Eleanor Maguire, a memory expert who studied London taxi, dies at 54

Eleanor Maguire, a cognitive neuronaukla, whose research on human hippocampus – especially those belonging to London taxi drivers – transformed the understanding of memory, revealing that the key structure in the brain can be strengthened like a muscle, died on January 4 in London. She was 54 years senior.

Her death in the hospice institution was confirmed by Cathy PriceHer colleague from the UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology. Dr. Maguire was diagnosed with spine cancer in 2022 and recently developed pneumonia.

Working for 30 years in a compact, compact laboratory, Dr. Maguire is obsessed with a hippocampus-shaped meat in the shape of a sea horse-shaped in the brain-how scrupulous, relentless detective trying to solve the cool box.

Early pioneer of the functional imaging of magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) on live topics, Dr. Maguire was able to look into the human brains during information processing. Her research has shown that the hippocampus may grow, and memory is not a replay of the past, but a rather busy reconstruction process that shapes the way people imagine the future.

“She was absolutely one of the leading researchers of her generation in the world in memory”, ” Chris FrithA retired professor of neuropsychology at the University College London, in an interview. “She changed our understanding of memory and I think that she also gave us vital novel ways of studying her.”

In 1995 “Knowledge” A strange film about potential London taxi drivers remembering 25,000 city streets to prepare for a three -year series of license tests.

Dr. Maguire, who said she rarely went because she was afraid that she had never reached her destination, she was hypnotized. “I am absolutely terrified in finding a road,” Daily Telegraph once said. “I wondered:” How are some people so damn good and I’m so terrible? “

In the first series of studies, Dr. Maguire and her colleagues scanned the brains of taxi drivers, asking them about the shortest routes between different places in London.

Results, published In 1997, he showed that blood flow in the right hippocampus increased rapidly when the drivers described their routes – which means that a specific area of ​​the brain played a key role in spatial navigation.

But this did not solve the secret why taxi drivers were so good at their work.

Dr. Maguire kicked. Using MRI machines, she measured various regions in the brains of 16 drivers, comparing their dimensions with the dimensions of the brains of people who were not taxi drivers.

“The rear hippochamps of taxi were much larger in relation to control people,” she wrote in the National Academy of Sciences. And the size, she discovered, correlated with the length of Cabby’s career: the longer he led Cabby, the greater the hippocampus.

The study of Dr. Maguire, published in March 2000, generated headers around the world and transformed London taxi drivers into unexpected scientific stars.

“I have never noticed that part of my brain,” David Cohen, member of the London Cab Drivers Club, he said BBC. “It makes you wonder what happened to the rest.”

Dr. Maguire also wondered: why (and how) their hippocampi grew?

She continued other research. One showed that the hippocamples of bus drivers – whose routes were set, and did not navigate from memory – did not grow. Another showed that potential taxi drivers who did not pass the tests did not gain any hippocampus volume in this process.

The implications were striking: the key structure in the brain governing memory and spatial navigation was plastic.

In the roundabout of the discoveries of Dr. Maguire revealed the scientific foundations of the archaic Roman “methods of loci”, a trick of remembering also known as “Palace of Remembrance”.

This technique includes visualization of a enormous house and assigning individual memory to a specific room. A mental walk around the house fires a hippocampus, causing the remembered information. Dr. Maguire He studied memory athletes – people who train their brains to quickly remember huge amounts of information – who used this methodAnd he noticed that its effectiveness was “reflected in the further operate of in virtually unchanged form by two and a half thousands.

But recalling information was only half of the story.

By studying patients with hippocampus damage, including patients with amnesia, Dr. Maguire stated that they could not visualize or move future scenarios. For example, one taxi driver tried to cross the busy streets in London in a simulation of virtual reality. Other amnesia could not imagine the upcoming Christmas party or trip to the beach.

“Instead of visualizing one scene in their mind, such as a crowded beach filled with sunbathers, patients reported that he only sees a collection of detached photos such as sand, water, people and beach towels”, science news magazine Reported in 2009.

It turns out that the hippocampus binds fragments of information to build scenes from the past – and the future.

“The whole point of the brain is future planning”, Dr. Maguire was cited in the book Margaret Heffernan “Uncharted: How to move around the future” (2020). “You have to survive and think about what happened when I was here, is there a terrifying monster that will come out and eat me? We create models of the future, recruiting our memories of the past. “

Eleanor Anne Maguire was born on March 27, 1970 in Dublin. Her father, Paddy Maguire, was a factory worker. Her mother, Anne Maguire, was a receptionist.

Growing up, Eleanor was obsessed with “Star Trek”.

“My first scientific hero was fiction – SPOCK, a science officer at Starship Enterprise,” said The Journal Current Biology in 2012. “He jumped so much of what attracted me to study. He was inquisitive, logical, candid, careful, composed, fearless in the face of an unknown, creative and is not afraid of taking risks. “

She graduated from the University College Dublin in 1990 with a psychology diploma and returned there to get a doctorate after receiving a master’s degree at the University College of Swansea (currently the University of Swansea).

Dr. Maguire joined the faculty at the University College London in 1995 and never left.

Her parents survived her. Her brother Declan died in 2019, also cancer.

During the funeral service, Dr. Maguire Dr. Price spoke about the energy and emotions that her friend and longtime colleagues generated in the laboratory, remembering that Mother Dr. Maguire rang Nightly to remind her daughter to come home.

“It wasn’t just a job,” said Dr. Price. “We were consumed by day and night.”

The feeling that they had something massive.

“We were one of the first to operate the latest technology to look into a vigorous, living human brain and witness its function in action,” said Dr. Price. “It was an exhilarating and transformational time in Neuronauka, and Eleanor curiosity and creativity contributed to numerous discoveries.”