Size Matters, Brain Studies Conclude

London taxi drivers are known for their sharp navigating skills, a result in large part to having undergone extensive two-year training throughout London’s 25,000 streets. Indeed a recent study has found that the volume of the hippocampus (brain structure associated with spatial memory) is larger in taxi drivers than control subjects.

Working Your Working Memory

These results of the study bring some major scientific questions to mind: Is nature or nurturing responsible for the change in the size of a cabby’s brain? Also, does a taxi driver choose their occupation because their brain was built for it? Or perhaps driving the streets of London daily has altered their brain in terms of memory improvement?

A possible answer comes from the fact that a positive correlation has been established between the number of hours a taxi driver works and their hippocampus volume, indicating that driving a taxi does in fact influence brain size. This result also implies that brain plasticity is possible even in adults.

“It has long been thought that if there’s damage to the brain there’s only a limited amount of plasticity in an adult that can help them recover,” says the study’s Dr. Maguire. “Now direct things in the environment, like navigation, appear to show changes in the brain. So we could in the future see some rehabilitation programs that use that kind of knowledge.”

Taxi vs. Bus Drivers’ Brains

Think driving a bus will also enlarge your brain, resulting in memory improvement? Think again. In a different study Dr. Maguire discovered that bus drivers who follow set routes do not exhibit the same change in brain volume as taxi drivers. In other words, drivers must apply more complex navigation skills daily for changes in the hippocampus to occur.

Tiger Woods has a Big Brain

Indeed a recent University of Zurich study has discovered that expert golfers, like Tiger Woods, possess more of the gray matter associated with muscle control than golfers who train less. After comparing the brain images of forty men divided into four groups based on their golfing experience (pro, expert, average, non-golfers), the pros demonstrated significantly more gray matter than those golfers with less or no practice at all.

Sarit Szpiro, Maister Artium, is a cognitive psychologist at Mind360, a leading scientific brain training games developer for boosting your memory, attention, executive functions, reasoning, and other key cognitive skills. As a Mind360 visitor you simply select your own Personal Training Program, which comes complete with a personal coach and constant feedback to ensure your swift and visible progress.