Memorization by Cabbies

The next time some ersatz educator rants about memorizing dates or learning by rote, show him or her your March 22 editorial on London cabbies. Memorizing exercises the brain; it hardly matters what you memorize--the Gettysburg Address, state capitals, the presidents--it all enlarges the posterior hippocampus. London cabbies memorize every street and don’t waste time getting out a map for each fare. That’s why we memorize multiplication tables, so that we don’t have to take off our shoes and count our toes all the time.

Memorizing in no way diminishes one’s ability to use original thought--just the opposite. It frees our minds so that we don’t have to always start from square one.

ELLIE WEISS

Los Angeles

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It’s not just that you’ve lost your keys, you’ve apparently lost your collective grasp on the “scientific method” and one of its prime tenets, namely that “correlation does not equal causation.”

You suggest that male London cab drivers have larger posterior hippocampi in their brains than comparable “noncabby males” possess, because these redoubtable cabbies had to spend years memorizing the many streets and alleyways of London. In other words, one can expand the posterior hippocampus by using it a lot. Sort of like weightlifting.

Sounds good, and it might be true. But did they measure the taxi drivers’ brains before they started their studies? It’s just as likely that the cab drivers were drawn to the intense memorization cab driving requires because they found it an easy, pleasant task, thanks to their already enlarged hippocampi.

ANDY BOEHM

Santa Barbara