It’s no secret London’s cabbies know the city better than anyone: their grasp of its sinuous streets, one-way thoroughfares and Lewis Carroll-esque shortcuts is the stuff of legend. Anyone who’s travelled from Islington to Hackney in under 20 minutes during an Arsenal game will tell you it takes a special kind of brain to get from one to the other in one piece. And they’d be right.
Science has long held that cabbies are cleverer than most: to earn their license, they have to memorise over 26,000 roads. They undergo a gruelling test called The Knowledge, study for which costs up to £5,000. Their awareness of our streets and the intricacies that bind them together results in an above-average posterior hippocampus (the area of the brain concerned with learning and memory). Cabbies, in short, are much like polymaths, multilinguists, or those who do the crossword every day.
