A reader writes:
Fascinating post. I lived in London a few years ago, and as an American accustomed to cities about as big as London, but arranged on a grid, I was always amazed at the cabbies' ability to remember so many details in a metropolis that had developed organically, with no master plan and few major thoroughfares through the tangle of streets and alleyways. About as close as you get are the high streets that used to be the main highways in and out of the old villages that over the years got gobbled up to become London neighborhoods.
US cities are completely different.
It's pretty easy, for instance, to drive to Lexington and 125th in New York, even if you've never been anywhere near Harlem, because the grid fills in all the unknown areas in a predictable pattern. In a tiny city like my current hometown of Washington, DC, it is nearly impossible to get lost if you know how the grid is arranged. London, on the other hand, is a sprawling maze. No wonder tourists become so laughably dependent on the Tube, not realizing they've taken two trains to cover a quarter mile. Other European cities are rarely so complicated because order has usually been imposed after a war or a revolution to facilitate the movement of troops (Paris's barricade-proof grand boulevards come to mind). As far as I know, Boston is the only major US city not arranged on a grid, and Glasgow may be only big UK city that is on a grid.
Having to memorize such an astounding sprawl, and to create all the different neural connections needed to remember how it all fits together would have to impact the structure of the brain. Thanks for giving me a fond memory of London.
Another DC resident vents:
I wish all places tested their cab drivers the way London does. Often I've had to give turn-by-turn directions to a cab driver. In the DC area, I recently had to tell one to go West on Route 50 (a major road for your non-DC readers) until he reached the road I needed. He then couldn't manage "West" on his own and asked me which direction to turn onto the highway. Imagine if I'd been an out-of-towner.
While they're very useful in the right situations, cell phones and GPS have made it worse much of the time (besides talking on their phones while driving in the rain on icy roads – it happened!) by allowing them to outsource much of the job's brain activity and never learn the roads.
Another reader adds:
This study shows how GPS use can hasten atropy. By the way, a couple of years ago an analogous fMRI study found that googling was better than crossword puzzzles and passive reading in engaging more areas of the brain, thus warding of Alzheimers.
The Dish 