London cab drivers have 'sat-nav' brains
London taxi drivers have a 'sat-nav' built into their brains, scientists have found.
Scanning the brain activity of cabbies they found different regions of their brains were activated as they considered route options, spotted familiar landmarks and thought about their customers.
Hang on, they found brain activity in London taxi drivers, this really is odd news.
The research by boffins at University College London found taxi drivers used the hippocampus region of the brain when planning a route but a different part of the brain to alter the route if they came across something like a blocked road.
Yet another region of their brain was used to track how close they were to the end of their journey, much like the working of a sat-nav.
"Over the millennia, humans have invented and utilised many different navigation tools such as maps, compasses and latitude and longitude," says researcher Dr Spiers.
"Nature is far ahead of us and seems to have developed these tools inside our heads for our survival."
The taxi drivers seem to have overcome the need to say "You have reached your destination" or spend the first 20 minutes of any journey looking skywards and muttering "trying to locate satellites."
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