Road Map Complexity in London made Taxi driver brain bigger

News Health Articles - Road Map Complexity in London made Taxi driver brain bigger. In the big cities of the world, the streets made straight and parallel in order to facilitate navigation. For example in the city of Manhattan in New York who arranged boxes are user-friendly. While in Paris, the streets are arranged clockwise spiral around the River Seine.

London is very different, because the road map is more similar than the tangled threads of the fabric of urban metropolis. But the London taxi drivers have accurate navigation capabilities and is able to find the quickest route between two points.



In one study, the scientists say that London taxi drivers not only have the memory centers of the larger, but also has done intensive training causes growth on his brain. Unfortunately, winning in one form of memory can inhibit other brain functions.

In an article published in the journal Current Biology, a neuroscientist from University College London (UCL) Eleanor Maguire discovered evidence that the taxi driver, the back of Hipokampusnya larger but the front is usually smaller than average. The back of the hippocampus important for spatial navigation, but the role of the back is still unknown.

"We do not know how long it takes effect to cause changes in the hippocampal sections. It may be that emerged some time after the participant qualified to be a taxi driver. But we found such changes within five years it takes to do research," said Maguire as reported HuffingtonPost , Monday (12/12/2011).

To get a license, a taxi driver in training spend three to four years of driving around town, memorizing street maze of 25,000 within a radius of 10 miles of Charing Cross railway station, as well as thousands of tourist attractions. From a series of exhaustive tests, only about 50 percent of applicants who successfully pass.

In early studies, Maguire found that London taxi drivers have more gray matter a lot in the area of ​​the posterior hippocampus than others in age, education and intelligence are the same, but not driving a cab.

In other words, the taxi driver has a memory centers are more obese than their peers. It seems that someone has long been driving a taxi, hipokampusnya larger, as if the brain expanded to accommodate the cognitive demands of navigating the streets of London. But it is also possible that the people who elected to have the taxi driver memory centers of the larger than average.

To be sure, Maguire assisted by his colleague Katherine Woollett, decided to follow the 79 candidates for the taxi driver for four years to measure the growth hipokampusnya with MRI brain scans when finished memorizing the road.

For comparison, Maguire also measure brain growth 31 people who are not driving a taxi with age, education, and the same intelligence as a potential driver of a taxi.

At baseline, all participants have the same size of the hippocampus. Maguire also ensure that prospective taxi drivers and not the taxi driver got the same score on tests of working memory and long-term memory.

Four years later, 39 people from 79 participants managed to get a taxi license. 20 participants who failed the exam agreed to continue to participate in this study.

When Maguire gave a series of tests the same memory at the start of training to trainees who are successful and which failed, he found that drivers who obtain a license have a much better score than the participants who failed, although it never underwent the same test four years earlier. MRI also showed that the participants who managed to get a license to drive a taxi, hipokampusnya has evolved over time.

There are several ways to explain the development of the hippocampus. Hippocampus can grow new neurons and can make more connections with one another. Tues-called non-neuronal glial cells help support and protect neurons, may also contribute to increase the volume of the hippocampus.