Hello all,
Did you know that when you become an expert in a specific domain, the areas in your brain that deal with this type of skill will grow? There are even parts of your brain that relate to particular professions.
For instance, London taxi drivers have a larger hippocapus (in the posterior region of their brains) than London bus drivers (Maguire, Wool lett, & Spiers, 2006)…. Why is that? It is because this region of the hippocampus is specialized in acquiring and using complex spatial information in order to navigate efficiently. Taxi drivers have to navigate around London whereas bus drivers follow a limited set of routes. Taxi drivers also have a highly tuned ability to remember jokes, and exaggerate about who they have had in the back of their cab, but scientists have yet to track down the Joke/Exaggeration centres of our brains.
Brain “plasticity” can also be observed in the brains of bilinguals (Mechelli et al., 2004). It looks like learning a second language is possible through functional changes in the brain: the left inferior parietal cortex is larger in bilingual brains than in monolingual brains. Sacre Bleu!!
As we have mentioned in one of our earlier newsletters, plastic changes also occur in musicians brains com pared to non-musicians. Gaser and Schlaug (2003) compared professional musicians (who practice at least 1hour per day) to amateur musicians and non-musicians. He found that they were better. ALSO, He found that gray matter (cortex) volume was highest in professional musicians, intermediate in amateur musicians, and lowest in non-musicians.
So for bigger brains, jump in a taxi with a violin and ask to go to the Eiffel tower.
