I first came across the idea of neuroplasticity being competitive when reading "The Brain That Changes Itself" back in around 2017. I spent some time over the

I first came across the idea of neuroplasticity being competitive when reading "The Brain That Changes Itself" back in around 2017. I spent some time over the Christmas break reading a few books on Neuroscience as the brain is a topic I for some reason keep on coming back to. Among them was "Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory" from Cambridge University Press, and looking it up now in Chapter Three they talk about studies comparing London taxi drivers with controls and noting down differences. To quote the relevant paragraph(s) "they found that taxi drivers had changes in the size of only their hippocampus, with a relative _increase_ in the amount of gray matter within the posterior hippocampus and a relative _decrease_ in the amount of gray matter within the anterior hippocampus. Moreover the changes in both types of hippocampal gray matter correlated with the length of time they had been taxi drivers, which ranged from 1.5 to 42 years (with the largest changes for those who had been taxi drivers the longest.". And also this one: "The investigators also found that the taxi drivers were worse at copying a complex drawing from memory, and a subsequent study from the same group observed the same result and also reported that the taxi drivers were relatively worse than control participants at learning object-place pairs and word pairs (they also reported that the taxi drivers had average IQs). These behavioral deficits may be due to the relatively smaller size of the anterior hippocampus in London taxi drivers. Thus, although the taxi drivers had superior memory for navigating London, it appears to have come at a cost for other forms of memory." [0] https://www.normandoidge.com/?page_id=1259 https://www.normandoidge.com/?page_id=1259 [1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cognitive-neuroscience-of-memory/B227134A1E009D170252D4BC11B7BA55 https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cognitive-neuroscience-...