Evidence: London Taxi Drivers

           Every black-cab driver in central London has to have “The Knowledge” — a memorized map of the capital, including some 25,000 streets and thousands of landmarks. It’s a brutal learning process that can take three to four years to complete, with a final test — the Knowledge of London Examination System — that often takes 12 attempts to pass. According to a report published in the journal Current Biology, successfully learning this mental atlas of London’s spaghetti streets causes structural changes in the brain, affects memory and creates a greater volume of nerve cells in the brain’s hippocampus.  Thus, we have evidence that even the physical embodiment of our brain is context dependent.