Neuroscientist Eleanor Maguire at University College London discovered that the mental feat of memorizing the layout of twenty-five thousand streets and thousands of landmarks, known as “The Knowledge,” could be changing the size of a cabbie’s hippocampus, a region associated with memory. This piece of research had enormous implications. It helped confirm an idea that scientists had already been developing since the 1970s, particularly through animal studies: that the brain isn’t set in stone in childhood but is in fact moldable throughout life.
