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A comment on We learn faster when we aren’t told what choices to make. Parent comment

Re:We learn faster when we aren’t told what choices to make by godelski on Thursday October 01, 2020 @12:33PM (#24652945)
Do we have MRIs of cab drivers before they became a driver? We need to decouple if that's a learned skill or not. Certainly there is some spectrum in native ability but it would make sense for the vast majority of people to have the basic ability but that they never hone the skill. There are people that are never about to write, but for practical purposes we expect everyone to be able to do it (after being taught).

I think a lot of people attribute to "natural ability" what is often learned because many times it isn't obvious how those skills were learned. It's obvious everyone went to school to learn to read and write, it's not obvious a child learned navigation because their favorite game growing up was hide and seek.

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Re:We learn faster when we aren’t told what choices to make by kiba on Thursday October 01, 2020 @12:48PM (#24653174)
It's a learned skill.

London cab drivers are famed for "The Knowledge". You can see the physical change in the hippocampus from the MRIs. However, the physical changes also seems to negatively impact some of their cognitive skills, so there's tradeoff.

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Re:We learn faster when we aren’t told what choices to make by ford_o on Thursday October 01, 2020 @01:19PM (#24653589)
Source? What cognitive skills are impacted?
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Re:We learn faster when we aren’t told what choices to make by kyuudou on Thursday October 01, 2020 @02:42PM (#24654631)
On top of what texasbigdata said, try searching for "london" "the knowledge". The non-linear way London's street system has evolved over the centuries has lent to some very unusual ways of getting around town that Uber/Lyft/GPS haven't really been able to supplant yet. The guys who test for "The Knowledge" have to do years of research, physically driving the best routes from major locations in great detail.

This research, whether they pass or not, results in marked growth in temporal and visuo-spatial parts of the brain.

It's one of my favorite subjects being a bit of a geography geek myself.

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Re:We learn faster when we aren’t told what choices to make by texasbigdata on Thursday October 01, 2020 @02:29PM (#24654469)
The first result on google for “London cab mri” is a paper with 922 citations....this is not witchcraft.
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Re:We learn faster when we aren’t told what choices to make by chewxy on Thursday October 01, 2020 @04:31PM (#24655868)
https://www.pnas.org/content/97/8/4398

I think they also studied former cab drivers and found the structures to have shrunken compared to current cab drivers but still more pronounced vs non can drivers. I can't seem to find the source but I seem to recall this from a Stan Dehaene book

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