London is not a good place for fans of right angles.
People who like the methodical grid
system of Manhattan
are baffled by the bewildering network of knotted streets. It’s entirely possible to take two
right turns and end up
in the same place. Even with a map, some people manage to get lost. And yet there are
thousands of Londoners
who have committed the city’s entire layout to memory — cab drivers. Piloting London’s
distinctive black cabs is no
mean feat. To earn the privilege, drivers have to pass an intense intellectual ordeal, known
charmingly as The
Knowledge. Ever since 1865, they’ve had to memorise the location of every street within six
miles of Charing Cross.
Today this implies familiarity with all 25,000 of the capital’s arteries, veins and capillaries.
They also need to know
the locations of 20,000 landmarks — museums, police stations, theatres, clubs and more —
and 320 routes that connect
everything up.
It can take two to four years to learn everything. To prove their skills, prospective drivers
do oral examinations called
‘appearances’ at the licensing office, where they have to recite the best route between any
two points. Incredible as it may
seem, they have to do this without any reference to maps aside from the mental map they
have in their head. They have to
narrate the details of their journey, complete with passed landmarks, road names, junctions,
turns and maybe even traffic
lights. Only after successfully doing this several times over can they earn a cab driver’s
licence.
Given how hard it is, it shouldn’t be surprising that The Knowledge changes the brains of
those who acquire it. Eleanor
Maguire from University College studied those changes and showed that the brains of
London taxi drivers do indeed undergo
a change which makes them very different from those of mere mortals like us. Doctors, for
example, with their extensive
knowledge of human anatomy and physiology, don’t exhibit the change Maguire found. You
don’t see it in memory champions
who have trained themselves to remember seemingly impossible lists and who go on to win
quizzes and competitions. You
don’t see it in London’s bus drivers who have similar driving skills but work along fixed
routes. Among all of these groups,
only the London cabbies, with their heightened spatial memories, have the change Maguire
was looking for.
One reason this might be is that London, as a cluster of what were once villages, simply
demands higher order skills. Cab
drivers in Paris and Chicago face similar challenges when it comes to traffic and navigation
and also have to get through a
test that demands an in-depth knowledge of the city concerned. Strange as it may seem,
though, when researchers looked at
drivers in these cities in a bid to replicate Maguire’s London study, they found none of the
same changes in brain structure.
Even among cabbies, the Londoners who pass The Knowledge are unique. But it’s not just
their skills and the ways in which
these have changed their brains that set them apart.
Their passengers generally trust them and can even be somewhat in awe of their navigation
skills. Their colleagues elsewhere
in the world do not fare so well when it comes to passenger attitudes. Rudeness, impatience
and poor driving skills are
among their many sins if the many customer complaints on the internet are to be believed.
Cabbies in other countries also find themselves accused of possessing too limited a
knowledge — or no knowledge whatsoever
— of the cities where they ply their trade. Stories abound of drivers making frantic appeals
on their radios for guidance or
relying too heavily on GPS. Believe these tales if you choose to but should you find yourself
going round in circles in the
labyrinth that is London for many a foreign visitor, don’t hesitate to hail a cab. The cabbie
may not ooze charm but will
certainly know the quickest and most direct way of getting you where you want to go.
