.

London cabbies...

[soliptic]

See The Knowledge and the references from there. I think it is only required for taxicab drivers (ie "Black cabs"), not minicab drivers.

Old news for nerds?

[the_humeister]

Studies were published in the year 2000. Why is this now getting attention? Actually, come to think of it, I think it got attention back then too.

Does this mean...

[Kiba Ruby]

Does this mean that programmers are more logical than people?

Cause or Effect?

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Do taxi drivers' brains expand to provide more memory, or do people with poor memory just forget to become taxi drivers?

A huge problem with any of these correlation studies is determining, accurately, which way the cause->effect relationship runs.

Re:Cause or Effect?

[slamb]

EmbeddedJanitor asked

Do taxi drivers' brains expand to provide more memory, or do people with poor memory just forget to become taxi drivers? A huge problem with any of these correlation studies is determining, accurately, which way the cause->effect relationship runs.

A good question, but RTFA:

Dr Maguire said: "We are now looking at the brains of taxi-drivers before they start training, and at those of retired cabbies to see whether that area of the brain gets smaller when it is not used."

Hopefully they'll actually follow the pre-training drivers through all the way through training so they don't compare future wash-outs with present successful cabbies rather than future successful cabbies with present successful cabbies. If so, it should go a long way toward answering your question.

The ultimate would be to compare the same population of cabbies vs. bus drivers (control group) through their entire careers. Obviously that'd be a long-term study, and it will become impossible when "the Knowledge" is obsoleted by GPS mapping software. (I say "when" rather than "if". It will happen sooner or later.)

Re:Cause or Effect?

[dirgotronix]

I'm a cabbie.

I was in a motorcycle accident in 2001 which caused serious short-term memory issues in my brain. I started driving a cab in february of 2006, and I have noticed an increase in my short term memory.

When I first started, I would have to ask my passengers to give me directions one turn at a time (and in my mind, I was repeating that single direction) in order to get to the destination. Now, I can generally get anywhere on address alone, or, at a minimum, remember the address all the way through the trip, despite having various conversations, remembering turn by turn directions, avoiding accidents, etc.

I'd say I agree with the studies, from personal experience.

Re:How do they know?

[zCyl]

Did these scientists have a "control experiment" done? The very usage of the word "believe" scares me. That means that there could be another scientist who might *not* believe.

Welcome to the real world of science, where conclusions are not solid, facts are not certain, and evidence is only an indication. :)

Re:london streets

[gilgongo]

One side effect of London cabbies having to do "The Knowledge" to get a license is that it creates a market for cheap, illegal cab drivers to fill the supply gap brough about by having such an exclusive system. With hoards of unlicensed cabbies around, women get raped, uninsured road accidents happen, tourists get ripped off and legitimate cab fares are sky high.

I am a Londoner, and I think the sooner the GPS makes The Knowledge a prerequisite of licenced cab driving irrelevant, the better. The times I've been to NYC and got a cab it's been paradise in comparison.

Plato/Socrates said that about writing too...

[KarmaRundi]

"Soc. At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality." Translation nabbed from here

Bet he would have hated Google. All we have to remember now is how to use it and a few key words.

Use a GPS. Save your brain for something better.

[cvd6262]

Recommending that GPS units shouldn't be used because it would cause a change in the person's brain is ridiculous unless the benefit of *not* changing the brain is good for anything other than the task the GPS does.

American Scientist had an episode where they taught a seeing girl braille, and tested her ability while doing an fMRI. The sections of her brain that fired during the test were associated with tactile processing. Then they blindfolded her for 100 hours, and retested. This time, her visual cortex was firing. The brain is dynamic and can repurpose unused neurons. This may be why people can no longer remember 7-digit telephone numbers: We all have PDA/cell phones to do it for us.

Is this bad? Not unless you value the ability to remember phone numbers.

Would it be bad if London taxi drivers no longer knew every little alleyway? Not so long as they could still accomplish their task.

BTW, I had a very different experience with a cabby in Paris. I told him where I wanted to go and he handed me a road atlas and said, "Trouvez-le."

Where the streets have TOO MANY names.

[The Monster]

Aren't American roads in the large cities laid out in grids anyway?

The older a city is, the less true this is. In a city like Boston, there are neighborhoods with local grids at roughly the same granularity as those in London, and the same tendency of a road passing through an intersection to change names and reset numbering back to 1. Even Manhattan Island, the stereotypical grid of numbered Streets and Avenues, has them laid out according to the general orientation of the island, rather than the points of a compass

By contrast, Washington, DC was carefully planned, with a Cartesian quadrant system of N/S and E/W 'Streets' numbered from the Capitol building, as well as 'Avenues' that run at odd angles to that grid. The Public Land Survey System, which was used for the territories gained/defined after the US became independent of Britain, imposes a compass grid that largely governs newer areas, such as Florida and Western states.

It is often said that St. Louis (built long before the survey system) is the westernmost 'eastern' city, and Kansas City the easternmost 'western' city. A comparison of the two shows that the former indeed has virtually no streets that align with the compass, while the latter has most major roads aligned with the survey grids, right down to the streets across the state line not being quite exactly aligned (due to accumulated errors over the distances from the 5th and 6th Principal Meridians, from which the surveys were conducted).

The reason why London cabbies have to learn so many different street names is because there's so damned many of them, and no particular scheme to tie them together.