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You Really Are What You Know

Posted by Soulskill on from the i-am-a-kung-fu dept.

jd writes "There has been research for some time showing that London cab driver brains differ from other people's, with considerable enlargement of those areas dealing with spacial relationships and navigation. Follow-up work showed it wasn't simply a product of driving a lot (PDF). However, up until now it has been disputed as to whether the brain structure led people to become London cabbies or whether the brain structure changed as a result of their intensive training (which requires rote memorization of essentially the entire street map of one of the largest and least-organized cities in the world). Well, this latest study answers that. MRI scans before and after the training show that the regions of the brain substantially grow as a result of the training, and they're quite normal beforehand. The practical upshot of this research is that — even for adult brains, which aren't supposed to change much — what you learn structurally changes your brain. Significantly."

7 of 188 comments (clear)

  1. " Even for adult brains, which aren't supposed to by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    " Even for adult brains, which aren't supposed to change much"

    How is it that this is still passed around as fact. This idea is incredibly outdated.

  2. Re:You would have to be differently abled by TWX · · Score: 4, Insightful

    To navigate a city looks like it was planned by throwing spaghetti at a wall and calling it a map.

    And to think, that's after the Great Fire of London in 1666, and the subsequent planned rebuilding strategies to improve it! I'd had to think what it was like before that!

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    Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
  3. Good news! by mosb1000 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This is good news for you then, since it means that it's never too late to forget all that junk.

  4. Re:" Even for adult brains, which aren't supposed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    He still has a century on the people he's insulting, champ.

  5. Not what you know by gmuslera · · Score: 3, Insightful
    but what you exercise. Probably there are (maybe in different areas) brain improvements too for piano players, people that speak in several languages or players of some games. The brain is a muscle that grows with training.

    Related with the title, not the content of the article, probably there is very little of what is "you" that wasnt what you know or what you lived. Someone else that looked essentially like me (to not have different experiences based on looks) living exactly what i lived would probably think like me.

  6. Re:You would have to be differently abled by fotoflojoe · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I grew up in Boston, Massachusetts. The first time I visited London, I felt right at home.

  7. Re:Changes your brain? by TheLink · · Score: 1, Insightful

    You think there won't be similar problems if those users were using GNOME/KDE on Linux/BSD?

    It'll probably be worse - imagine business apps written by outsourced Indians that would only work on GNOME 2 maybe even only a specific version of the distro, so that you really could not update/upgrade stuff without breaking the apps.

    Meanwhile the OSS bunch will be merrily breaking backward compatibility (whether at program or UI level) and saying "with open source you can fix it yourself". The frigging thing they don't seem to get is most people don't want to have to keep fixing or recompiling stuff.

    So the OP would just be posting this instead: "the same Desktop Linux machines, year after year, as the problems can't truly be fixed."

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