Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

(photo Source: nyts) Writing | Su Chengyu

These days, whether it is online taxi-hailing or taxi-hailing on the street, the drivers basically drive navigation. Those who do not use navigation are so rare that drivers who do not use navigation can be regarded as news. "I was shocked by the Shanghai master Bo who ran errands in Shanghai."

It is reported that a 54-year-old taxi driver, who hardly needs navigation, has embedded the city road of Shanghai in his mind. As long as the passenger gives the address, he will basically automatically form a road map in his mind. I know which road is congested at which time, so there is basically no need for navigation.

But in fact, this practice of memorizing maps is still popular in the UK. No, it should be said that if you want to become a taxi driver in London, you have to memorize maps. Even in today's popular map navigation, this must be the case.

A London taxi driver Tuyuan: it is not easy for Rory Van Millingen to apply to become a London taxi driver and needs to go through a number of rigorous examinations and examinations. The first thing to pass is to memorize the map, and for this reason, you have to cycle around the city in two years. Find out the names of more than 18000 streets, the locations and shapes of various buildings, the locations and addresses of all hotels, restaurants, shops, cinemas, monuments and subway stations, and the addresses of various public places such as stock exchanges. This is the only way to qualify for a preliminary qualification in the taxi industry, yes, this is only a preliminary qualification.

An applicant who wants to be a London taxi driver has a map fixed in front of his motorcycle to learn and write down all kinds of locations. Photo Source: Bloomberg finds the shortest distance between two points as quickly as possible, knowing which are one-way streets, which are dead ends, where to get in and out of the traffic circle, etc., which are necessary for taxi drivers. Applicants dare to take the oral examination only after they have fully mastered at least 350 driving routes.

The examiners asked random questions, such as what color is a building and where is the entrance to the stage of a theater? No matter how unknown and remote the proposed location is, it must be answered.

Photo Source: a taxi driver in wikihow once answered an outrageous question. He was asked where a statue was located. The examiner only roughly described the height of the statue. The theme was that two mice shared a piece of cheese. Of course, he answered that the site was located on the front of a building in Philpot Lane, not far from London Bridge, otherwise he would not have been a taxi driver.

In the classroom of London's taxi driving school, a huge map of the streets of London hangs on the wall. Rory Van Millingen: normally, an applicant who wants to become a taxi driver takes at least two years to study and then passes a rigorous exam, with about 70 per cent of candidates eliminated each time. But also because of the rigor, those who can really become taxi drivers can often provide the best service. In the European taxi satisfaction questionnaire, London taxis have firmly ranked first in all dimensions for many years.

For taxi drivers with such a strong memory, are their brains different from those of ordinary people?

Some scientists are very interested in the brains of London taxi drivers. So they recruited 16 London taxi drivers, all of whom had been driving for more than a year and a half, and then scanned their brains with MRI and compared them with the brains of ordinary people.

It turned out that the rear hippocampus, which is responsible for "spatial navigation and memory", was significantly larger in taxi drivers' brains.

The volume of the posterior hippocampus of taxi drivers was significantly larger than that of the control group: the literature and scientists found that the older drivers who did not navigate, the larger the volume of gray matter in their hippocampus.

The correlation between the volume change of taxi drivers and time. Image source: the hippocampus is an important part of the brain of humans and vertebrates, which plays a role in short-term memory, long-term memory, and spatial location. Some animals, such as squirrels, have larger hippocampi in the fall (when memory storage sites are needed). It can be seen that the size of the hippocampus is positively correlated with the level of memory.

Location source of the brain horse: in the Themantic Education study, the better the spatial memory of taxi drivers, the larger the volume of the posterior hippocampus, which is the evidence of functional differentiation in the hippocampus. You can also simply understand that those humanoid GPS store offline maps in the back sea horse, which is why they become larger. Of course, not only the memory of the map, other types of learning and memory will also increase the volume of the posterior hippocampus.

This study also tells us an important lesson: relying too much on electronic devices to remember things may be convenient for a while, but it may make your brain's posterior hippocampus smaller. Do not worry very much, because acquired learning and memory can be improved. It was only when these London taxi companies wanted to become a humanoid GPS that they spent more than two years studying and taking exams, and their hippocampus changed. So, maybe you recite or memorize something from time to time, and the hippocampus in the back of your brain may also get bigger.

Source: giphy cover Source: wordpress

Reference: Navigation-related structural change in the hippocampi of taxi drivers | PNAS

This article is from the official Wechat account: bring Science Home (ID:steamforkids), author: everything.

Welcome to subscribe "Shulou Technology Information " to get latest news, interesting things and hot topics in the IT industry, and controls the hottest and latest Internet news, technology news and IT industry trends.