In The Field

SfN: The traumas of transit – and it’s not just the jetlag

A lot of people have come a lot of miles to attend this year’s SfN in San Diego. So perhaps I had travel in mind when I started off with a couple of posters loosely related to going places – admittedly on rather different scales…


Firstly: getting around London by taxi. Eleanor Maguire and her student Katherine Woollett of University College London have been following up on Maguire’s previous – and rather well-publicised – study (Nature’s story at the time is here) on the brains of London cabbies. Back in 2000, they found that the size of a region called the hippocampus, which is involved in navigation and memory, is larger in London’s black cab drivers (who have to pass a foreboding test of the capital’s 25,000 streets, suitably titled The Knowledge) than in other people. Unfortunately for them, however, this expertise comes at a price to new learning and memory.

A different part of the hippocampus actually decreases in size as a result of the enlargement of the rest of it. “It’s a story of loss and gain if you’re a taxi driver,” Maguire says. She wouldn’t be surprised, she told me, if this ‘give-and-take’ mechanism was being employed elsewhere in the brain too.

Second travel titbit: getting humans to Mars. For completely different reasons, this form of transit might also impair your memory, as Bernard Rabin’s work on the effect of cosmic rays on rat’s brains suggests.

I have to admit, I was drawn to this poster mainly because it had the words ‘cosmic rays’ in the title. For a moment I wondered if I’d got the wrong conference. But when I looked a bit more closely, it turned out that the team had been monitoring the effects in rats of the kind of cosmic rays that humans might encounter on a mission to Mars.

It turns out that not only will the individuals who sign up to be sent to the red planet have to deal with a lengthy spell of isolation and unenviable dried food supplies – they’re also likely to encounter memory problems. Given the preference, rats crave novelty and usually spend time with unfamiliar objects in their cages rather than ones they’re used to. But Rabin’s rats spent just as long with both types – implying, he thinks, that they could no longer recognise the differences between the objects.

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