Mental maps

Having been built up over hundreds of years into its current dense and meandering tangle, London’s road network shows few signs of the regularity that characterizes its counterparts in younger countries. Prior to the advent of cheap map technology, anyone wanting to explore unfamiliar neighborhoods would need a detailed atlas to find addresses or landmarks. Finding the desired spot was akin to playing Where’s Waldo, given the thicket of alleys and courts and lanes laid out with no obvious organizing principle.1

One group was notably unfazed by this challenge. London’s black cab drivers developed a well-deserved reputation for their ability to navigate to any points in the metro area with ease, with no reference to guide them. This was not accidental, as to earn their license each had to pass a legendarily grueling test that came to be known simply as the “Knowledge,” a requirement first instituted in the era of horse-drawn carriages.

Prospective cabbies study the layout of London for years, memorizing tens of thousands of streets and establishments. During this period they pore over maps for hours and wind their way through the streets on scooters, committing what they see to memory. They are required to visualize paths between restaurants or theaters or shops, or any other random point of interest a rider might choose that’s within a quarter mile of 320 predefined routes.

At the culmination they are called in for a series of progressively harder live interviews, in which an examiner calls out two points and the candidate must respond with the optimal turn-by-turn sequence to navigate between them, noting the exact steps taken along the way. There is no recourse to any material outside of one’s head. Failing more than once bumps you back to the beginning of a series, and failing a series twice sends you back to the previous one.2

In the process of accumulating this knowledge drivers learn to see their city differently, forming a richly layered and instantly accessible mental map.3 They are able to draw out the best route from a cloud of thousands of data points, with little conscious thinking required. Successful students of the Knowledge become so immersed in the nuances of London that they disproportionately go on to pass the tour guide qualification, putting to use their intimate knowledge of geography and its implied history.

More intriguingly, researchers noted that the brains of these taxi drivers experience measurable physical changes, as the posterior hippocampus used for spatial memory becomes larger. The unusual intensity of studying road layouts leads to structural adaptations, allowing candidates with unremarkable memories to perform feats of recall that seem impossible to outsiders. Much like muscles that grow in the using, gray matter drawn on for certain skills seems to swell up with the Knowledge.

Panopticon

On the spectrum of ways to employ knowledge London’s taxi drivers sit at one extreme, with all relevant data fully integrated into their working memories. For most other professions, technology is pushing closer to the opposite end, where knowing how to retrieve data is more important than the facts themselves. Instead of embedding knowledge deep in the mind, the tendency has been to use servers and fast networks and interfaces to make it instantly available, decreasing the thought required.

don't forget those unknown unknowns

One of the most advanced expressions of this is Google’s wearable Glass product, eyeglasses intended to put an all-seeing pipeline connected to the company’s broad computing power right on the user’s face, mediating the interface between the wearer and the environment. Information doesn’t have to be stored when it could be accessed, with a miniature projector casting updates into one’s field of view.

This is a different vision of thinking—with Google Glass you don’t have to remember so much as where you left your phone before the next data fix. Reminders are timed to the right moment, augmented reality overlays explanatory information on the real-world scenes in front of you, and context relevant to your activities is fed to the senses automatically without the need to query it.

Google Glass has so far failed to make much of a splash in the broader marketplace, probably due to its price tag, clunky interface, and the sheer goofiness of functioning in society looking like a leveled-up version of that guy who wears his Bluetooth headset too much. The creep of technology has for now advanced mainly to the wrist, where smartwatches provide instant reminders that still require the user to choose to look for them.

With his startup Neuralink, Elon Musk is attempting to take this evolution to its logical end, bypassing the external device altogether and implanting some form of interface directly into the brain. The company is testing the process on rats but needs to make dramatic progress before expanding it to humans. As a general improvement on the human-computer interface it might have promise. Add in Musk’s apocalyptic transhumanist undertones and the whole endeavor smacks of a dystopian experiment that ends with caged human subjects in a lab.

We may be able to supplement our thinking but there is no proof that our minds can integrate symbiotically with machines, notwithstanding the claims of Silicon Valley’s best and brightest. The task remains of discerning what we actively think about and what should be offloaded to the increasingly capable tools at our disposal.

Knowledge economy

Unfortunately, the rise of cheap and ubiquitous GPS receivers obliterated the cabbies’ hard-won advantages. Anyone with a basic phone can now navigate anywhere within London or farther afield with ease, matching what drivers took years to master. Even more, digital maps have continuous awareness of traffic conditions and road closures that even the most diligent can’t stay current with. Add in the rise of Uber and its on-demand peers, and the battle lines have been drawn between traditionalists and those who don’t want to pay the extra pounds for an iconic cab.4

It’s story that’s constantly repeated. A supermarket cashier once distinguished herself by instant recall of the dozens of lookup codes for vegetables, but the bar code scanner makes that skill unnecessary. A travel agent might know the arcana of airline reservation systems that are now navigable by user-friendly search engines. Visual designers who were expert in manually crafting graphics were replaced by tools that their clients could use independently. Even London’s original taxi drivers were adept at handling horses, but no one suggests that the Knowledge should today include a section on proper shoeing techniques or how to soothe a spooked animal.5

Some elements of our thinking will likewise atrophy, freeing up other areas with the potential to gain. Humanity’s thoughts were once consumed with how to scratch out sustenance from the earth, but relatively few people today need deep understanding of crop planting patterns or how to drive livestock. Map navigation is similarly receding in importance for modern life—today’s rideshare drivers probably have average-sized hippocampi.

Our freed-up mental space could be valuable if replaced with the next level of understanding. If we instead anesthetize ourselves with consumption that replaces thinking, the future will be both easier and bleaker.6 Not having information incorporated into our intuition risks some loss, especially if sustained work is jettisoned in favor of hopping amongst superficialities.

What will it mean for a society when knowledge is almost entirely outsourced? If artificial intelligence is largely an overhyped marketing term and the singularity is definitely not real, what will it mean for generative work if no one can weave together disparate threads to create something novel?

For your industry, organization, or individual work, there are some things that should be pushed off to the digital sphere and accessed only where needed. There are others that merit continued immersion, soaking in the implications that emerge only when you understand enough of what’s obvious to discover what’s not. There may be some equivalent of the Knowledge of London for your work, and the process of gaining it opens up a vista that can’t be seen otherwise.

What about your knowledge set will become a drag if technology evolves along its current trajectory?7 If you’re anchored in one costly and intensive way of engaging with the world, what happens when the underlying framework changes? On the other side, where is it worth going deeper, flexing your brain to build new capabilities?

Not receiving these articles automatically? 1/week, subscribe here.

References

The New York Times had a detailed exploration of the Knowledge of London.

Scientists researching London cab driver brains published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Transport for London oversees the taxi driver licensing process.

Tim Urban wrote about Neuralink on his blog Wait But Why, in his typical magisterial style and also a little too credulously.

  1. Or Where’s Wally for the non-American reader, which is the original name of the series, incidentally created by a Brit. ↩
  2. There is no permanent failure, as test takers can persist in the series until they pass or quit trying. Perhaps some metaphor for life is baked in there. ↩
  3. Note there’s an official City of London, which is a small historic part of what the world generally knows as London. Through various amalgamations it has become mostly symbolic as a political entity. Cabbies study the bigger conurbation. ↩
  4. The Knowledge doesn’t come cheap, as black cabs are usually more expensive than their ridesharing counterparts. ↩
  5. Although in their role as anonymous confidants, drivers might still need to soothe the occasional rider. ↩
  6. A plot device of the Pixar movie Wall-E, in which humans have become sedentary and gluttonous consumers chained to entertainment that meets their every need, rendering them into passive blobs. ↩
  7. No doubt most of the agita among London’s taxi drivers stems from the costly years of investment they put into learning the Knowledge and the erosion of their path to recouping it. ↩