In 2000, the cognitive neuroscientist Eleanor Maguire printed the examine that may convey her worldwide fame. It confirmed {that a} mind area known as the posterior hippocampus was bigger in London taxi drivers who had acquired the Data – a psychological map of the British capital full with streets, routes and landmarks – than in individuals who lacked these navigational expertise. The longer the cabbie’s profession, the larger the posterior hippocampus.
Maguire, who has died aged 54 of most cancers, had joined the younger Practical Imaging Laboratory (FIL) at College School London (UCL) solely 5 years earlier. Her gorgeous demonstration of the mind’s plasticity was instantly plastered over newspapers’ entrance pages. It gained her an Ig Nobel prize, awarded for discoveries that “make individuals snigger, then assume”, and landed her uncomfortably on a panel the place her work upstaged that of three Nobel laureates.
It additionally launched a lifelong wariness of the press. “I typically really feel a bit like an ageing rock singer,” she instructed the journal Present Biology in 2012. “I’m singing new songs, however the media solely wish to hear the outdated tunes.”
The brand new songs, and the outdated tunes, all fitted seamlessly right into a programme of enquiry that she had launched into as a psychology undergraduate at College School Dublin within the Nineteen Eighties. Navigationally challenged herself, she got down to perceive how individuals negotiate and recollect their paths by the world, and what occurs when this capability deserts them – because it did in some sufferers who had undergone mind surgical procedure for intractable epilepsy.
Within the early 90s, when she was working with such sufferers, she got here throughout a paper that the psychologists John O’Keefe and Lynn Nadel had printed over a decade earlier, by which they proposed – contentiously on the time – that the hippocampus was key to the psychological illustration of area. A brand new scientific world opened as much as Maguire: “the wondrous world of the hippocampus,” as she put it, “with its beautiful anatomy and physiology”.
The position of the hippocampus, not solely in navigation, but in addition in episodic or private reminiscence, and in creativeness, grew to become the main target of her analysis. The unifying theme was scene building concept, the concept the hippocampus consistently builds and updates spatially coherent scenes that signify and anticipate the altering surroundings utilizing data past what is straight away out there to the senses.
This she examined by meticulous research of amnesic sufferers and wholesome individuals, usually utilizing cutting-edge applied sciences. Combining digital actuality and purposeful magnetic resonance imaging, for instance, she peered inside individuals’s brains as they negotiated a fictional city known as FILbury, full with canine parks, buskers and a misplaced man asking his manner.
“Eleanor demonstrated that reminiscence is the constructing block of creativeness, by her shocking discovering that individuals who have been amnesic from harm to their hippocampus additionally couldn’t assemble new imagined experiences of their thoughts’s eye,” mentioned her former colleague Geraint Rees.
She acknowledged her luck to find herself in London as purposeful neuroimaging was taking off and the medical neuroscientist Richard Frackowiak was establishing the FIL, however fortune favours the ready thoughts and she or he would ultimately be lauded by those that had proven her the best way. “Her work, beginning with the taxi drivers, actually linked the human hippocampus to area in addition to reminiscence,” says Nadel, who is predicated on the College of Arizona. “Nearly every little thing she did broke new floor.”
Maguire was born in Dublin, the youthful of two youngsters of Anne, a receptionist, and Paddy, a manufacturing facility employee. Conscientious even in major college, she usually needed to be chivvied away from her homework to eat dinner, and her nascent style for science manifested in a love of archaeology, astronomy and biology. Her dad and mom dominated out the primary on the grounds that it couldn’t help a dwelling, and she or he ultimately dismissed the second with attribute wit: “In Dublin within the late Nineteen Eighties, learning astronomy appeared like pie within the sky.” That left biology, and after a grasp’s in neuropsychology at Swansea College and a PhD again at UCD, she joined the FIL.
It was an thrilling time, and she or he knew she had discovered an ecosystem by which she might thrive. Colleagues admired her deceptively easy experimental designs, and earlier than lengthy she was operating her personal lab. She remained on the FIL for the remainder of her profession, appointed professor of cognitive neuroscience at UCL in 2007. “It was her residence,” mentioned her pal and former FIL director Cathy Value.
Within the little downtime she accorded herself, she gravitated to the stands of Selhurst Park in south London, the house floor of Crystal Palace – the soccer membership she began supporting in her youth as a result of, in accordance with a former colleague, Tom Miller, its identify sounded “magical and regal”.
Her devotion to the FIL and to her college students by no means wavered. These included Sir Demis Hassabis, the primary creator on their 2007 paper about creativeness in amnesic sufferers, who went on to co-found the unreal intelligence start-up DeepMind, purchased by Google in 2014, and to win a Nobel prize.
After she was recognized with bone most cancers in 2022, Maguire focused on guiding her final doctoral college students to success. It was a supply of delight for her, Value mentioned, when Hassabis visited her two days earlier than she died, bringing his Nobel medal.
One other was a much-reported examine within the British Medical Journal a number of weeks earlier, exhibiting that taxi drivers have been considerably protected in opposition to dementia. By the point of her dying, she could have discovered some measure of peace with the media who had so formed, or distorted, her profession.
She was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 2016 and of the British Academy in 2018.
Maguire is survived by her dad and mom.
