This is triggering me lol. I was a Paramedic for 10 years and 3 of those years were before GPS existed and we had these awful 900 page 5" thick things we had to wield on the fly called Map Books. It was part of our probation period testing and they would time us to pick out the routes reliably within a certain deadline or not graduate from being a probie.
While your partner drove to the call you'd put the book on your lap and flip to the big large grid which would tell you which map your location would be on (page 770), then you'd look up the street in the back appendix to get the coordinates for the specific house (P5, C2) and then find the cross street on another page (P5, C3), go to the grid and find the closest appropriate hospital for the purpose of the call (different ERs have different functions- for gunshots go to Highland, for amputations go to CalPac Davies, for heart attacks go to UCSF, etc) (page 815), the street location for that (A6, C4) and then make your route while flipping back and forth between all the pages while simultaneously telling your partner where to turn as you go.
When I went to a better ran company, dispatch would give us map page and grid coordinates over the radio when we got the call.
Within a few months you learn most of the neighborhoods and routes, and road hazards and preferences- for example if going to UCSF from the Peninsula take O'Shaughnessy because there's no traffic and is a smooth ride. And if you're going to Seton Hospital from 101 slow down around the turn on the on ramp onto 280 because there is a GIANT bump that will knock your partner in the back's head into the ceiling and not be comfortable for the patient on the gurney.
Map books were no fun but some of the dudes I worked with definitely became route-finding savants.
Similar. I worked doing deliveries for an event company all over the greater NY area, based out of Queens. I usually rode jump-seat and spent a few years with a retired trucker who was such a savant. He could maneuver a truck through any tight/precarious situation with great precision and care. He could visit a location once and recall it next year, every year.
The most impressive was a full day gauntlet starting at 5 AM where he navigated starting in south queens NYC to a stop in Staten Island, then off to Jersey city, then up to Sleepy Hollow NY, then all the way to some Greek church deep in Suffolk county through the winding maze that is the north shore - no map, no gps.
The most scary situation was driving a smaller Isuzu cab-over box truck through Brooklyn on a hot summer day. We had no AC, windows down, headed along a narrow avenue under the elevated train tracks. A passing truck was a little too far - BOOM- a loud shattering glass and bang sound. Turns out that idiot hit his mirror violently into ours so hard it showered him directly in the face with shards of mirror. I only got hit with a few pieces in the arm and a bunch landed on my lap. He didn't flinch. He kept the truck strait while muttering "I've been waiting for that to happen again." He thankfully only had two small cuts on his face, nothing went into his eyes. We lucky passed an auto parts store and he was able to rig up something on the mirror bar, continued on and finished the route.
He was a real character and he always had a lot of fun and crazy road stories. That dude also taught me to drive a truck with air brakes which is also how I learned to drive a manual. In addition to showing me all the secret traffic avoidance and toll beating routes, he was a foodie and showed me a lot of interesting restaurants he'd stop at along our routes. He took me to the famous Wo Hop in Manhttan's China Town when you could just walk in and get a table (late 90's.) He parked the truck at an inactive construction site a block away and moved cones around it so we didn't get a ticket. That character knew all the tricks :-)
Tony got his "knowledge" around "21-Up" in the series, became a London cabby by "28-Up" [2].
If I remember the story I read correctly, they just call it "The Knowledge". What a great name.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Knowledge_(film)
It's available on YouTube (potential geoblocking notwithstanding):
>> for gunshots go to Highland, for amputations go to CalPac Davies, for heart attacks go to UCSF, etc
Oooft. My utmost respect. I could not do this job.
To be clear, I'm not implying that usage of LLMs or viewing potentially unlimited video shorts is necessarily bad, nor could I guess the threshold from which doing these things becomes cognitively damaging in the long term. All I'm saying is that such a threshold exists and some people in society are surpassing it.
DayZ is another one because there is no in-game GPS. You have to use maps and compasses to figure your route and many people can spot an exact area on the massive map by a picture of a bush
"Video gaming, but not reliance on GPS, is associated with spatial navigation" paper shows there was a significant association between self-reported weekly hours of video gaming and wayfinding performance.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027249442...
Tested with Sea Hero Quest
1. Those with spatial reasoning are less likely to develop Alzheimers
2. Ambo and Taxi drivers are less likely (for some reason) to develop Alzheimers AND their work leads them to develop good spatial reasoning.
Sorry if I am misunderstanding you.
1. Ambo and Taxi drivers are vastly more likely than the general population to die in a collision before Alzheimers gets to them. 2. Even if you control out collisions, driving an Ambo and Taxi requires enough more memory and cognitive functioning to survive that people with early Alzheimer symptoms are significantly more likely to die in a collision, meaning you've controlled out a good chunk of ALzheimer victims in the process.
Taxi drivers were exposed to a wide variety of people who they conversed with, became aware of Alzheimer's symptoms and treatments and sought help early.
Off the top of my head.
And try to control with so many other non-transport occupations like nurses, therapists, hairdressers, air-traffic controllers, etc.
Ironically, the transport aspect reminds me of a prior correlation I read about for truck drivers and higher rates of colon cancer. There were speculative theories as to whether it was from the hours sitting or something like the chronic vibration.
So spatial navigational ability is another risk factor/biomarker (along with blood pressure, smoking etc)
The problems arrizing from alzheimers are so problematic, that the cabdrivers / ambulance drivers drive themselves to death before they enter the stats as alzheimers patients?
A bit like the famous bullet holes in planes from ww2