Dave Firman 〓〓 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 🇬🇧 🖖

ALL Social Media is toxic: leave. (Grand)Father, husband, bad golfer, curmudgeon, Anglophile. Retired IFA. *Frequently* sweary. Churchill knew what to do #KBO

[Dave Firman 〓〓 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 🇬🇧 🖖 @DFirman]

Somewhere in the future, your older self is watching you through memories. Whether it's with regret or nostalgia depends on what you do now.

[Dave Firman 〓〓 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 🇬🇧 🖖 @DFirman]

@TUIUK Thank you, del / reinstall worked. I’ve spoken to one of your colleagues re the lost property in question so fingers crossed for its return.
As an aside point, the bloody TUI-clone accounts on X are v annoying.

[Dave Firman 〓〓 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 🇬🇧 🖖 @DFirman]

@TUIUK hi, I’m in Ibiza and your app loops when I try and send a message - it (app) thinks I haven’t yet departed, directs me to send a message then give the departure date error.

[The Ways of A Gentleman @Gentleman_Ways]

When You Are Old
by William Butler Yeats

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

[Dave Firman 〓〓 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 🇬🇧 🖖 @DFirman]

@NickLincoln Lend us a quid mate.

[Dave Firman 〓〓 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 🇬🇧 🖖 @DFirman]

@G_S_Bhogal Viruses of the Mind?

[Dave Firman 〓〓 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 🇬🇧 🖖 @DFirman]

@NickLincoln Come to Cornwall, it knocks ‘Grotford’ into a cocked hat.

[Dave Firman 〓〓 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 🇬🇧 🖖 @DFirman]

At last.

[Dave Firman 〓〓 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 🇬🇧 🖖 @DFirman]

@Mazza6069 Ditto, although a couple of years later.

[Dave Firman 〓〓 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 🇬🇧 🖖 @DFirman]

@Mazza6069 Cue the “Fokkers” joke….

[Dave Firman 〓〓 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 🇬🇧 🖖 @DFirman]

@Mazza6069 It’s a quite excellent (long) read. I have the third impression from February 1999.

[Dave Firman 〓〓 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 🇬🇧 🖖 @DFirman]

Absolutely fascinating. “Use it or lose it” has been proven.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

To get a license to drive a black cab in London, you have to memorize 25,000 streets, 20,000 landmarks, and the fastest route between any two points in a six-mile radius of Charing Cross. It takes most people three to four years.

A British neuroscientist asked the obvious question nobody had thought to ask. What does that actually do to a human brain?

Her name was Eleanor Maguire. The study changed neuroscience forever.

The exam is called The Knowledge. It was introduced in 1865, and the format has barely changed since.

Applicants ride a moped around London for years with a clipboard strapped to the handlebars, tracing every possible route between every possible pair of points in the city.

They get tested in person by an examiner who can ask them, on the spot, for the shortest legal route between any two addresses in a database of tens of thousands. Half the people who attempt it fail.

The ones who pass have spent an average of four years studying full time and have taken the test 12 times before getting through.

Maguire was watching a TV movie about it in 1995 when she had the idea. These were not ordinary people. They were people running one of the most extreme spatial memory training programs that exists anywhere on Earth.

If the human brain could be reshaped by experience, this was the cleanest natural experiment anyone was ever going to find.

She put 16 of them in an MRI machine.

Their posterior hippocampi were significantly larger than the brains of matched controls. The longer a driver had been working, the bigger the difference got.

A 40-year veteran had a measurably more developed hippocampus than a 5-year veteran, and both had more than someone who had never driven a cab.

Here is why that finding broke a century of consensus.

Until 2000, every neuroscience textbook in the world taught a version of the same idea. The adult brain is essentially fixed. You are born with a set number of neurons. Childhood is the window where the wiring gets laid down. After puberty, the structure freezes, and the rest of your life is just slow decline.

Maguire's study was one of the first pieces of human evidence that this was simply wrong. Adult brains physically remodel themselves in response to what you ask them to do. Not metaphorically. Structurally. With grey matter you can measure on a scan.

The skeptics had an obvious objection. Maybe people with bigger hippocampi were just more likely to become taxi drivers in the first place. The brains were not changing. The job was selecting for brains that already looked that way.

So Maguire ran the experiment again. Properly this time.

She recruited 79 trainees who were just starting to study for The Knowledge and 31 controls who were not. She scanned all of them at the start. Then she waited four years. Of the 79 trainees, 39 eventually passed the exam and 20 failed. She scanned them again.

The trainees who passed had grown larger posterior hippocampi over those four years. The trainees who failed had not. The controls who never studied had not. The brain change was not selection. It was construction.

The act of memorizing the city had physically rebuilt the part of the brain responsible for spatial memory, and the rebuild only happened in the people who actually did the work.

There is a quieter finding from this research that almost nobody quotes, and it is the one I cannot stop thinking about.

The drivers had a bigger posterior hippocampus, but they had a smaller anterior hippocampus. The brain had not magically expanded. It had reallocated. Tissue that was being used for one type of memory had been compressed to make room for another.

When Maguire ran follow-up cognitive tests, the cabbies were measurably worse than controls at certain visual memory tasks unrelated to navigation. They had paid for The Knowledge with something else. The trade was real.

She also ran a second control experiment that is the part of the story most people never hear. She scanned London bus drivers. Same hours behind the wheel. Same city. Same traffic. Same stress. The only difference was that bus drivers follow fixed routes. They do not have to navigate. Their hippocampi looked completely normal.

The cab drivers had not grown bigger hippocampi from driving. They had grown them from the constant, active, effortful retrieval of spatial information from memory.

That distinction is the entire study.

Then in 2020, McGill researchers ran the inverse experiment. They tracked 50 regular drivers and measured how often they used GPS. The participants who relied most heavily on turn-by-turn navigation had measurably weaker spatial memory. When the researchers retested a subset of them three years later, the heavier GPS users had declined fastest.

The hippocampus, the same region the cabbies had built up by ignoring shortcuts, was being slowly hollowed out in everyone else by accepting them.

The mechanism Maguire spent 25 years documenting works in both directions. Brains grow what you make them grow. They lose what you stop asking them to do.

The taxi drivers were running the most intense spatial memory training program on Earth. Most of the rest of us are running the opposite program without realizing it.

Maguire died in early 2025. UCL's tribute described the cabbie study as a stroke of creative genius. She had spent her entire career on a single question. What does it physically take to remember something, and what changes inside a person who remembers a lot of it.

The answer is the part that should change how you live.

[Dave Firman 〓〓 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 🇬🇧 🖖 @DFirman]

@TheSimonEvansX @X Welcome back Mr E, it’s good to see you again. Bastard hackers really do get on one’s thruppenies. I hope that the powers within X can restore ownership of your original a/c - although there is some small cachet with having an “X” within one’s new ‘handle’, IMHO.

[Dave Firman 〓〓 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 🇬🇧 🖖 @DFirman]

@FXTraderPaul A good post- it’s the difference between “being in motion” and “taking action” the former is ‘busywork’ the latter produces results. Too many people spend time “in motion” and wonder why they don’t make progress.

[Ajay Joe @joedelhi]

Left behind in Kabul. Alone. He waited 47 days.

K-9 Chaos was not a dog who did his job. He was a dog who had DECIDED, completely, permanently, without reservation, that Lieutenant Marcus Webb was coming back for him. No matter how long it took.

At Hamid Karzai International Airport, Kabul, on the morning of August 30th, 2021, a three-year-old Belgian Malinois sat in an empty aircraft hangar. The last American plane had left six hours ago. The evacuation was over.

Chaos had been left behind.

Not intentionally. The chaos of the withdrawal. The panic. The rush. Webb had been separated from Chaos during the final evacuation. Put on a different plane. Told Chaos would be on the next flight.

There was no next flight.

Chaos survived the first day alone. Waiting at the hangar where Webb had left him.

Chaos survived the first week. Scavenging food from abandoned military supplies.

Chaos survived 47 days in Taliban-controlled Kabul. Alone. Hiding. Waiting.

Because Chaos survived on the belief that Webb wouldn't leave him forever.

Back in the United States, Webb was losing his mind. Filed reports. Called congressmen. Contacted rescue organizations. Went on the news.

"I left my dog in Afghanistan," he said on CNN, his voice breaking. "I left my brother. And I'm going to get him back."

The military said it was impossible. Kabul had fallen. Taliban controlled the airport. No way to extract a dog.

Webb didn't care about impossible.

He contacted Pineapple Express, a veteran-run extraction operation. Gave them Chaos's last known location. Sent photos. Videos. Anything that could help.

For 47 days, Webb didn't sleep. Didn't eat properly. Just waited for news.

On October 16th, 2021, his phone rang.

"We found him," the voice said. "We found Chaos."

A rescue team had infiltrated Kabul. Used Webb's intel. Found Chaos still at the hangar. Still waiting. Forty-seven days later.

Chaos was emaciated. Dehydrated. Traumatized.

But alive.

The extraction took three days. Smuggling Chaos out of Taliban-controlled territory. Through checkpoints. Through danger.

But they got him out.

On October 19th, 2021, Chaos landed at Dulles International Airport. Webb was waiting on the tarmac.

When they opened the crate, Chaos didn't move. Stared at Webb like he was seeing a ghost.

"It's me, brother," Webb said, kneeling down. "I came back. I promised I'd come back."

Chaos stepped out slowly. Walked to Webb. Collapsed into his arms.

The reunion video went viral. Seventeen million views in three days.

But what people didn't see was what happened after.

For six months, Chaos wouldn't sleep unless Webb was in the room. Wouldn't eat unless Webb fed him. Wouldn't go outside unless Webb went first.

"He's terrified I'll leave him again," Webb said in an interview. "And I don't blame him. I left him once. In the worst place. At the worst time. He waited 47 days for me. And I'll spend the rest of my life making sure he knows I'm never leaving again."

Three years later, Chaos still sleeps with his head on Webb's chest. Still follows him everywhere.

Still making sure Webb doesn't disappear.

K-9 Chaos. Survived 47 days alone in Kabul. Extracted by heroes. Reunited with his handler. Home.
https://t.co/t4eYGPJPrk

#LostAndFound
#doglover #seniordogs #animalwelfare #militarydog #k9hero #dogrescue #Kabul #47Days #LeftBehind #BroughtHome

[Dave Firman 〓〓 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 🇬🇧 🖖 @DFirman]

@CharlieH29 Well you have nothing better to do so why not? 😁

[Dave Firman 〓〓 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 🇬🇧 🖖 @DFirman]

@LeeHurstComic Oh, that’s very good Lee, very good indeed. Here’s 3p (or whatever you get per reply).

[Dave Firman 〓〓 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 🇬🇧 🖖 @DFirman]

@NickLincoln Where is this fine establishment that does not understand sums?

[Dave Firman 〓〓 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 🇬🇧 🖖 @DFirman]

I'm at that stage in life where I stay out of discussions. Even if you say “1+1=5”, you’re right, have fun.

Life is too short to spend it arguing with people who may or may not be idiots - a bee does not waste time arguing with a fly that pollen tastes better than rotting flesh.