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Comment by Raphmedia | Hacker News Reader

I can't get in the details because I'm no neurologist but there are a lot of news stories out there about how taxi drivers end up with a great memories from having to remember all the routes. There are also stories about how taxi drivers using GPS don't have all those memory improvements. I agree that news stories are not the best source of accurate scientific information so take it with a grain of salt.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/london-taxi-memor...

http://www.thedrive.com/news/8686/study-using-gps-navigation...

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> there are a lot of news stories out there about how taxi drivers end up with a great memories from having to remember all the routes

The question is, does that do them any good? It might help them in the rare case there's a problem with navigation data, but 99% of the time it's a wasted effort, and personally, I purposefully prefer taxis/transport services that use navigation.

My own opinion is that we should treat brain-memory as cache memory: store the things that are directly relevant to the important parts of our lives, to make ourselves better in those areas; otherwise, don't bother memorizing.

> The question is, does that do them any good?

Anecdotally, I used to have a phone with a really bad battery that I couldn’t be bothered to replace, so I was constantly running out of charge. I started training myself to look up directions on google maps, then memorize the next 5-10 direction steps and compete with myself to make it to my destination with the fewest number of map checks.

I continue to do that, because it’s done a few things for me:

- it’s fun and I get personal gratification out of my improved sense of direction and orientation - driving/riding is much more engaging because I’m paying attention to my surroundings (looking for visual queues for my location) instead of just putting on music and turning on mental cruise control - I travel a lot and feel a lot safer when I have a mental backup of where I am, in case I run out of data or if I lose signal, which happens from time to time - I feel less attached to and reliant on my phone

To your point, it’s something I decided is worth my time and effort, if even just for the entertainment.

>The question is, does that do them any good? It might help them in the rare case there's a problem with navigation data, but 99% of the time it's a wasted effort

Yes, very much so. The road layout in London is absolutely insane, because the city was established in AD 43. Finding efficient routes requires a great deal of local knowledge and contextual understanding.

Black cab drivers are extremely good at minimaxing journey time. If they have a choice between a route that always takes 30 minutes or a route that sometimes takes 25 minutes and sometimes takes an hour, they'll usually choose the former.

They're required to memorise both routes and landmarks, so they're phenomenally good at fuzzy matching for destinations. If you ask to go to "that place where all the goths and weirdos hang out", they'll take you straight to Camden Lock. They have an uncanny knack for getting confused tourists back to their hotel, based on the scantest of descriptions in the most broken of English.

Uber has a role to play in London, but it's undoubtedly an inferior option. Black cab drivers are a part of the fabric of London and it'd be a tragedy if they were pushed out of business.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ws-eyqWHNPs

Here in Sydney, Australia, the taxi drivers are generally hopeless and in many cases can hardly manage basic English, let alone navigate properly.

That's why I understand Uber has become popular but not all of my experiences with Uber have been so crash hot either.

When I lived in London I once read a text from my wife to a black cab driver with instructions of where I was supposed to meet her for dinner.

Even though I didn't have the correct name of the street (and didn't have the name of the restaurant at all!), the driver got the right street and the right restaurant. (The street had probably 10+ restaurants on it.) I was astonished, and have never forgotten it.

Depends on what you're memorizing, too. You can be good at remembering some things, but not others. Lots of fields have specialized training exercises for memorization - consider how you learn vocabulary in a new language, for example.

This can get tied to "muscle memory" as well. I'm currently going through a lot of this on guitar - two note per string pull-off exercises, in the interest of learning Eric Johnson style picking techniques. Much of the core of his playing is based on two notes per string, first the high note and then the low note. So deep muscle memory of that particular move helps me do other, larger things.

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