Memorizing 25,000 city streets balloons the hippocampus.
Streets in Manhattan are arranged in a user-friendly grid. Twenty dministrative districts, or arrondissements, form a clockwise spiral around the Seine in Paris. London is a different story. A map of its streets looks more like a tangle of yarn that a preschooler glued to construction paper than a metropolis designed with architectural foresight. Yet London’s taxi drivers navigate the smoggy snarl with ease, instantaneously calculating the swiftest route between any two points.
Continue reading… “London taxi drivers’ brains grow to navigate London’s streets”
