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…