Diving for Seahorses by Hilde Østby

Author:Hilde Østby
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NewSouth Publishing

— 5 —

THE BIG TAXI EXPERIMENT AND A RATHER EXTRAORDINARY GAME OF CHESS

Or: How good can your memory get?

“You appear to be astonished,” he said, smiling

at my expression of surprise. “Now that I do know it I

shall do my best to forget it.” “To forget it!”

“You see,” he explained, “I consider that a man’s brain

originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock

it with such furniture as you choose.”

ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, A Study in Scarlet

AS YOU APPROACH London by air, you see the city sprawled out far below. The Thames shimmers like a ribbon thrown on the floor by an impatient child. Two thousand years of history shines back at you—from 50 CE until today, the city has grown without any coherent plan. It is a chaotic wilderness of streets and landmarks from every century, churches and steeples, prisons and palaces, hospitals and museums all scrambled together; five-hundred-year-old pubs with crooked floors and modern buildings with facades of glass and steel sit side by side. Originally, London consisted of several separate villages that gradually grew into each other, and so the city has no single centre but rather many different ones. The streets take strange turns, suddenly stopping or transforming into alleys. It’s no coincidence that so many action movies set in London feature car chases ending on foot, with the hero jumping fences and turning tight corners. The heart of Britain is a tight nest of streets with no structure, an untidy assortment of architectonic candy—a city planner’s nightmare. How is it even possible to learn the streets of London by heart?

Eleanor Maguire, whom we met in earlier chapters, became famous for her research on London taxi drivers. She showed that there are visible differences between their brains and the brains of those who never acquired the Knowledge, the test all drivers of London’s black cabs must pass before they’re allowed behind the wheel. The Knowledge requires them to learn the names and locations of 25,000 streets, 320 specific routes, and countless landmarks, all without the help of a map or GPS. The revelation that this visibly changes the brains of taxi drivers may have led the general public to view them in a different light. Who knew that, behind the wheel, they harboured such a stunning neuroscientific secret?

“To our surprise, we found an increase in the posterior part of the hippocampus in the taxi drivers,” Maguire says.

London’s convoluted maze of streets and alleys from throughout history works brilliantly as an environment for extreme training of spatial memory. While Maguire sat in her office, wondering whom she could research, thousands of the most highly trained memories in the city passed by her window in their shiny black cabs. Suddenly, the idea hit her. Had it not been for London’s messy structure and the rigid test the cab drivers must endure, Maguire would not have become known as a leading memory researcher, not only among her peers worldwide, but also among an entire fleet of drivers.

How did

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