Eleanor Maguire, a cognitive neuroscientist whose analysis on the human hippocampus — particularly these belonging to London taxi drivers — reworked 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 dying, at a hospice facility, was confirmed by Cathy Value, her colleague on the U.C.L. Queen Sq. Institute of Neurology. Dr. Maguire was recognized with spinal most cancers in 2022 and had just 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 attempting to unravel a chilly case.
An early pioneer of utilizing useful magnetic resonance imaging (f.M.R.I.) on residing topics, Dr. Maguire was in a position to look inside human brains as they processed data. Her research revealed that the hippocampus can develop, and that reminiscence shouldn’t be a replay of the previous however quite an energetic 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 earth 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 feel she additionally gave us vital 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 came across “The Information,” a unusual movie about potential London taxi drivers memorizing town’s 25,000 streets to arrange for a three-year-long sequence of licensing exams.
Dr. Maguire, who stated she hardly ever 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 instructed The Every day Telegraph. “I puzzled, ‘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 varied locations in London.
The outcomes, revealed in 1997, confirmed that blood move in the proper hippocampus elevated sharply because the drivers described their routes — that means that particular space of the mind performed a key position in spatial navigation.
However that didn’t clear up the thriller of why the taxi drivers had been so good at their jobs.
Dr. Maguire stored 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 had been considerably bigger relative to these of management topics,” she wrote in Proceedings of the Nationwide Academy of Sciences. And the dimensions, she discovered, correlated with the size of a cabby’s profession: The longer the cabby had pushed, the larger the hippocampus.
Dr. Maguire’s examine, revealed in March 2000, generated headlines all over the world 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, instructed the BBC. “It makes you marvel what occurred to the remainder of it.”
Dr. Maguire puzzled, 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 had been set quite than navigated from reminiscence — didn’t develop. One other confirmed that potential taxi drivers who failed their exams didn’t achieve any hippocampus quantity within the course of.
The implications had been hanging: 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 often known as the “reminiscence palace.”
This method includes visualizing a big home and assigning a person reminiscence to a specific room. Mentally strolling via the home fires up the hippocampus, eliciting the memorized data. Dr. Maguire studied reminiscence athletes — individuals who practice 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 nearly unchanged type.”
However recalling data was solely half the story.
In finding out sufferers with injury to the hippocampus, together with these with amnesia, Dr. Maguire discovered that they couldn’t visualize or navigate future eventualities. One taxi driver, for example, struggled to make his means via busy London streets in a virtual-reality simulation. Different amnesiacs couldn’t think about an upcoming Christmas occasion or a visit to the seaside.
“As a substitute of visualizing a single scene of their thoughts, reminiscent of a crowded seaside full of sunbathers, the sufferers reported seeing only a assortment of disjointed photographs, reminiscent of sand, water, individuals and seaside 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 e book “Uncharted: The best way to Navigate the Future” (2020). “You might want to 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 reminiscences of the previous.”
Eleanor Anne Maguire was born on March 27, 1970, in Dublin. Her father, Paddy Maguire, was a manufacturing unit 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 instructed the journal Present Biology in 2012. “He embodied a lot of what attracted me to science. He was inquisitive, logical, trustworthy, 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 vitality and pleasure her pal and longtime colleague generated on the lab, recalling that Dr. Maguire’s mom had known as nightly to remind her daughter to go dwelling.
“It wasn’t only a job,” Dr. Value stated. “It consumed us, day and evening.”
There was a way that they had been onto one thing large.
“We had been among the many first to make use of cutting-edge know-how to look contained in the wholesome, residing human mind and witness its capabilities in motion,” Dr. Value stated. “It was an exhilarating and transformative time in neuroscience, and Eleanor’s curiosity and creativity had been instrumental to quite a few discoveries.”
