Transportation
Learning to Drive a Taxi in London Changes Your Brain
According to a new study, drivers who master London's complicated street layouts actually grow their grey matter
Taxi drivers-in-training in London are required to learn the layout of roughly 25,000 streets within a 6-mile radius of Charing Cross train station, near the north bank of the Thames River. They also have to memorize the locations of thousands of places of interest where a tourist or businessman might want to be dropped.
Generally, all of this takes a good driver three or four years to master – at which point, he bellies up for a set of rigorous examinations that half of the trainees fail. No city requires quite so much of its would-be cab drivers. To put all of this in perspective, this is just a piece of what London expects them to internalize: