Joshua Lima

• Lingo Goes From Cockney To A Gringo • London Taxi Driver • Chelsea FC • 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇵🇹

[Joshua Lima @Lima89]

@IslingtonChap The UK Government makes £3 Trillion a year probably better to ask them why NHS Nurses are starving?

[Joshua Lima @Lima89]

Wtf has happened to our Country 😢

[Visegrád 24 @visegrad24]

Video with subtitles of yesterday’s attempted beheading of a young British man by a Somali migrant in Belfast. It’s a hard watch but Europeans must see it.

Those who intervened and smashed a shovel over the attackers’ head are heroes

They most likely saved that young man’s life

[Joshua Lima @Lima89]

@FootballFunnys United sung You’ll Never Walk Alone before Liverpool did.

[Konstantin Kisin @KonstantinKisin]

"It's very important not to politicise a personal tragedy."

[Joshua Lima @Lima89]

New Cool Runnings Looks Shit.

[Mara Webster 🇬🇧🇺🇸 @Mara_Webster]

If anybody asks how I’m doing right now I’m going to send them this video as a representation of my current state of mind

[Sikh Federation (UK) @SikhFedUK]

Jas Singh, representing the Sikh Federation (UK) @SikhFedUK speaking at a press conference at Guru Nanak Gurdwara, Smethwick @GNGSmethwick following the sentencing of Vickrum Digwa for 21 years for the murder of Henry Novak.

The Sikh community has unequivocally condemned in the strongest terms Vickrum Digwa for not only the murder of Henry Novak for which he is solely responsible, but also the lies he has told.  

He made the wrong choice, should have pleaded guilty and must now serve his lengthy prison sentence.

[Nicolas Hulscher, MPH @NicHulscher]

The LARGEST human ivermectin cancer study EVER conducted found 84% of cancer patients declared COMPLETE REMISSION, TUMOR SHRINKAGE, or HALTED TUMOR GROWTH.

Our study is now PEER-REVIEWED and PUBLISHED by the International Institute of Anticancer Research.

The tide is turning.

[Joshua Lima @Lima89]

From the Horses mouth. “WHO CAN WE TAX IN ORDER TO PAY BENEFITS TO OTHERS”

🤬🤬🤬

[Politics UK @PolitlcsUK]

🚨 NEW: Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden told Peter Mandelson that Labour MPs always ask "who can we tax in order to pay benefits to others"

[Football Away Days @AwayDaysFB]

He’s actually spot on with this…

[HAS ARSENAL WON A UCL? @RASHYCLOUD]

Day 25,553

Nope!

[talkSPORT @talkSPORT]

✅ Arsenal
✅ Arteta
✅ Win the Dog
✅ Gunnersaurus
✅ Martin Keown
✅ Arsenal's set piece coach

Jason Cundy launches into an all-timer of a 'Has Anyone Seen?' as #AFC lose to PSG in the UCL final! 🤣

[UEFA Champions League @ChampionsLeague]

THE ENCORE 🔴🔵

#UCLfinal

[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.

[Joshua Lima @Lima89]

@ChelseaFC Be playing Centre Mid next season on 12 year contract knowing our owners and directors

[ClarksonsFarm @ClarksonsFarm1]

What it feels like driving on main roads & through cities in the UK…

[Jay @Jay13Silva]

@siphillipssport Chelsea FC have turned elite football into a grotesque experiment—reckless spending, zero cohesion, and a revolving door of players treated like disposable assets. No spine, no leadership, no clue. This isn’t a rebuild, it’s institutional self-sabotage dressed up as strategy.

[Joshua Lima @Lima89]

@Romanswallet @b836ededc9b549b @TheLTDA @TfL @TfLTPH @MayorofLondon @The_LCDC @UKLabour Madness.

[Joshua Lima @Lima89]

@AbsoluteChelsea @TheAthleticFC Which means we will end up with a 14 year old from Venezuela.