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Comment by warent | Hacker News Reader

This is very relevant to my personal experience.

I've always had a very, very poor sense of direction. Even if I I've been down a road countless times, if I approach it from a different direction I can easily become lost and turned around, so I've just relied on my gps to get me anywhere.

This is something I always figured must be due to something with how my brain is structured. Just a reality of how I've developed.

Then one day I travelled to cuba on a whim. Spent a week there with no phone service. Within just a few days, I had most of Havana memorized and could easily navigate it without a map, even intuit where I was by the position of the sun. It's like I unlocked a new super power I never had.

Then it hit me... the reason my sense of direction has always been so poor is because I offload that part of my brain onto machines.

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Similarly, if I go to some new place with a friend or a group where I'm not the one leading, I would never remember the road. Even after multiple trips.

If I go by myself even once, I will always remember how to get there.

This phenomen is quite common and pretty straightforward if you think about it.

This particular GPS example is slightly flawed. If you MRI cab drivers their brains are slightly different. Evolutionarily it makes sense why direction would be particularly important.

My dad drove a cab in grad school to pay the bills, and even now his sense of direction (which should be relatively close since we share genetics) is relatively absurd; stuff like “I drove past this place 7 years ago I remembered it was a left turn here”.

So we might be slightly off track with the GPS example.

Do we have MRIs of cab drivers before they became a driver? We need to decouple if that's a learned skill or not. Certainly there is some spectrum in native ability but it would make sense for the vast majority of people to have the basic ability but that they never hone the skill. There are people that are never about to write, but for practical purposes we expect everyone to be able to do it (after being taught).

I think a lot of people attribute to "natural ability" what is often learned because many times it isn't obvious how those skills were learned. It's obvious everyone went to school to learn to read and write, it's not obvious a child learned navigation because their favorite game growing up was hide and seek.

It's a learned skill.

London cab drivers are famed for "The Knowledge". You can see the physical change in the hippocampus from the MRIs. However, the physical changes also seems to negatively impact some of their cognitive skills, so there's tradeoff.

Source? What cognitive skills are impacted?

The first result on google for “London cab mri” is a paper with 922 citations....this is not witchcraft.

On top of what texasbigdata said, try searching for "london" "the knowledge". The non-linear way London's street system has evolved over the centuries has lent to some very unusual ways of getting around town that Uber/Lyft/GPS haven't really been able to supplant yet. The guys who test for "The Knowledge" have to do years of research, physically driving the best routes from major locations in great detail.

This research, whether they pass or not, results in marked growth in temporal and visuo-spatial parts of the brain.

It's one of my favorite subjects being a bit of a geography geek myself.

https://www.pnas.org/content/97/8/4398

I think they also studied former cab drivers and found the structures to have shrunken compared to current cab drivers but still more pronounced vs non can drivers. I can't seem to find the source but I seem to recall this from a Stan Dehaene book

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