Eleanor Maguire, a cognitive nerve scientist who transformed his search for human hippocampus – especially those belonging to taxi drivers in London – understood the understanding of memory, and revealed that the main structure in the brain can be enhanced like muscles, on January 4 in London. It was 54.
Her death was confirmed in an analgesic facility Cathy PriceHer colleague at the UCL Queen Square Institute for Neuroscience. Dr. Maguire was diagnosed with spine cancer in 2022, and pneumonia was recently developed.
Work for 30 years in a coherent small laboratory, Dr. Maguire obsessed on Hippocampus -Memory Memory in the shape of the sea horse in the depth of the brain-Like an accurate investigator, there is no relentlessness in it trying to solve a cold tray.
Dr. Maguir was able to use functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) on living topics, and Dr. Maguir was able to look into human brains during their treatment. Her studies have revealed that the hippocampus can grow, and that memory is not like to restore the past, but it is an active restoration process that constitutes how people imagine future.
“She was absolutely one of the main researchers in her generation in the world on memory,” Chris FreithIn an interview, Fakhri Professor of Nervous Psychology said in an interview. “I changed our understanding of memory, and I think it also gave us important new ways to study it.”
In 1995, while a post -doctoral colleague at Dr. Freith Laboratory was watching television one night when she stumbled “Knowledge”, “ A strange film about potential taxi drivers in London, they keep the city’s 25,000 street to prepare for a three -year series of licensing tests.
Dr. Magir, who said she was rarely leading because she was afraid of reaching her destination, was fascinated. “I am very horrific to find my way,” she said once to the Daily Telegraph. “I wondered, how are some people very good and I am very terrible?”
In the first series of studies, Dr. Maguire and her colleagues surveyed the brains of taxi drivers, with their interrogation of the shortest roads among different destinations in London.
Results, Published In 1997, it showed that blood flow in the right hippocampus increased sharply as drivers described their methods – which means that the specified brain area played a major role in spatial mobility.
But this did not solve the reason why taxi drivers were good in their jobs.
Dr. Maguir continued to drill. Using MRI machines, it measured different areas in the brains of 16 drivers, and compared their dimensions with those in the brains of people who were not taxi drivers.
“The rear hinter of taxi drivers was much larger than people who enjoyed control,” she books In the facts of the National Academy of Science. And I found that the size is linked to the length of the taxi driver’s march: the longer the taxi driving, the greater the hippocampus.
A study of Dr. Maguire, published in March 2000, was born with headlines around the world and turned taxi drivers into London into unbearable scientific stars.
“I have never noticed part of my mind,” David Cohen, a member of the London taxi club, London, He said BBC. “It makes you wonder what happened to the rest of that.”
Dr. Maguir also asked: Why (and how) the hippocampus grew?
I followed other studies. One of them showed that the hippocampus is one of the bus drivers – whose roads were set instead of moving from memory – did not grow. Another showed that potential taxi drivers who failed in their tests did not gain any hippocampus in this process.
The amazing effects were striking: the main structure in the brain governed memory and spatial navigation flexible.
In a rotating way, the results of Dr. Maguire revealed the scientific foundations of the old Roman “Loci method”, a motivation trick also known as “Palace of Memory”.
This technique includes the perception of a large house and the appointment of individual memory for a specific room. Mental walking at home shoots the hippocampus, which led to the deduction of the preserved information. Dr. Maguir He studied memory athletes – People who train their brains to save huge amounts of information quickly – who used This methodAnd note that its effectiveness “is reflected in its continuous use for two and a half thousand years in a form almost that has not changed.”
But calling the information was only half of the story.
When studying patients who suffer from hippocampus, including those with memory loss, Dr. Maguir found that they could not imagine or move future scenarios. For example, a taxi driver struggled to make his way through the crowded streets of London in a virtual realistic simulation. Other memory ideas were unable to imagine the next Christmas party or a journey to the beach.
“Instead of envisioning one scene in their minds, such as a crowded beach full of sun, patients reported to see just a group of broken images, such as sand, water, people and beach towels,” The Journal Science News I mentioned In 2009.
It turns out that the hippocampus connects excerpts from information to build scenes from the past – and the future.
“The bottom line of the brain is future planning,” said Dr. Maguire as saying in the Margaret Hevrannan book. “Unchaarted: How to Mobility in the Future” (2020). “You need to stay and think about what happened when I was the last time here, is there a frightening monster that will come out and eat me? We create models from the future by employing our memories about the past.”
Elianor Ann Maguire was born on March 27, 1970, in Dublin. Her father, Badi Maguire, was a factory worker. Her mother, Ann Maguire, was a receptionist.
I grew up, Elianor was obsessed with “Star Trek”.
“He was the first imaginative scientific hero – Spoke, the science officer at the mouth institution. He was curious, logical, sincere, accurate, calm, not known for fear in the face of the unknown and the innovative and not afraid of risk.” .
She graduated from Dublin University College in 1990 with a certificate in psychology, and she returned to earn a doctorate there after obtaining a master’s degree from Swansea University College (Swansea University now).
Dr. Magir joined the college at the University of London in 1995 and never left.
She has survived by her parents. Her brother, Diklan, died in 2019, also from cancer.
At the service of Dr. Maguire Memorial, Dr. Price talked about the energy and excitement of her friend and colleague for a long time in the laboratory, noting that the mother of Dr. Maguire called at night to remind her daughter to return home.
“It was not just a job,” said Dr. Price. “We consumed, day and night.”
There was a feeling that they were a big thing.
“We were one of the first to use the advanced technology of the counterpart in the healthy human brain, and witness its functions at work,” said Dr. Price. “It was a pleasant time and a transformation in neuroscience, and Eleanor’s curiosity and creativity was effective for many discoveries.”
