Eleanor Maguire, a cognitive neuroscientist whose analysis on the human hippocampus — particularly these belonging to London taxi drivers — remodeled the understanding of reminiscence, revealing {that a} key construction within the mind might be strengthened like a muscle, died on Jan. 4 in London. She was 54.
Her loss of life, at a hospice facility, was confirmed by Cathy Value, her colleague on the U.C.L. Queen Sq. Institute of Neurology. Dr. Maguire was identified with spinal most cancers in 2022 and had lately developed pneumonia.
Working for 30 years in a small, tight-knit lab, Dr. Maguire obsessed over the hippocampus — a seahorse-shaped engine of reminiscence deep within the mind — like a meticulous, relentless detective making an attempt to resolve a chilly case.
An early pioneer of utilizing practical magnetic resonance imaging (f.M.R.I.) on residing topics, Dr. Maguire was capable of look inside human brains as they processed info. Her research revealed that the hippocampus can develop, and that reminiscence just isn’t a replay of the previous however relatively an lively reconstructive course of that shapes how individuals think about the long run.
“She was completely one of many main researchers of her technology on the planet on reminiscence,” Chris Frith, an emeritus professor of neuropsychology at College School London, stated in an interview. “She modified our understanding of reminiscence, and I believe she additionally gave us necessary new methods of finding out it.”
In 1995, whereas she was a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Frith’s lab, she was watching tv one night when she found “The Information,” a unusual movie about potential London taxi drivers memorizing town’s 25,000 streets to organize for a three-year-long sequence of licensing checks.
Dr. Maguire, who stated she not often drove as a result of she feared by no means arriving at her vacation spot, was mesmerized. “I’m completely appalling at discovering my means round,” she as soon as informed The Each day Telegraph. “I questioned, ‘How are some individuals so bloody good and I’m so horrible?’”
Within the first of a sequence of research, Dr. Maguire and her colleagues scanned the brains of taxi drivers whereas quizzing them concerning the shortest routes between numerous locations in London.
The outcomes, printed in 1997, confirmed that blood movement in the proper hippocampus elevated sharply because the drivers described their routes — which means that particular space of the mind performed a key function in spatial navigation.
However that didn’t clear up the thriller of why the taxi drivers have been so good at their jobs.
Dr. Maguire saved digging. Utilizing M.R.I. machines, she measured totally different areas within the brains of 16 drivers, evaluating their dimensions with these within the brains of people that weren’t taxi drivers.
“The posterior hippocampi of taxi drivers have been considerably bigger relative to these of management topics,” she wrote in Proceedings of the Nationwide Academy of Sciences. And the scale, she discovered, correlated with the size of a cabby’s profession: The longer the cabby had pushed, the larger the hippocampus.
Dr. Maguire’s research, printed in March 2000, generated headlines world wide and turned London taxi drivers into unlikely scientific stars.
“I by no means observed a part of my mind rising,” David Cohen, a member of the London Cab Drivers Membership, informed the BBC. “It makes you surprise what occurred to the remainder of it.”
Dr. Maguire questioned, too: Why (and the way) did their hippocampi develop?
She adopted up with different research. One confirmed that the hippocampi of bus drivers — whose routes have been set relatively than navigated from reminiscence — didn’t develop. One other confirmed that potential taxi drivers who failed their checks didn’t acquire any hippocampus quantity within the course of.
The implications have been placing: The important thing construction within the mind governing reminiscence and spatial navigation was malleable.
In a roundabout means, Dr. Maguire’s findings revealed the scientific underpinnings of the traditional Roman “technique of loci,” a memorization trick also called the “reminiscence palace.”
This system entails visualizing a big home and assigning a person reminiscence to a selected room. Mentally strolling by means of the home fires up the hippocampus, eliciting the memorized info. Dr. Maguire studied reminiscence athletes — individuals who prepare their brains to memorize huge quantities of knowledge rapidly — who used this technique, and noticed that its effectiveness was “mirrored in its continued use over two and a half millennia in just about unchanged kind.”
However recalling info was solely half the story.
In finding out sufferers with harm to the hippocampus, together with these with amnesia, Dr. Maguire discovered that they couldn’t visualize or navigate future eventualities. One taxi driver, as an illustration, struggled to make his means by means of busy London streets in a virtual-reality simulation. Different amnesiacs couldn’t think about an upcoming Christmas celebration or a visit to the seashore.
“As an alternative of visualizing a single scene of their thoughts, similar to a crowded seashore crammed with sunbathers, the sufferers reported seeing only a assortment of disjointed photographs, similar to sand, water, individuals and seashore towels,” the journal Science Information reported in 2009.
The hippocampus, it seems, binds snippets of knowledge to assemble scenes from the previous — and the long run.
“The entire level of the mind is future planning,” Dr. Maguire was quoted as saying in Margaret Heffernan’s ebook “Uncharted: The right way to Navigate the Future” (2020). “You should survive and take into consideration what occurred after I was final right here, is there a scary monster that may come out and eat me? We create fashions of the long run by recruiting our recollections of the previous.”
Eleanor Anne Maguire was born on March 27, 1970, in Dublin. Her father, Paddy Maguire, was a manufacturing facility employee. Her mom, Anne Maguire, was a receptionist.
Rising up, Eleanor was obsessive about “Star Trek.”
“My first scientific hero was fictional — Spock, science officer on the Starship Enterprise,” she informed the journal Present Biology in 2012. “He embodied a lot of what attracted me to science. He was inquisitive, logical, sincere, meticulous, calm, fearless in dealing with the unknown, modern and unafraid of taking dangers.”
She graduated from College School Dublin in 1990 with a level in psychology, and returned to earn her doctorate there after receiving a grasp’s diploma from the College School of Swansea (now Swansea College).
Dr. Maguire joined the school at College School London in 1995 and by no means left.
She is survived by her mother and father. Her brother, Declan, died in 2019, additionally of most cancers.
At Dr. Maguire’s memorial service, Dr. Value spoke concerning the power and pleasure her good friend and longtime colleague generated on the lab, recalling that Dr. Maguire’s mom had referred to as nightly to remind her daughter to go residence.
“It wasn’t only a job,” Dr. Value stated. “It consumed us, day and evening.”
There was a way that they have been onto one thing massive.
“We have been among the many first to make use of cutting-edge know-how to see contained in the wholesome, residing human mind and witness its features in motion,” Dr. Value stated. “It was an exhilarating and transformative time in neuroscience, and Eleanor’s curiosity and creativity have been instrumental to quite a few discoveries.”
