[LINK] Brain region changes shape with learning the layout of London

As would be expected, they were better at memory tasks involving London landmarks than the non-cabbies, but this advantage appeared to come at a price, as the non-cabbies outperformed them in other memory tasks, such as recalling complex visual information.

From the paper:

The memory proﬁle displayed by the now qualiﬁed trainees mirrors exactly the pattern displayed in several previous cross-sectional studies of licensed London taxi drivers [3, 4, 20] (and that which normalized in the retired taxi drivers [21]). In those studies also, the taxi drivers displayed more knowledge of the spatial relationships between landmarks in London, unsurprisingly, given their increased exposure to the city compared to control participants. By contrast, this enhanced spatial representation of the city was accompanied by poorer performance on a complex ﬁgure test, a visuospatial task designed to assess the free recall of visual material after 30 min. Our ﬁndings therefore not only replicate those of previous cross-sectional studies but extend them by showing the change in memory proﬁle within the same participants. That the only major difference between T1 and T2 was acquiring ‘‘the Knowledge’’ strongly suggests that this is what induced the memory change.

Ah, I was wondering what the penalty was for The Knowledge. Brain-training is usually zero-sum.

[-]Douglas_Knight12y70

"usually"? do you have other examples? My guess is that you just mean that your prior is that it should be zero-sum.

[-]gwern12y00

I mean that in the past when I read of some specialized training 'increasing brain size' and I've investigated, there's always been some penalty - some other brain area shrunk to compensate or measured performance went down, or something.

[-]khafra12y10

I didn't know this. What's the tradeoff for increasing your working memory with dual-n-back?

[-]taf12y60

Uh, not spending time learning stuff that's actually useful?

[-]gwern12y40

I don't know yet. That's why DNB is interesting.

[-]Kaj_Sotala12y20

Downvoted for uninformative title (brain structure changes with any learning, unless one presupposes dualism) and a post which also didn't have any descriptions about the links.

[-]whpearson12y00

There are various types of change that can occur on different levels:

Small scale changes (new dendritic spines, more neuro transmitter receptors)
New connections between cells
New brain cells or removal of old
Change of shape of a brain region. Brain regions are sometimes called brain structures, more so than neurons etc.

It was the last I was trying to communicate.

[-]dlthomas12y00

brain structure changes with any learning, unless one presupposes dualism

I am not sure that is the case. My neuroscience is very rusty, but is there a distinction between structural changes and other changes? New neural connections versus changes in neurotransmitters or triggering thresholds seems a likely candidate.

[-]Matt_Simpson12y10

This is also useful as a piece of evidence to convince (reasonable) interlocutors that the mind is, in fact, physical - though clever individuals can (and do) come up with dualist theories which predict this result.

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