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Acquiring the Knowledge and then compare the brains of those who eventually passed the test with those who did not. And that’s exactly what Maguire and her team did. This kind of study is much more powerful because you can clearly identify any brain changes as a function of taxicab training. What the researchers found is that before training started, all the wide-eyed and bushy-tailed London taxicab driver wannabes had the same size hippocampi. The scientists then reexamined the cab drivers after they had completed the training period and after they knew who passed and who failed. They found that the wannabe cabbies who passed now had significantly larger posterior hippocampi than they did before they started their training. Ta-da! Brain plasticity in the flesh! This group’s posterior hippocampi were also larger than those of the subjects who hadn’t passed. In other words, this experiment showed that successful training to pass the Appearances exam did indeed enlarge the hippocampus, and the trainees who had not retained enough information showed far less of an increase in size.
    This is just one example of the everyday, beautiful plasticity of our brains. Everything we do and for how long and intensely we do it affects our brains. Become an expert bird watcher, and your brain’s visual system changes to be able to recognize all those tiny little birds. Dance tango all the time, and your motor system shifts to accommodate all those precise kicks and flicks you are doing with your feet. The life lesson I learned all those years ago in Diamond’s classroom was that I shape my brain every day and so do you.

    MY OWN DOORMAN EXPERIMENT
    London is not the only city where its municipal workers have special skills. In New York, it’s doormen. Think about all those faces they have to recognize and differentiate from strangers if they work in a thirty- or forty-story high-rise! Here is a thought experiment I would love to do with New York City doormen if the opportunity ever arose. I would examine the doormen’s brain areas known to be important for face recognition and compare the size of that area to those of other city workers who don’t have to remember lots of faces (let’s say subway conductors). Where exactly is the face recognition area in the brain? At the bottom of the temporal lobe is a unique area known as the fusiform face area, which specializes in helping us recognize faces. When this region is damaged, people cannot distinguish facial features, a condition known as prosopagnosia. The actor Brad Pitt, the famous portrait painter and photographer Chuck Close, and the Harvard professor and author of Multiple Intelligences Howard Gardner are a few famous people with prosopagnosia. Because they cannot recognize people by their faces, they rely on other features such as voice, hair, gait, and clothing. But in doormen, who develop and hone the skill of quickly recognizing sometimes hundreds of faces, I predict that this fusiform area will be significantly larger than that in the subway conductors. Maybe someday I’ll get to do this experiment.

    MY OWN PERSONAL ENRICHED ENVIRONMENT: ADVENTURES IN BORDEAUX
    My life in college was firmly focused on doing well in my classes, though I did date a couple of guys (somewhat awkwardly) during my first two years at Berkeley. Despite my general shyness as a young woman, the truth is that I have always had an adventurous spirit and I was itching to see the world and travel abroad. U.C. Berkley had the perfect study abroad program for me, and I signed up in my junior year. I learned that if I went to particular campuses abroad, I could even take science classes that counted toward my major of physiology and anatomy, so I would not lose any credits. The only country I would even consider visiting was France. I had been enchanted with the French language ever since I started learning it in junior high. My choices for campuses were either Bordeaux or Marseille. In other words,