UberX Drivers Might Never Get Any Better at Navigation

A couple of years ago, British researchers discovered that London cabbies have particularly beefy brains. Their study, which followed 79 trainee taxi drivers and 31 non-taxi drivers (the controls) for three to four years as they got acquainted with London’s winding and congested streets, discovered that the taxi drivers eventually developed notable differences in their posterior hippocampi—changes not found in the brains of the controls. (The hippocampus, as the neurosurgeons among us will recall, manages the brain's memory tasks, including navigation.)

At the end of the study, even those taxi drivers who failed to pass their training tests were significantly better at memory tasks involving London landmarks than the control group. Maybe that's not surprising: Over the course of their driving, these cabbies learned London.