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“ANYONE, WHATEVER THEIR NATURE, CAN BE TRAINED TO BECOME ANYTHING.”
This piece belongs to a series of 100 posts written in memory of Thom's grandmother, published on her Facebook.
“ANYONE, WHATEVER THEIR NATURE, CAN BE TRAINED TO BECOME ANYTHING.”
And here is one of the stories that bears this out, about the taxi drivers of London.
London taxi drivers are required to learn a book called “The Knowledge”, which includes memorising a map of London with its 25,000 streets within a ten-kilometre radius of Charing Cross station, as well as tens of thousands of tourist sites, schools, hospitals and offices…
Between the three to five years of studying for the licence and the “live combat” out on every road there is, the BRAINS of those drivers have changed.
London taxi drivers have been found to have larger-than-average memory centres, particularly in the hippocampus — the part responsible for spatial memory and navigation.
The hippocampus is one of the first areas damaged in Alzheimer’s disease, and its structure shrinks in people who have it. Studying the brains of London taxi drivers, whose hippocampus is larger, may therefore give detailed insight into how this part of the brain is involved in the early stages of Alzheimer’s.
The London taxi driver story on Great Big Story.
https://youtu.be/sU4W36_5oiM?si=0V30JVQWE1W2wtyf
Remember this — revisit it in a few days.
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