A research project at the University College London is looking into the brains of who it believes to have the greatest memories: the city’s taxi drivers.
The project, conducted by professor Hugo Spiers and three doctoral students, is titled “Taxi Brains” and will determine if the hippocampus regions of cab drivers’ brains hold any clues when it comes to contributing toward Alzheimer’s disease research. Spiers chose to analyze cab drivers because taxi drivers “have remarkable brains,” according to the Washington Post.
“We don’t know much about how taxi drivers use their hippocampus during route planning,” Spiers said. “And how do they use other brain regions to solve the task of navigating 26,000 streets? Can we explain why they might be quick to plan out one route and take a while to think out another one? It’s something we need to know more about.”
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The hippocampus is a part of the brain that plays a major role in learning and memory. Spiers said that among taxi drivers, the hippocampus appears to grow larger the longer they are on the job, while the same region is known to shrink in people with Alzheimer’s disease.
To become a cab driver, a person must first pass a series of exams over the course of three to four years known as “The Knowledge.” To be fully licensed with a “green badge” to drive anywhere in London, a driver must know how to plot routes without a GPS on about 26,000 streets and know where to find 100,000 businesses and landmarks. The exams have existed since 1865 and have been hailed as possibly the most difficult memory test in the world.
To collect the research, Spiers has cab driver volunteers enter a magnetic resonance imaging scan and are shown photos of London landmarks and street names. The drivers are asked to map out 120 routes in their minds from point A to point B as their brains are scanned. They are also asked to play a video game to test their brains’ complex spatial navigation abilities, the outlet reported.
Spiers and his team plan to forward their study results to Alzheimer’s Research UK, with preliminary findings available next summer.
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Spiers did not immediately respond to the Washington Examiner’s request for comment.
