Born: March 27th, 1970
Died: January 4th, 2025
Eleanor Maguire, a cognitive neuroscientist whose research on the human hippocampus – especially those belonging to London taxi drivers – transformed the understanding of memory, revealing that a key structure in the brain can be strengthened like a muscle, has died at the age of 54 in London.
Working for 30 years in a small, tight-knit lab, Maguire obsessed over the hippocampus – a seahorse-shaped engine of memory deep in the brain – like a meticulous, relentless detective trying to solve a cold case. An early pioneer of using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) on living subjects, Maguire was able to look inside human brains as they processed information. Her studies revealed that the hippocampus can grow, and that memory is not a replay of the past but rather an active reconstructive process that shapes how people imagine the future.
“She was absolutely one of the leading researchers of her generation in the world on memory,” said Chris Frith, an emeritus professor of neuropsychology at University College London. “She changed our understanding of memory, and I think she also gave us important new ways of studying it.”
In 1995, while she was a postdoctoral fellow in Frith’s lab, Maguire was watching television one evening when she stumbled on The Knowledge, a quirky film about prospective London taxi drivers memorising the city’s 25,000 streets to prepare for a three-year-long series of licensing tests. Maguire, who said she rarely drove because she feared never arriving at her destination, was mesmerised. “I am absolutely appalling at finding my way around,” she once told The Daily Telegraph. “I wondered, ‘How are some people so bloody good and I am so terrible?’”
In the first of a series of studies, Maguire and her colleagues scanned the brains of taxi drivers while quizzing them about the shortest routes between various destinations in London.
The results, published in 1997, showed that blood flow in the right hippocampus increased sharply as the drivers described their routes – meaning that specific area of the brain played a key role in spatial navigation. But that didn’t solve the mystery of why the taxi drivers were so good at their jobs.
Maguire kept digging. Using MRI machines, she measured different regions in the brains of 16 drivers, comparing their dimensions with those in the brains of people who weren’t taxi drivers. “The posterior hippocampi of taxi drivers were significantly larger relative to those of control subjects,” she wrote in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And the size, she found, correlated with the length of a cabby’s career: The longer the cabby had driven, the bigger the hippocampus.
Maguire’s study, published in March 2000, generated headlines around the world and turned London taxi drivers into unlikely scientific stars. “I never noticed part of my brain growing,” David Cohen, a member of the London Cab Drivers Club, told the BBC. “It makes you wonder what happened to the rest of it.”
Maguire wondered, too: Why (and how) did their hippocampi grow?
She followed up with other studies. One showed that the hippocampi of bus drivers – whose routes were set rather than navigated from memory – didn’t grow. Another showed that prospective taxi drivers who failed their tests did not gain any hippocampus volume in the process.
The implications were striking: the key structure in the brain governing memory and spatial navigation was malleable.
In a roundabout way, Maguire’s findings revealed the scientific underpinnings of the ancient Roman “method of loci,” a memorisation trick also known as the “memory palace.” This technique involves visualising a large house and assigning an individual memory to a particular room. Mentally walking through the house fires up the hippocampus, eliciting the memorised information. Maguire studied memory athletes – people who train their brains to recall vast amounts of information quickly – who used this method, and observed that its effectiveness was “reflected in its continued use over two and a half millenniums in virtually unchanged form”.
Her taxi driver study, widely regarded as a stroke of creative genius, exemplifies her trailblazing discoveries and inspirational research. Famously, though a world authority on navigation she was notoriously poor at negotiating even familiar environments
— Prof Cathy Price
But recalling information was only half the story. In studying patients with damage to the hippocampus, including those with amnesia, Maguire found that they couldn’t visualise or navigate future scenarios. One taxi driver, for instance, struggled to make his way through busy London streets in a virtual-reality simulation. Other amnesiacs couldn’t imagine an upcoming Christmas party or a trip to the beach. “Instead of visualising a single scene in their mind, such as a crowded beach filled with sunbathers, the patients reported seeing just a collection of disjointed images, such as sand, water, people and beach towels,” the journal Science News reported in 2009.
The hippocampus, it turns out, binds snippets of information to construct scenes from the past – and the future.
“The whole point of the brain is future planning,” Maguire was quoted as saying in Margaret Heffernan’s book Uncharted: How to Navigate the Future (2020). “You need to survive and think about what happened when I was last here, is there a scary monster that will come out and eat me? We create models of the future by recruiting our memories of the past.”
Eleanor Anne Maguire was born on March 27th, 1970, in Dublin. Her father, Paddy Maguire, was a factory worker. Her mother, Anne Maguire, was a receptionist, who was an advocate of hard work and fond of the quoting Mark Twain: “Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.”
The young Eleanor was a hard worker even in primary school. Her first loves were archaeology, astronomy and biology. As she told Current Biology in 2012: “When it came to making choices for university, my parents ruled out archaeology as they felt I couldn’t make a decent living from it. In Dublin in the late 1980s, studying astronomy seemed like pie in the sky. So I quite happily plumped for a career in biology. Visits to the local university arranged by my biology teacher quickly confirmed that a wet lab was not for me, and consequently I fell into psychology.”
As a child, she was obsessed with Star Trek. “My first scientific hero was fictional – Spock, science officer on the Starship Enterprise,” she told the journal Current Biology. “He embodied so much of what attracted me to science. He was inquisitive, logical, honest, meticulous, calm, fearless in facing the unknown, innovative and unafraid of taking risks.”
She graduated from University College Dublin in 1990 with a degree in psychology, and returned to earn her doctorate there after receiving a master’s degree from the University College of Swansea (now Swansea University). Maguire joined the faculty at University College London in 1995.
She remained a keen supporter of Irish rugby and Crystal Palace Football Club.
At Maguire’s memorial service, Prof Cathy Price, her colleague at the UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology, spoke about the energy and excitement her friend and long-time colleague generated at the lab, recalling that Maguire’s mother had called nightly to remind her daughter to go home. “It wasn’t just a job,” Price said. “It consumed us, day and night.”
Price also said: “Her taxi driver study, widely regarded as a stroke of creative genius, exemplifies her trailblazing discoveries and inspirational research. Famously, though a world authority on navigation she was notoriously poor at negotiating even familiar environments. Eleanor was a force of nature and had a towering work ethic. Her immense clarity of thought allowed her to distil complex ideas with unparalleled clarity ... Eleanor’s team motto was: ‘We want to plant seeds, not prune hedges.’ And that’s exactly what she did.”
Over the course of her career, she received numerous awards, including the Ig Nobel Prize for Medicine, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society Young Investigator Award and the Royal Society Rosalind Franklin Award. She was a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), the Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci), and the Royal Society (FRS), and an Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy (MRIA).
Maguire was diagnosed with spinal cancer in 2022 and had recently developed pneumonia. She is survived by her parents, nephews Senan and Ultan and a wide circle of family and friends. Her brother, Declan, died in 2019.
