Arthur Weasley was well known for his interest in muggles and their lives. What people didn't know was that he had started taking their subjects and exams to find out how all their eckeltricity worked and how their aeroplanes stay up. At the moment he was sat in a muggle lecture all about memory, this had also intrigued his daughter in law Hermione who had agreed to accompany him to see whether the muggle studies of the brain could be of use in the wizarding world.

The pair sat at the back and watched as a man just older than Hermione started his talk; "Hello, I'm James tonight's guest speaker. Today our main focus will be the hippocampus," He waved his arm motioning towards a large white board which lit up with an image of a brain the hippocampus highlighted, "the area of the brain associated with memory, we will be looking at a study by Miss Eleanor Maguire who concentrated on the differences between your average persons brain and that of a taxi driver."
"What is a traxci driver?" Arthur whispered.
"Taxi and it's a job where someone drives other people where they want to go, a bit like Stan and Ernie on the nightbus, but only a few people can go together so they don't have to be with strangers." Hermione answered, now used to having to answer all of Arthurs questions about muggles.

"Let us begin with some context, psychologists" "Muggle healers who look at how the brain works" "had been discussing Localisation, the idea that certain areas of the brain do different things. The hippocampus was believed to provide a mental representation of spatial relations, this had stemmed from biological studies of birds. Lee et al found that the hippocampus in birds and mammals was capable of growing more cells, neuroplasticity, and Smulders" Here an image of a black and white bird popped up. "found that in birds like the black-capped chickadee, the size of the hippocampus was larger in periods when they had to remember where they have buried their excess food. This led Maguire to the conclusion that people who use their navigational skills more often could also develop a larger hippocampus. This became the basis for Maguire's aim, would taxi drivers have a larger volume of hippocampus than that of other people or not?"

James smiles a full set of white teeth on show. "Maguire's taxi driver sample consisted of 16 right-handed male with an average age of 44. They had all worked as licensed London Taxi drivers for between one and a half and forty-two years. She used a matched control group of only right handed healthy males between the ages of 32 and 62, 50 people were chosen for this group. The dependant variable of the study was the hippocampal volume which was measured using an MRI scan."
"A muggle piece of technology used to take pictures of the brain without cutting them open. Its a little bit like the ultrasound scan used to give the picture of baby." Hermione placed her hand on her slightly rounded stomach, smiling gently as she thought of her child growing inside her.
"Each measurement was taken by someone unaware of the participants condition, to avoid any experimenter biases which could occur. VBM or voxel-based morphometry was used to take the image and then a method of pixel counting was used to calculate the number of 1.5mm³ in each participants hippocampus. The results were not quite as Miss Maguire had expected," The board was now lit up with a table displaying the results. "as you can see she was correct in that the taxi drivers did have a larger central and posterior hippocampus. However the non-taxi drivers had a much larger anterior. This led Maguire to the conclusion that the distribution of grey area in the hippocampus changes with use therefore suggesting that by becoming a taxi-driver the volume of your hippocampus will grow rather than that having a large hippocampus will lead to starting work as a taxi driver. Thank you all for listening, goodnight."

The lecturer walks off the stage his messy strawberry blond hair bouncing in time with his steps. Arthur immediately rather excitedly whether they can get a taxi, Hermione just sighs getting out of her seat and leading him to the nearest train station.