Eleanor Maguire, a cognitive neuroscientist whose research on human hippocampus – especially those belonging to London taxi drivers – transformed understanding of memory, revealing that a basic structure in the brain can be strengthened as a muscle on January 4th in London . He was 54 years old.
Her death, in a hospital unit, was confirmed by Cathy Price, her colleague at the UCL Neurology Institute of Neurology. Dr. Maguire was diagnosed with spine cancer in 2022 and recently developed pneumonia.
Workers for 30 years in a small, tight laboratory, Dr. Maguire obsessed on the hippocampus-an engine in the shape of a moon of memory deep in the brain-like a meticulous, relentless detective trying to solve a cold case.
A first pioneer of the use of Magnetic Coordination Imaging (FMRI) on live issues, Dr. Maguire was able to look through human brains as information was processed. Her studies have revealed that the hippocampus can be developed and that memory is not a repetition of the past but rather an active reconstructive 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 Frith, a neuropsychology professor at University College London, said in an interview. “It changes our understanding of memory and I think it also gave us important new ways of studying.”
In 1995, while he was a postdoctoral partner in Dr. Frith, watched a TV one night when he stumbled upon “Knowledge”, a peculiar film about future London taxi drivers who memorize the city’s 25,000 streets to prepare for three years -a general series of licensing tests.
Dr. Maguire, who said that he rarely led to because he was afraid that she had never reached her destination, was fascinated. “I am absolutely scary to find my way around me,” he once told the Daily Telegraph. “I wondered,“ How are some people so bloody and I’m so terrible? ”
In the first of a series of studies, Dr. Maguire and her colleagues scanned the brains of taxi drivers, while leaning for the shortest routes between various destinations in London.
The results, published in 1997, showed that the blood flow to the right hippocampus increased sharply as drivers describe their routes – which means that the particular brain area played a key role in spatial navigation.
But this does not solve his mystery because taxi drivers were so good at their jobs.
Dr. Maguire continued to dig. Using magnetic resonance machines, he measured different areas in the brains of 16 drivers, comparing their dimensions with those of the brain of people who were not taxi drivers.
“The rear hippocampus of taxi drivers was significantly larger than those of control issues,” he wrote in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And the size, he found, was associated with the length of a cabin’s career: the more the cabin had led, the longer the hippocampus.
The study of Dr. Maguire, published in March 2000, created headlines around the world and turned into London taxi drivers into amazing scientific stars.
“I never noticed part of my brain to grow,” said David Cohen, a member of the London Cab Drivers Club, at the BBC. “Makes you wonder what happened to the rest.”
Dr. Maguire also wondered: why (and how) their hippocampus grew?
Attended other studies. Someone showed that the hippocampus of bus drivers – whose routes were placed instead of navigating the memory – did not grow up. Another showed that future taxi drivers who failed that their tests did not gain hippocampus volume in the process.
The consequences were striking: the basic structure in memory governing the brain and spatial navigation was supple.
In a circular intersection, the findings of Dr. Maguire revealed the scientific bases of the ancient Roman “method of places”, a trick of memoirs also known as “Memory Palace”.
This technique involves visualizing a large house and assigning an individual memory to a particular room. The mentally walking through the house burns the hippocampus, causing memorable information. Dr. Maguire studied memory athletes – people who train their minds to quickly memorize huge amounts of information – who used this method and observed that its efficiency “reflected in continued use of more than two and a half millennia”.
But recalling information was only half the story.
When studying patients with hippocampus damage, including those with amnesia, Dr. Maguire found that they could not visualize or browse future scenarios. A taxi driver, for example, struggled to make his way through the busy streets of London in a simulation of virtual reality. Other amnesians could not imagine an upcoming Christmas party or a beach trip.
“Instead of depicting a single scene in their minds, such as a beach full of solar struggles, patients said they saw only a collection of disconnected images such as sand, water, people and towels on the beach,” the beach said, ” The Journal Science News in 2009.
Hippocampus, proves, binds excerpts of information to build scenes from the past – and the future.
“The whole point of the brain is the future design,” Dr. Maguire said in her book Margaret Heffernan “Uncharted: How to browse the future” (2020). “You have to survive and think about what happened when I was the last here.
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 fantastic – Spock, science manager at Starship,” he told Current Biology in 2012. , fearless in dealing with the unknown, innovative and non -terrible risk. “
She graduated from Dublin University College in 1990 with a degree in Psychology and returned to win her doctorate there after receiving a Masters Degree from SWANSEA College (now Swansea University).
Dr. Maguire joined the School of London University College in 1995 and never left.
She has survived her parents. Her brother, Declan, died in 2019, also of cancer.
In the memorial of Dr. Maguire, Dr. Price talked about the energy and excitement that her boyfriend and her long -term colleague created in the lab, reminding that his mother Dr. Maguire had invited Nightly to remind her daughter to go home.
“It wasn’t just a job,” said Dr. Price. “He consumed us, day and night.”
There was a feeling that it was on something big.
“We were one of the first to use cutting -edge technology to look in the healthy, living human brain and watch its functions in action,” Dr. Price said. “It was an exciting and transformation of time in neuroscience, and Eleanor’s curiosity and creativity were decisive for many discoveries.”
