Research on the human hippocampus, particularly cognitive neuroscientist Eleanor Maguire, who belongs to taxi drivers in London, has changed the understanding of memory and revealed that key brain structures can strengthen like muscles. She was 54 years old.
Her death at the hospice facility was confirmed by a colleague at the UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology. Dr. Maguire was diagnosed with spinal cancer in 2022 and recently developed pneumonia.
After working in a small, close-up lab for 30 years, Dr. Maguire became obsessed with the hippocampus, a ring-shaped engine of memory deep inside his brain.
An early pioneer using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) on living subjects, Dr. Maguire was able to see the human brain when processing information. Her research revealed that the hippocampus could grow, and that memory is not a replay of the past, but an active reconstruction process that shapes the way people imagine the future.
“She was one of the leading researchers of her generation in the world of memory,” said Chris Fris, professor emeritus of neuropsychology at the University of London, in an interview. “She has changed our understanding of memories, and I think she has also given us an important new way to study it.”
In 1995, she was a postdoctoral researcher in Dr. Fris' lab, and one night she was watching TV when she stumbled over “knowledge.” – A series of license tests.
Dr. Maguire said he rarely drove because he was afraid he would not reach his destination, but was fascinated. “I'm absolutely terrified of finding my way,” she once told the Daily Telegraph. “Why are you so bloody, am I so bad?”
In the first of a series of studies, Dr. Maguire and her colleagues scanned the brains of taxi drivers while quizzing about the shortest routes between various London destinations.
Results published in 1997 showed that blood flow in the right hippocampus suddenly increased as drivers explained the route. This means that certain areas of the brain played an important role in spatial navigation.
But it didn't solve the mystery of why taxi drivers were so good at their jobs.
Dr. Maguire continued to dig. Using an MRI machine, she measured different regions of the brains of 16 drivers and compared the brain dimensions of people who were not taxi drivers.
“The posterior hippocampus of taxi drivers was significantly larger than that of control subjects,” she wrote in the minutes of the National Academy of Sciences. They then found that size correlated with the length of the cabby carrier. The more the cabbie was driving, the bigger the hippocampus.
Published in March 2000, Dr. Maguire's research has generated headlines around the world, turning London taxi drivers into an unlikely scientific star.
“I didn't notice that some of my brain was growing,” David Cohen, a member of the London Cab Driver Club, told the BBC. “It makes you wonder what happened to the rest of it.”
Dr. Maguire was also wondering. Why did their hippocampus grow?
She followed other studies. Some showed that the bus driver's hippocampus was routed rather than being navigated from memory – but not growing. Another showed that future taxi drivers who failed tests did not acquire hippocampal volume in the process.
The meaning was impressive. The critical structures and spatial navigation of the brain that governed memory were adaptable.
On a detour, Dr. Maguire's discoveries revealed the scientific foundations of the ancient Roman “method of loci.”
This technique involves visualizing a large home and assigning individual memory to a specific room. As you walk mentally through the house, it fires the hippocampus and extracts the information you have remembered. Using this method, Dr. Maguire has studied people who train their brains to quickly store huge amounts of information, and their effectiveness is “continuous for 2.5 thousand years in a form that is virtually unchanged.” We observed that it is reflected in the use of the product.
But recalling the information was only half the story.
When studying patients with hippocampal damage, including those with amnesia, Dr. Maguire discovered that he was unable to visualize or navigate future scenarios. For example, one taxi driver struggled to get through busy London streets with virtual reality simulations. Other amnesia could not imagine future Christmas parties or trips to the beach.
“Instead of visualizing a single scene in your mind, such as a crowded beach filled with sunbathing, patients reported that they only saw a collection of scattered images, such as sand, water, people, beach towels, etc. ”, Journal Science News reported in 2009. .
The hippocampus combines snippets of information to construct scenes from the past and future.
“The whole point of the brain is planning for the future,” Dr. Maguire was quoted as saying in Margaret Heffernan's book, Uncharted: How to Navate the Future (2020). “You need to survive and think about what happened when I was last here. Are there any scary monsters that come out and eat me? By recruiting memories of the past, we'll be able to model the future. Create a
Eleanor Ann Maguire was born in Dublin on March 27, 1970. Her father, Paddy Maguire, was a factory worker. Her mother, Anne Maguire, was a receptionist.
Growing up, Eleanor became obsessed with Star Trek.
“My first scientific hero was fictional. I'm a science officer at Spock, Starship Enterprises,” she told Journal Current Biology in 2012. He was curious, logical, honest, meticulous, calm, fearless, unknown, innovative, and not afraid to take risks. ”
She graduated from Dublin University with a degree in psychology in 1990 and after completing her master's degree from Swansea University (now Swansea University), she returned to earn her PhD there.
Dr. Maguire joined the faculty at University College London in 1995 and never left.
She is survived by her parents. Her brother, Declan, also died of cancer in 2019.
During Dr. Maguire's service, Dr. Price talks about the energy and excitement her friends and longtime colleagues have created in the lab, and Dr. Maguire's mother calls every night to remind her daughter that she is heading home. I remembered what I had put it on.
“It wasn't just a job,” Dr. Price said. “It consumed us day and night.”
There was a sense that they were in something big.
“We were the first to use cutting-edge technology to peer into the brains of healthy, living human beings and witness functioning during action,” Dr. Price said. “It was an exhilarating and transformative time in neuroscience, and Eleanor's curiosity and creativity helped him discover many things.”
