THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGYat University College London. Maguire scanned the brains of taxi
drivers who’d passed “the Knowledge” – a test of their memory of
over three hundred of the city’s routes, which takes about two years to
master. The scans showed that the posterior hippocampus of the taxi
drivers was enlarged compared to a control group of participants. By
contrast, the drivers’ anterior hippocampus was smaller. What’s more,
the longer a person had been a taxi driver on London’s streets, the
more exaggerated the structural differences. The findings appear to
show that the brain’s structure changes to meet the demands placed on
it. In this case, the posterior of the hippocampus – a structure known
to be involved in representing space – had grown at the expense of the
anterior hippocampus.
Just consider for a moment what this means. If you spent the next few
weeks learning to juggle, your new skills would be reflected in functional
reorganization and restructuring in your brain. Learn a language, learn
an instrument or start playing tennis. However you choose to use your
brain it will adapt and change in response. A 2007 study suggested these
changes can even occur over incredibly short time scales. Inspired by
research showing that in blind people the redundant visual cortex can be
farmed out for use by the senses of touch and hearing, Jorg Lewald and
his team at the Ruhr-Universität investigated the effects of blindfolding
a sighted person for just ninety minutes. Amazingly, after this short
In 2003 the Thai government imposed a night-time curfew on all local online
computer games in order to curb the apparent addiction among young people to
a game called Ragnarok Online.