{"id":22292,"date":"2025-02-14T20:54:12","date_gmt":"2025-02-14T21:54:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=22292"},"modified":"2025-02-14T22:30:37","modified_gmt":"2025-02-14T22:30:37","slug":"eleanor-maguire-memory-expert-who-studied-london-cabbies-dies-at-54","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=22292","title":{"rendered":"Eleanor Maguire, Memory Expert Who Studied London Cabbies, Dies at 54"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By watching the brain process information, she discovered that a specific region plays a key role in spatial navigation \u2014 and that it can be strengthened like a muscle.<\/p>\n

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Eleanor Maguire, a cognitive neuroscientist whose research on the human hippocampus \u2014 especially those belonging to London taxi drivers \u2014 transformed the understanding of memory, revealing that a key structure in the brain can be strengthened like a muscle, died on Jan. 4 in London. She was 54.<\/p>\n

Her death, at a hospice facility, was confirmed by Cathy Price<\/a>, her colleague at the U.C.L. Queen Square Institute of Neurology. Dr. Maguire was diagnosed with spinal cancer in 2022 and had recently developed pneumonia.<\/p>\n

Working for 30 years in a small, tight-knit lab, Dr. Maguire obsessed over the hippocampus<\/a> \u2014 a seahorse-shaped engine of memory deep in the brain \u2014 like a meticulous, relentless detective trying to solve a cold case.<\/p>\n

An early pioneer of using functional magnetic resonance imaging (f.M.R.I.) on living subjects, Dr. 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cShe was absolutely one of the leading researchers of her generation in the world on memory,\u201d Chris Frith<\/a>, an emeritus professor of neuropsychology at University College London, said in an interview. \u201cShe changed our understanding of memory, and I think she also gave us important new ways of studying it.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 1995, while she was a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Frith\u2019s lab, she was watching television one evening when she stumbled on \u201cThe Knowledge,\u201d<\/a> a quirky film about prospective London taxi drivers memorizing the city\u2019s 25,000 streets to prepare for a three-year-long series of licensing tests.<\/p>\n

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By watching the brain process information, she discovered that a specific region plays a key role in spatial navigation \u2014 and that it can be strengthened like a muscle.Eleanor Maguire, a cognitive neuroscientist whose research on the human hippocampus \u2014 especially those belonging to London taxi drivers \u2014 transformed the understanding of memory, revealing that a key structure in the brain can be strengthened like a muscle, died on Jan. 4 in London. She was 54.Her death, at a hospice facility, was confirmed by Cathy Price, her colleague at the U.C.L. Queen Square Institute of Neurology. Dr. Maguire was diagnosed with spinal cancer in 2022 and had recently developed pneumonia.Working for 30 years in a small, tight-knit lab, Dr. Maguire obsessed over the hippocampus \u2014 a seahorse-shaped engine of memory deep in the brain \u2014 like a meticulous, relentless detective trying to solve a cold case.An early pioneer of using functional magnetic resonance imaging (f.M.R.I.) on living subjects, Dr. 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.\u201cShe was absolutely one of the leading researchers of her generation in the world on memory,\u201d Chris Frith, an emeritus professor of neuropsychology at University College London, said in an interview. \u201cShe changed our understanding of memory, and I think she also gave us important new ways of studying it.\u201dIn 1995, while she was a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Frith\u2019s lab, she was watching television one evening when she stumbled on \u201cThe Knowledge,\u201d a quirky film about prospective London taxi drivers memorizing the city\u2019s 25,000 streets to prepare for a three-year-long series of licensing tests.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and\u00a0log into\u00a0your Times account, or\u00a0subscribe\u00a0for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?\u00a0Log in.Want all of The Times?\u00a0Subscribe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22294,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22292","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22292","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22292"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22292\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22295,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22292\/revisions\/22295"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/22294"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}