Mental Health Year In Review

I read the section of this article that discussed how a person's brain structure can be altered by something other than drugs or other treatments, through repetitive actions. The idea of the brain's "plasticity" is not new, it has been observed many times in young children, but I had never heard of anyone actually increasing the size of his brain through pure repetition in an adult. Eleanor Maguire has done research on this phenomenon that dates back to 2000 using magnetic resonance imagin scans on taxi drivers' brains. Her data confirmed the belief that the posterior hippocampus can expand to accommodate more spatial representations. A taxi driver whose entire occupation deals with memorization and navigational skills would be expected to have an enlarged posterior hippocampus, and that is exactly what Maguire and her colleagues found. The brain's plasticity is a fascinating topic, and this article was further support of this theory.