Meeting of the Mind

Training causes brain restructuring

Article in Slashdot (“news for nerds, stuff that matters”):  You really are what you know: “There has been research for some time showing that London cab driver brains differ from other people’s, with considerable enlargement of those areas dealing with spacial relationships and navigation. Follow-up work showed it wasn’t simply a product of driving a lot (PDF). However, up until now it has been disputed as to whether the brain structure led people to become London cabbies or whether the brain structure changed as a result of their intensive training (which requires rote memorization of essentially the entire street map of one of the largest and least-organized cities in the world). Well, this latest study answers that. MRI scans before and after the training show that the regions of the brain substantially grow as a result of the training, and they’re quite normal beforehand. The practical upshot of this research is that — even for adult brains, which aren’t supposed to change much — what you learn structurally changes your brain. Significantly.”

The first comment is worth following the link to the main article.