Cabbies have superhuman memories

Some of you may have heard about the rigorous training that London cab drivers have to go through before they can be registered to drive a cab. If you haven't it involves over 3 years of schooling in order to memorize every street(over 25,000), turn, intersection, and fastest routes between over 20.000 landmarks in a 6 mile radius around Charing Cross train station in London. Needless to say, this is an almost superhuman feat and as such attracted the interest of a few neurological researchers. Trainees were evaluated using multiple factors such as IQ, memory skills, and grey matter volume before they began to learn what is referred to as "the Knowledge". Then after their training was up all of the 79 trainees were evaluated again, even though only 40 of them had made the cut. The difference between those that had succeeded and those that had not was drastic. Those who had succeeded showing a substantial increase in grey matter in the hippocampus, an area of the brain responsible for spatial reasoning and related memories. The results led the scientists to believe that perhaps those individuals with more "plastic" brains were usually more successful as drivers because their brain learned to adapt during their training.

http://io9.com/5866305/why-cab-drivers-are-mentally-superior-to-you