Acquiring “the Knowledge” of London's Layout Drives Structural Brain Changes

Abstract

SummaryThe last decade has seen a burgeoning of reports associating brain structure with specific skills and traits (e.g., [1–8]). Although these cross-sectional studies are informative, cause and effect are impossible to establish without longitudinal investigation of the same individuals before and after an intervention. Several longitudinal studies have been conducted (e.g., [9–18]); some involved children or young adults, potentially conflating brain development with learning, most were restricted to the motor domain, and all concerned relatively short timescales (weeks or months). Here, by contrast, we utilized a unique opportunity to study average-IQ adults operating in the real world as they learned, over four years, the complex layout of London's streets while training to become licensed taxi drivers. In those who qualified, acquisition of an internal spatial representation of London was associated with a selective increase in gray matter (GM) volume in their posterior hippocampi and concomitant changes to their memory profile. No structural brain changes were observed in trainees who failed to qualify or control participants. We conclude that specific, enduring, structural brain changes in adult humans can be induced by biologically relevant behaviors engaging higher cognitive functions such as spatial memory, with significance for the “nature versus nurture” debate.

Cognitive Aging: Methodological Considerations and Some Theoretical Consequences

“…This was a cross-sectional study and it does not really say anything about the causal link between this map learning and the good cognitive performance or the structural changes of the hippocampus in the brain, because those taxi drivers who managed well in tests might have had a larger hippocampus volume already from the beginning. However, Woollett and Maguire (2011) recently confirmed the findings in a longitudinal study showing that there is a causal link between cognitive training and structural changes of the brain. Similar associations between changes in brain structure after training has also been recently demonstrated by several other researchers and is nicely summarised by May (2011) and Simon, Yokomizo, and Bottino (2012).…”

Strategy‐based reasoning training modulates cortical thickness and resting‐state functional connectivity in adults with chronic traumatic brain injury

“…MRI‐based morphometry has enabled us to noninvasively and quantitatively assess training‐induced structural changes in the healthy adult brain (Best, Chiu, Liang Hsu, Nagamatsu, & Liu‐Ambrose, 2015; Bezzola, Merillat, Gaser, & Jancke, 2011; Draganski et al., 2004, 2006; Engvig et al., 2010; Ilg et al., 2008; Kwok et al., 2011; Landi, Baguear, & Della‐Maggiore, 2011; Schmidt‐Wilcke, Rosengarth, Luerding, Bogdahn, & Greenlee, 2010; Takeuchi et al., 2011, 2014; Taubert et al., 2010; Woollett & Maguire, 2011). For example, Engvig et al.…”

Structural and functional neuroplasticity in human learning of spatial routes

“…Draganski et al provided some of the first longitudinal evidence of learning-induced structural plasticity in humans by showing voxel-based morphometric changes in the gray matter of bilateral temporal visual motion areas and the left intraparietal sulcus following three months of training on juggling (Draganski et al, 2004). Additional studies of gray matter have suggested neuroplastic changes resulting from intensive training or learning in domains such as medical knowledge (Draganski et al, 2006), spatial memory (Maguire et al, 2006;Woollett and Maguire, 2011), and aerobic exercise (Colcombe et al, 2006;Erickson et al, 2011).…”