Friday, December 09, 2011

This general effect applies to reviewers of scientific manuscripts as well as Taxi drivers, I suspect

Cabbies who acquire "the knowledge", a stern test involving in-depth mastery of London's streets, suffer changes to their brains that could make them blinkered, research at the Wellcome Institute has shown. Those who pass the test develop more grey matter in the posterior hippocampus, the part of the brain they use to recall a mental map and calculate the shortest route from A to B. But this comes at a price because the tens of thousands of streets and landmarks they need to remember "fill up" their brain to its maximum capacity, researchers said.

Research shows that taxi drivers struggle more than most drivers to adapt to changes in the road network or to driving in unfamiliar cities.

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