In 2000, a neuroscientist at University College London named Eleanor Maguire wanted to find out what effect, if any, all that driving around the  labyrinthine streets of London might have oncabbies' brains. When she brought sixteen taxi drivers into her lab and examined their brains in an MRI scanner, she found one surprising and important difference. The right posterior hippocampus, a part of the brain known to beinvolved in spatial navigation, was 7 percent larger than normal in the cabbies-a small but very significant difference. Maguire concluded that all of that way-finding around London had physically altered the gross structure of their brains. The moreyears a cabbie had been on the road, the more pronounced the effect.The brain is a mutable organ, capable-within limits-of reorganizing itself and readapting to new kinds of sensory input, a phenomenon known asneuroplasticity. It had long been thought that the adult brain was incapable of spawning new neurons-that while learning caused synapses to rearrange themselves and new links between brain cells to form, the brain's basic anatomical structurewas more or less static. Maguire's study suggested the old inherited wisdom was simply not true.After her groundbreaking study of London cabbies, Maguire decided to turn her attention to mental athletes. She teamed up with ElizabethValentine and John Wilding, authors of the academic monograph Superior Memory, to study ten individuals who had finished near the top of the World Memory Championship. They wanted to find out if the memorizers' brains were-like the Londoncabbies'-structurally different from the rest of ours, or if they were somehow just making better use of memory abilities that we all possess.The researchers put both the mental athletes and a group of matched control subjects into MRI scanners  and asked them to memorize three-digit numbers, black-and-white photographs of people's faces, and magnified images of snowflakes, while their brains were being scanned. Maguire and her team thought it was possible that they might discover anatomical 45 differences in the brains of the memory champs, evidence that their brains had somehow reorganized themselves in the process of doing all that intensive remembering. But when the researchers reviewed the imaging data, not a single significant structural50 difference turned up. The brains of the mental athletes appeared to be indistinguishable from those of the control subjects. What's more, on every single test of general cognitive ability, the mental athletes' scores came back well within the normal range. The 55 memory champs weren't smarter, and they didn't have special brains.But there was one telling difference between the brains of the mental athletes and the control subjects: When the researchers looked at which parts of the 60 brain were lighting up when the mental athletes were memorizing, they found that they were activating entirely different circuitry. According to the functional MRIs [fMRIs], regions of the brain that were less active in the control subjects seemed to be 65 working in overdrive for the mental athletes.Surprisingly, when the mental athletes were learning new information, they were engaging several regions of the brain known to be involved in two specific tasks: visual memory and spatial70 navigation, including the same right posterior hippocampal region that the London cabbies had enlarged with all their daily way-finding. At first glance, this wouldn't seem to make any sense. Why would mental athletes be conjuring images in 75 their mind's eye when they were trying to learn three-digit numbers? Why should they be navigating like London cabbies when they're supposed to be remembering the shapes of snowflakes?Maguire and her team asked the mental athletes 80 to describe exactly what was going through their minds as they memorized. The mental athletes said they were consciously converting the information they were being asked to memorize into images, and distributing those images along familiar spatial85 journeys. They weren't doing this automatically, or because it was an inborn talent they'd nurtured since childhood. Rather, the unexpected patterns of neural activity that Maguire's fMRIs turned up were the result of training and practiceQ: Which question was Maguire's study of mental athletes primarily intended to answer? Answer Choices: (A)Does the act of memorization make use of different brain structures than does the act of navigation? (B)Do mental athletes inherit their unusual brain structures, or do the structures develop as a result of specific activities? (C)Does heightened memorization ability reflect abnormal brain structure or an unusual use of normal brain structure? (D)What is the relationship between general cognitive ability and the unusual brain structures of mental athletes?
A: Among A through D, the answer is
(A)Does the act of memorization make use of different brain structures than does the act of navigation?
(B)Do mental athletes inherit their unusual brain structures, or do the structures develop as a result of specific activities?
(C)Does heightened memorization ability reflect abnormal brain structure or an unusual use of normal brain structure?
(D)What is the relationship between general cognitive ability and the unusual brain structures of mental athletes?
Answer: 2