

Scientists Find Studying For Test To Become London Cabbie Enlarges Brain - wallflower
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/12/09/143465903/scientists-find-studying-for-test-to-become-london-cabbie-enlarges-brain

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mechanical_fish
This particular publication may add new data, but this basic finding about
London cabbies is years old - it won the Ig Nobel prize years ago. Not sure if
the previous work was by the same research group or a different one.

No mention of that in the article, of course, because press-release science
exists in a timeless vacuum independent of context or references.

EDIT: Not surprisingly, the folks at the Annals of Improbable Research are
better science journalists than average:
[http://www.improbable.com/2011/12/09/taxi-driver-brains-a-
fu...](http://www.improbable.com/2011/12/09/taxi-driver-brains-a-further-
look/)

~~~
hmahncke
The big advance here is that the current study shows that the brain change
occurred directly as a result of the learning. Previous studies had a weakness
in that they only looked at brain size well after the learning had occurred;
raising the possibility that people with bigger hippocampi choose to become
taxi drivers, or are the only people who pass the test.

So the new study established causation, extending our knowledge beyond the
correlation.

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abruzzi
First thought when I read the title, was "enlarge as in make smarter, or
enlarge as in adema and increased intracranial pressure?"

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stfu
_To become a cab driver in London, you have to acquire "The Knowledge," which
is their fancy way of saying that you have to memorize all the streets in
London. It's quite a process that takes most three to four years to complete._

Crazy. Any bets on for how long they are going to continue this practice?
Seems almost as redundant as to teach them how to drive a horse buggy just for
the time their engine is dead.

~~~
ColinWright
I remain unconvinced that it's crazy. I've been driven in London by a cabbie
when there are unexpected road closures and diversions, and there is
absolutely no doubt that he did better than any existing system at getting me
where I wanted to go efficiently despite the problems.

GPS and SatNav is currently no solution for the streets of London. Remember,
it's been there a long time, and initially grew without the existence of cars.

~~~
vacri
I've been driven by cab in London to an address we later found was on the same
physical street, it just changed name halfway. The folks at the destination
laughed and said that while the cabbie should have just driven straight down
the street, his actual route took us about four times the distance it should
have...

It seems that The Knowledge isn't necessarily implemented for The Punters :)

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teamonkey
There's knowing the quickest route to take and then there's taking the longest
route you can get away with. Two different problems with the same data set.

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zdw
So, memorization will change brain structure. Interesting.

I'd also bet that people who for various reasons had to memorize a lot (for
example, if you weren't ever taught to read either now or years ago when it
wasn't a common skill) also have different brain structure.

~~~
espeed
In addition to just memorizing facts, they are building a mental structure for
all the connections within the city. I wonder if learning the structure of any
large system would have the same effect? For example, a large software system,
the economic system, or the political system -- where you understand the
relationships of all the political players.

~~~
robertskmiles
Perhaps the political system, or a complex ecosystem with a lot of
relationships, but I think software and economic systems are generally much
less complex than London. The thing about a city like London is it's pretty
much 'incompressible' data. If you want to learn New York, large chunks of it
compress by saying things like "the roads are mostly a grid", "these streets
are numbered sequentially", etc. London doesn't show that kind of patterned,
designed structure that allows other complex systems like software systems to
be learned. Imagine trying to learn Unix when anything that would be
referenced by a number is referenced by its own name.

Also cabbies need to know traffic patterns for the city to get around it
quickly, which means in principle you're learning what the traffic is likely
to be like on every road on every day of the week. That's a lot more
compressible though.

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brandall10
They went over this phenomena in a 60 minutes piece that chronicles are far
more advanced version of this, where the people studied actually remembered a
highly detailed version of their entire lives. They call it Superior
Autobiographical Memory and I strongly urge people to watch it, the details of
the things remembered from 30+ years ago are shocking.

[http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/12/16/60minutes/main7156...](http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/12/16/60minutes/main7156877.shtml)

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chocoheadfred
I guess they aren't using GPS. If they did, I wonder I studying other brain
increasing activities would give the cabbies even smarter brains.

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mdda
It's a point of pride amongst cabbies to have the got past the hurdle of
attaining 'the knowledge'. And my guess is that their union will be able to
pressure the taxi licensing body not to reduce the hurdle, since that is what
keeps the 'riff-raff' out.

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vorg
Would learning a second language over a 4 year period with a 25,000 vocabulary
have the same effect?

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teamonkey
I'm not a neurologist but I believe that not all learning is the same. In this
case they were specifically learning spatial mapping (and possibly
manipulation and reasoning). The study doesn't say anything about linguistic
learning, which happens in a different part of the brain.

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charlieflowers
The article says this offers encouragement to adults wanting to learn later in
life. Bullocks. The article simply shows that any claims about the brain's
plasticity being "frozen" after a certain age were incorrect (or overstated).
I'm sure "old" people have been learning "The Knowledge" successfully for
years now. They weren't worried about inaccurate claims of low brain
plasticity ... they had a test to study for.

We already had the "encouragement" because people have been passing the test.
We didn't need to wait for the scientists to catch up. The finding did not
uncover any new ability ... it merely helped explain a capability we should
have already observed in terms of increased grey matter.

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itmag
Is there some way to use this for personal gain? Ie I don't want to become a
London cabbie but I do want to improve my brain.

~~~
euccastro
Practice deliberately on the stuff for which you want to improve your brain.

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Bodyhack
Obvious! Learning all streets in London is hard training for the brain. What a
waste of money researching this.

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gwern
I agree! Science never surprises us; all it does is reinforce our prejudices
and common sense, so what's the point of funding it? We already know
everything it would tell us.

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charlieflowers
Did you intentionally personify Hindsight Bias here? If so, well done, and I
got the joke. lol. <http://lesswrong.com/lw/il/hindsight_bias/>

