πŸ’Ž On how our behaviour can change the physical make up of our brain (e.g. London cab drivers)

It’s not just repeated physical actions that can rewire our brains. Purely mental activity can also alter our neural circuitry, sometimes in far-reaching ways. In the late 1990s, a group of British researchers scanned the brains of sixteen London cab drivers who had between two and forty-two years of experience behind the wheel. When they compared the scans with those of a control group, they found that the taxi drivers’ posterior hippocampus, a part of the brain that plays a key role in storing spatial representation won much larger than normal.

Excerpt from: The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember by Nicholas Carr