Do London cabbies have bigger brains?

Navigation-related structural change in the hippocampi of taxi drivers

London cabbies who memorised the city’s maze of streets had bigger memory-for-places bits in their brains.

Maguire, E. A., Gadian, D. G., Johnsrude, I. S., Good, C. D., Ashburner, J., Frackowiak, R. S., et al. · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2000

Ig Nobel 2003

To get a licence, London black-cab drivers must learn thousands of streets by heart. Neuroscientists scanned the brains of experienced cabbies and compared them with people who didn’t drive taxis.

The back part of the hippocampus, a region linked to spatial memory, was larger in the taxi drivers, and the longer they had been driving, the bigger it was. The adult brain, it turns out, can grow to fit the map.

the verdict

Sat-nav is handy, but cabbies come with a built-in upgrade.