To drive one of London's famous black cabs,
you need to be a special kind of person.
London's cabbies don't use GPS,
but then, they don't need it.
They have the Knowledge.
I have undertaken the stiffest geographical test
that any transport operative has to go through,
probably anywhere in the world.
It consists of memorizing
straight line routes across London.
You learn something like 25,000 streets,
left this street, right this street,
forward this roundabout, leave by this exit,
probably a hundred thousand points of interest.
On average, it takes four and a half years
to complete the Knowledge
and only one in seven students passes.
Those expert navigators that do are remarkable specimens.
They're even studied by scientists.
And while all our brains are excellent
at decoding our surroundings,
good design makes navigating a whole lot easier
in complex places like cities.
This is all part of a process called wayfinding.
Wayfinding is about finding your way
while you're interacting with your surroundings.
The environment can help us or can hinder us.
The information that you've got
can be useful or it can be absent.
From the roads we drive, the paths we walk,
to negotiating busy airports and shopping malls,
carefully designed wayfinding systems are everywhere,
but in a world where GPS is in all of our pockets,
do we risk losing our innate ability to find our way?
Wayfinding's kind of the opposite of being lost,
so when you know where you're going,
or you work out how you go somewhere,
then you are actually using the process of wayfinding.
It is innate in humans.
As creatures, we come from the savannah
and we always needed to know
where our food was, where water was, where the camp was,
so our ability to navigate is fundamental to survival.
Humans are spacial beings.
Our brains give us an internal compass
to help us understand and navigate unfamiliar environments.
Neuroscientists talk about the cognitive map,
which is the map that we have in our brain.
It effectively works in the same way as a regular map
because it allows us to retain a memory,
and it allows us, for example, to take shortcuts.
Research has found very specific types of cells
in our hippocampus
that fire in different locations within our environment.
Place cells cover our environment with a firing pattern
that we believe helps support the idea of a cognitive map,
as in we have this,
not just a physical representation of our environment
that we can kind of see,
but actually a neural representation
of cells that fire in a pattern in our environment
that helps us reduce the cognitive demand needed
to actually travel from point A to point B.
Likewise, grid cells are also found in this region,
and they form a hexadirectional representation
of a familiar, learned environment.
So for example, as I'm sitting in this room,
I would have a grid-like pattern of cells that fire,
that then move as I move around the room.
You kind of think of it as, like, pointillism.
The combination of all of these different cells
that fire for different places
and for different directions that you're approaching,
barriers and such in your environment,
build up the idea that we have this cognitive map.
Despite the brilliance of our brains,
it's still very easy to get lost
in our busy, ever-changing cities.
Cities are very stressful places.
There's a lot of noise, tall buildings, people around.
London is notorious for being a difficult place
to find your way through,
and people do get lost in it all the time.
I couldn't find any of my landmarks.
It provokes horror.
I was lost. You know, I really was lost.
You want to end up in a place
and you end up in another one,
so I was late for work because of that.
London is a messy city
compared to something like New York.
One reason is the sheer scale.
It's a very big city.
It was not designed as a city at the beginning,
a series of different settlements.
Manhattan is a lot easier, as a city, to navigate
than London
because of that consistent, uniform grid system.
When people get lost, they basically run out of clues
to help them orientate themselves.
Point north? OK.
Uh...
Is it that way?
Uh...
The Thames is that-
No!
It's the other way.
Yeah? Oh.
Uh, I'm gonna go that way.
Close enough!
Navigating in London is so difficult
that 44% of those walking above ground
actually use a map of the Underground, London's Tube.
It's very accessible.
The Tube map is an excellent device
for understanding London's whole structure
and how to connect and use it across the city.
It's a shorthand.
It gives you a picture of the city.
It gives you a confidence,
but it's not a great device for walking around.
The difficulty is when people use the tube map
to navigate when they get above ground,
because it's not a reflection of how the city is laid out.
We found that there's a lot of people getting lost.
There was a lot of people who didn't travel places
because they didn't think they could.
When you look down a street
and it doesn't look very interesting,
or whatever is at the end of it isn't very visible,
you will naturally think, "Hmm, maybe I won't go down there.
Let's not adventure."
Well, the next street could be full
of wonderful, interesting bohemian stores
that you want to go and see,
but because you can't see it, you don't know it exists
and you don't go down there
and the city, therefore, is a quite dark place
until you get to know it,
and then you know those little shortcuts,
you know something is round the corner.
But that takes time for you to build a mental map
and to understand it, and have that confidence.
Applied Information Group is a design agency
who specialize in fixing this very problem.
They created a tool
to help people get around the city center:
Legible London.
Legible London is London's walking system.
It started, really, from the observation
that walking around London,
you don't get a lot of help in the last mile.
The sign system is designed around
answering four questions,
no more than that.
The first question is, "Where am I?"
So you'll see information at the top
giving you the village that you're in
and the area within that village
and there's a map with a large "You are here"
to kind of, "Ok, so this is gonna help me,
tell me where I am."
Second question that it answers is, "Well, where is it?"
So we don't know what you're looking for
and this is the reason why it evolved as a mapping system
rather than with lots of finger posts,
because on a mapping system,
we can get between 200 and 250 locations on that map.
The third question is, "Well, how do I get there?"
And that's why you see this very careful selection
of landmarks which are highlighted,
that are designed to be placed along routes
so that you can see that, "I need to go along here,"
and that's why we started to introduce 3D buildings,
because we found just naming them
and saying there was a church here,
wasn't doing enough.
And then the fourth question,
"Well, what else is around here?"
So that's why you have this wider area map
that goes out to five minutes, with a lot more detail,
because it actually tells you
that there are interesting streets round the corner,
that, "Oh, I didn't know
there was another tube station there."
As you approach this sign with a map on it,
it's quite obvious that I'm here,
the way in which I'm facing
and if you look ahead, South Molton Street,
that's South Molton Street.
So immediately, I haven't had to think
and I'm orienting myself.
The map at the top here gives me more of an idea
of what's within 15 minutes.
So if you can see the number of tube stations,
there's about nine of there within a 15-minute walk,
and not a lot of people realize
that these tube stations are as close as that
and it gives you the basic directions in order to get there
using these pathways, which were decided very carefully
and then, as you're traveling, we'll be guiding you
by finding other ones of these signs along the way.
We also, from research, know that
remembering street names is very hard to do,
the reason being is that street names are quite abstract
and they don't create an image in your mind,
and your memory works so much better
when you create an image.
You know, one of those secrets of learning people's names
is soon as you meet somebody,
you meet a Kevin, just think of Kevin Bacon,
and then when you meet them next,
you think "Why am I thinking of Kevin Bacon?
Oh, your name's Kevin."
That's how the brain works,
so that's why street names are poor.
We just ended up redacting, taking things out,
how can we make this as simple as possible,
Because there's so much information on that map,
it's so detailed,
it can become overwhelming very, very quickly.
It takes a lot of iteration to get that balance right,
to get all of these things in play.
I think we went through about 293 different iterations
to resolve the whole design.
And the colors on the map were probably
one of the hardest things to try and resolve.
Big learning there is
to try and reduce the number of colors that you're using.
We came up with the use of blue.
It's a color that works well in U.K.'s overcast skies.
We wanted them to be, like,
you can spot them from a distance
and that's where the idea of a yellow bar
at the top came from.
It's higher up, it was yellow in the environment,
it kind of speaks to you about information,
and can be very visible
and all the research that we did showed,
not by a huge factor,
but the power of the Transport for London's typeface,
Johnston,
the kind of respect that it had
for giving me transport information,
being part of the transport system,
and using Johnston underground,
makes more logical sense.
In the Spiers Lab at University College London,
neuroscientists Sarah and Chris
are running an experiment on cab driver, James.
So the next thing we're gonna run
is a very exciting scan for us.
It's the high resolution picture of your hippocampus.
Would you like to begin?
Anytime you're ready.
All right, perfect.
They're hoping to learn
about how our brains change
by studying expert wayfinders.
We're taking a much more detailed look
at the cabbie hippocampus
than has ever been done before.
It is helping us to learn how the cabbie hippocampus grows.
The task that we have taxi drivers perform
is very similar to the job that they do on a daily basis.
The game will begin again in a few seconds,
with another 15 routes.
Ok.
We essentially have them do a route planning task
where we tell them a point A to a point B,
ask them to plan this route in their head,
and then simply ask them a yes or no question:
"Would you take street X?"
And then they respond,
"yes" or "no", they would take that street
along the route that they planned in their head.
The design of this task was developed
to actually test a mathematical theory
of how they might be able to plan
over this huge structure in state space
that is the 30,000 streets of London.
They can't possibly just be planning
across all of the streets,
all of the possible connections.
First of all, that would take way too long,
and these taxi drivers plan their route
in about three seconds.
At least, they say they do.
When you come to the window, tell them where you wanna go,
they think, "Ok, I know where to go."
And then they take you there
and simply there has to be a way for them to reduce
this massive cognitive demand of this.
It's actually interesting.
As we've talked to a lot of taxi drivers now,
they've informed us that the most difficult routes for them
are actually the shortest routes,
the ones that are within a local area,
because those routes are actually,
they have the least margin of error there.
They pretty much do actually have to plan the entire route
from street A to street B,
whereas when they have a longer journey,
they're able to more easily compartmentalize that route
into a series of global segments.
London taxi drivers are this very famous example
of adult plasticity in the brain,
and specifically, adult plasticity in the hippocampus,
which is the region that is one of the first to be impacted
by the onset of Alzheimer's disease
and we're hoping that that will give us
a better understanding of how this area grows
before it's started to decline,
and that that will give us, for one,
just a better understanding of the hippocampus in general,
but then also, down the line,
whether or not doing something like this
and learning the Knowledge,
becoming a taxi driver,
growing your hippocampus,
having this adult plasticity,
whether that gives you,
does it give you a buffer?
Does it help you prevent Alzheimer's disease?
Those are questions that we don't know the answers to.
While navigational skills are clearly useful,
do the majority of us really need them
in a world where simple journey planning
can easily be done by apps on our phones?
Every piece of technology comes
with its own pros and cons, right?
and having Sat Nav, using Google Maps
or Apple Maps, or whatever,
it is great in the sense that it does help people
who might not be a great navigator,
or you're visiting a new place.
It can be very helpful in that sense.
You're essentially reducing the cognitive load for yourself
by offloading it to this app,
but in doing so,
you're not training your brain, essentially,
so you're not gonna learn that route.
We most definitely convince ourselves
that we can't figure it out.
We have a cognitive block.
We often don't think we can do something.
Our ability to navigate is kind of
fundamental to survival,
so while we think and many people argue,
that GPS is kind of getting rid of that ability,
everything that we've studied says
it's like it's born with every child
and it's a matter of merely exercising that muscle.
If you're hoping to get there.
you'll definitely get there.
If you're hoping to train your brain
and become a better navigator,
it's probably not the best way to go.
Smart design can encourage us to wayfind
and strengthen our natural navigational skills.
While you probably shouldn't delete those apps
that use GPS just yet,
it might be worth traveling a part
of your next journey without it.
Who knows, you might grow a hippocampus like James.
My idea of fun on a weekend away somewhere
is to get myself lost and then find my way out,
so I will deliberately find the back streets
and then I'll work out how to get back to where I wanna be
and I'm pretty good at it.