lVacations are precious to us. They allow us, among other things, to rest, sleep, reduce the stress linked to our often very active lives, escape from our obligations, change pace, discover new horizons or new cultures, dream, break the barrier. routine, enjoy new experiences, spend time with those we love. The list of its benefits seems endless…
Just planning or preparing for your future vacation would activate the reward system and release dopamine, the pleasure hormone. But for many of us, it’s been at least a month since we returned to work and we no longer hear the sound of the waves, the seagulls or the wind through the trees…
So how to get motivated again? Just remembering that work is good for our brains! The proof? Let’s start with these well-known studies carried out on London taxi drivers. By subjecting taxi drivers to a neuroimaging test, Eleanor Maguire and her colleagues at the Institute of Neurology in London demonstrated for the first time in 2000 that remembering trips and city streets by heart activated the hippocampus, this region known for its involvement in memory. They also showed that it is the hippocampus of the right hemisphere that is activated specifically for spatial memory.
brain plasticity
Then, in another study published in 1997, they showed that the size of the hippocampus of taxi drivers was larger than that of control subjects. Even more surprising is that the size of this brain region increases with the number of years of taxi drivers’ practice. The practice of navigating in the city not only activates the hippocampus, but this region changes depending on the driver’s experience.
This is a first example of the development of our brain through work, but it does not stop there and does not only concern taxi drivers. The same type of brain plasticity has been found in… acupuncturists! Minghao Dong and his colleagues from different Chinese universities found, in 2013, greater volumes of gray matter in the primary somatosensory cortex that controls the dominant hand of acupuncturists (the one that handles the needles) compared to the same brain region of subjects who practice. another professional. activity. As in the previous study, the more experienced the acupuncturist, the more developed this area of the brain was.
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