long-term potentiation
: Long-term potentiation was discovered by Terje Lømo in 1966. More
precisely, he discovered that when a series of signals was repeatedly transmitted by the brain,
there was a persistent effect that lasted afterward that made it easier for those signals to be
transmitted in the future.
“Neurons that fire together wire together”
: Donald O. Hebb,
The Organization of Behavior: A
Neuropsychological Theory (New York: Wiley, 1949).
In musicians, the cerebellum
: S. Hutchinson, “Cerebellar Volume of Musicians,”
Cerebral Cortex
13, no. 9 (2003), doi:10.1093/cercor/13.9.943.
Mathematicians, meanwhile, have increased gray matter
: A. Verma, “Increased Gray Matter
Density in the Parietal Cortex of Mathematicians: A Voxel-Based Morphometry Study,”
Yearbook of Neurology and Neurosurgery 2008 (2008), doi:10.1016/s0513–5117(08)79083–5.
When scientists analyzed the brains of taxi drivers in London
: Eleanor A. Maguire et al.,
“Navigation-Related Structural Change in the Hippocampi of Taxi Drivers,”
Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences 97, no. 8 (2000), doi:10.1073/pnas.070039597; Katherine
Woollett and Eleanor A. Maguire, “Acquiring ‘the Knowledge’ of London’s Layout Drives
Structural Brain Changes,”
Current Biology 21, no. 24 (December 2011),
doi:10.1016/j.cub.2011.11.018; Eleanor A. Maguire, Katherine Woollett, and Hugo J. Spiers,
“London Taxi Drivers and Bus Drivers: A Structural MRI and Neuropsychological Analysis,”
Hippocampus 16, no. 12 (2006), doi:10.1002/hipo.20233.
“the actions become so automatic”
: George Henry Lewes,
The Physiology of Common Life
(Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1860).
