11/17/24, 8:13 PM Cache Cab: Taxi Drivers' Brains Grow to Navigate London's Streets | Scientific American

DECEMBER 8, 2011 4 MIN READ

Cache Cab: Taxi Drivers' Brains Grow to
Navigate London's Streets
Memorizing 25,000 city streets balloons the hippocampus, but cabbies may
pay a hidden fare in cognitive skills
BY FERRIS JABR

Manhattan's midtown streets are arranged in a user-friendly grid. In Paris 20

administrative districts, or arrondissements, form a clockwise spiral around
the Seine. But London? A map of its streets looks more like a tangle of yarn
that a preschooler glued to construction paper than a metropolis designed with
architectural foresight. Yet London's taxi drivers navigate the smoggy snarl
with ease, instantaneously calculating the swiftest route between any two
points.

These navigational demands stimulate brain development, concludes a study

five years in the making. With the new research, scientists can definitively say
that London taxi drivers not only have larger-than-average memory centers in
their brains, but also that their intensive training is responsible for the growth.
Excelling at one form of memory, however, may inhibit another.

Neuroscientist Eleanor Maguire of University College London (U.C.L.) first

got the idea to study London cab drivers from research on memory champions
of the animal world. Some birds and mammals, such as western scrub jays and

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11/17/24, 8:13 PM Cache Cab: Taxi Drivers' Brains Grow to Navigate London's Streets | Scientific American

squirrels, cache food and dig it up later, which means they must memorize the
locations of all their hiding spots. Researchers noticed that a part of the brain
called the hippocampus was much larger in these animals than in similar
species that did not secret away their snacks. The hippocampus is a seahorse-
shaped section in the vertebrate brain that is crucial for long-term memory
and spatial navigation.

Maguire wondered whether London taxi drivers also had larger-than-average

hippocampi. To earn their licenses, cab drivers in training spend three to four
years driving around the city on mopeds, memorizing a labyrinth of 25,000
streets within a 10-kilometer radius of Charing Cross train station, as well as
thousands of tourist attractions and hot spots. "The Knowledge," as it is called,
is unique to London taxi licensing and involves a series of grueling exams that
only about 50 percent of hopefuls pass.

In her earliest studies, Maguire discovered that London taxi drivers had more
gray matter in their posterior hippocampi than people who were similar in
age, education and intelligence, but who did not drive taxis. In other words,
taxi drivers had plumper memory centers than their peers. It seemed that the
longer someone had been driving a taxi, the larger his hippocampus, as though
the brain expanded to accommodate the cognitive demands of navigating
London's streets. But it was also possible that The Knowledge selected for
people whose memory centers were larger than average in the first place.

To find out which possibility was more likely, Maguire and her U.C.L.
colleague Katherine Woollett decided to follow a group of 79 aspiring taxi
drivers for four years to measure the growth of their hippocampi with
magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) as they completed The Knowledge. For the
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11/17/24, 8:13 PM Cache Cab: Taxi Drivers' Brains Grow to Navigate London's Streets | Scientific American

sake of comparison, Maguire also measured brain growth in 31 people who did
not drive taxis but were of similar age, education and intelligence as the taxi
trainees. At the start of the study, all of the participants had more or less the
same size hippocampi. Maguire also made sure that the aspiring cabbies and
non-taxi drivers performed similarly on tests of working memory and long-
term memory.

Four years later 39 of the 79 trainees had earned their licenses; 20 trainees who
failed their exams agreed to continue participating in the study. When
Maguire gave the successful and disappointed trainees the same battery of
memory tests she had given them at the start of their training, she found that
drivers who earned their licenses performed far better than those who failed—
even though they had performed equally four years earlier. And MRIs showed
that the successful trainees' hippocampi had grown over time.

There are several ways to explain the ballooning hippocampus. The

hippocampus may grow new neurons or hippocampal neurons may make
more connections with one another. Non-neuronal cells called glial cells,
which help support and protect neurons, may also contribute to the increase in
hippocampal volume, although they are not generated as quickly as neurons.

The successful trainees did not perform better on all tests of memory,
however. Licensed taxi drivers did worse than non-taxi drivers on a test of
visual memory called the Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure Test: The subject is
asked to study what looks like a dollhouse designed by a loony architect, full of
superfluous lines and squiggles, and sketch it from memory 30 minutes later.

Maguire thinks that The Knowledge may enlarge the hippocampus's posterior
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11/17/24, 8:13 PM Cache Cab: Taxi Drivers' Brains Grow to Navigate London's Streets | Scientific American

(rear) at the expense of its anterior (front), creating a trade-off of cognitive

talents—that is, taxi drivers master some forms of memory but become worse
at others. In her earlier work, Maguire found evidence that, whereas the rear
of the hippocampus was bigger in taxi drivers, the front was usually smaller
than average. She didn't find this same difference in her new study because, she
speculates, front-end shrinkage may happen after the four years of training.
The hippocampus's rear section seems to be important for spatial navigation
specifically, but Maguire says the front end's role remains more mysterious.

Maguire says she was "greatly relieved" by the results of her study, which
appears in the December issue of Current Biology. "We didn't know how long
the effects would take to appear on an MRI scan," she says. "Maybe they only
appeared quite some time after the trainees qualified. But we found them
within the five years it took to do the study."

Neurobiologist Howard Eichenbaum of Boston University commends the

study for answering the "chicken-and-egg question" posed by Maguire's earlier
research. He sees it as confirmation of the idea that cognitive exercise produces
physical changes in the brain. "The initial findings could have been explained
by a correlation, that people with big hippocampi become taxi drivers," he
says. "But it turns out it really was the training process that caused the growth
in the brain. It shows you can produce profound changes in the brain with
training. That's a big deal."
RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

FERRIS JABR is a contributing writer for Scientific American. He has also written for the New York Times
Magazine, the New Yorker and Outside.
More by Ferris Jabr
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