Neural Cartography

Norazha Paiman

Gray matter awakens like wilted flowers in water
in posterior chambers while memories die— 
twenty-five thousand streets devouring 
the soft tissue of yesterday’s dreams.

The Knowledge carves its geography 
into neural flesh, a violent reshaping 
with each taxi turn through lanes and mews: 
anterior regions shrinking as drying seas.

Bus drivers pass untouched, their paths 
too gentle to reshape the mind, 
while we become living maps, 
our hippocampi eating themselves

until the revelation breaks us: 
we are not learning London 
London is mastering us, 
street by bloody street.

The Science

The poem describes the profound physical changes in London taxi drivers’ brains as documented in Maguire et al.’s landmark study (2006). The research found that mastering ‘The Knowledge’ - London’s complex street system - physically reshapes the hippocampus, with taxi drivers showing enlarged posterior regions but reduced anterior volume. The poem captures this scientific finding through visceral imagery, portraying how learning 25,000 streets literally transforms brain tissue. It contrasts taxi drivers with bus drivers (who showed no such changes) and culminates in the realisation that this expertise comes at a biological cost - the brain physically remoulds itself to accommodate the city’s geography. The poem captures both the clinical marvel and horror of neuroplasticity, where expertise literally reconstructs brain tissue until the line blurs between the map and the mind that holds it.

The Poet

Norazha is a Malaysian poet and academic with linguistics degrees from the International Islamic University Malaysia and Universiti Putra Malaysia. He was mentored at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and holds a Cambridge Assessment Practitioner Award. As an interdisciplinary scholar-poet, his work bridges literature, sciences, and humanities.

Next poem: of the foreshore by Katie Hart Potapoff