IN THE NEWS
WHY CAB DRIVERS HAVE BIGGER BRAINS!! Have you ever won- dered what makes London cabbies differ- ent from the rest of us?
memory power.
Becoming a London taxi driver isn’t as easy as you may think. Drivers have to spend hours learning the city’s road network for a face-to-face exam at the Public Carriage Office.
So what exactly does this gruelling process do to their brains? Well for starters, all that worthwhile learn- ing not only makes them money,
but
according to research included in the Sci- ence Museum’s new ‘Who Am I?’ gallery, it also increases their
With 320 routes around London and scores of notable his- toric landmarks to recall, it is not surpris- ing that London taxi drivers are now known to have different brains to the rest of us.
According to Yahoo News, neuroscientist Eleanor Maguire and her team discovered in the unique study that part of the hip- pocampus - an area of the brain support- ing spatial navigation and memory - becomes larger when learning road knowl- edge.
A series of MRI brain scans on certain taxi
drivers revealed that the volume of informa- tion that licensed cabbies have to remember makes physical changes to their brains.
Making memories
In a nutshell, our brains are made up of 100 bil- lion brain cells, called neurons. As we grow and develop, these neurons are ‘wired up’ to each other,
and
communicate through thousands of connec- tions – synapses. Memories are formed when certain connec- tions are strengthened. How do connections between neurons become strength-
ened, so that the con- nection is ‘remembered’? Scien- tists know that if they give an electrical impulse to a pair of neurons, the two will communicate more easily in the future. This process is known as long-term potentia- tion (LTP). The effect can last for weeks, or even months – long enough to make a memory. LTP is espe- cially obvious in the hippocampus, one of the areas of the brain active in memory.
Improving memories
But, the good news is that you don’t have to be a taxi driver to have
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a good memory. Got an exam or test com- ing up? A bit of practice can improve your memory for facts dramatically. Simple ways of doing this include associating a
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picture with a word, making up a story, or even a rhyme.
The key is to associate facts with meanings – a strategy which is used by professional memorisers.
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www.cabdespatch.com PAGE 28 PHTM SEPTEMBER 2010
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