London is a crazy mixed - up urban center , navigation - wise . It ’s so hard find your room around that when taxi - gadget driver learn to , they say they ’ve Acquired The Knowledge . And now scientists say The Knowledge really exchange drivers ’ brains .
It ’s the late evidence that adult brains can evolve and change to learn fresh things . Until the seventies and ’ 80s , scientists believed our psyche were mostly fixed , and that only during a critical period of childhood could our neurons grow and make fresh connections . But a growing dead body of evidence shows that even grownup can improve their gray matter .
MRIs first showed thatLondon taxi driver ’ hippocampi were largerthan normal in 2000 . But it was always possible that this was not stimulate and force . Perhaps drivers who could pass the three to four year driver education — which include memorizing a labyrinth of 25,000 streets within London ’s 10 - kilometre radius including yard of holidaymaker attractor — already had more grey thing and that ’s what helped them pass their examination .
But now , NeuroscientistEleanor Maguireof University College London has serve the Gallus gallus and egg interrogative sentence by comparing taxi drivers to normal folks and following them over four years . Drivers who had completed their preparation and expire their trial did well on memory chore than those who failed as well as the control group .
It ’s Bob Hope for grownup who require to pick up how to play the fiddle or learn Cantonese ! But be bright only if you ’re willing to put in the equivalent of five geezerhood memorizing the labyrinthian throughfares of London to learn your newfangled skill .
[ ScienceBlog , Scientific American ]
Image : Shutterstock / takito
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