The cab drivers’ brains
Somewhere along the way you decided this is just how you are. The overthinking, the people-pleasing, the 3am meetings. Wired in when you were small, permanent now.
To drive a black cab in London you have to learn the city by heart: around 25,000 streets, every landmark, every one-way system. It takes three or four years. In 2000 the neuroscientist Eleanor Maguire scanned London cabbies’ brains. The back of the hippocampus, which handles spatial memory, was larger than in people who didn’t drive cabs, and the longer someone had driven, the larger it tended to be. Later studies followed trainees and watched the change happen in the ones who qualified.
These were grown adults. Their brains reshaped themselves around what they practiced.
Chapter 21 is the science of how that works, and what it means for the patterns you’d like to lose. It’s free.
