Happy Birthday, Eleanor Maguire.

Today would have been Eleanor Maguire's 55th birthday. Alas, she isn't around to celebrate. In early January of this year, Maguire - an Irish neuroscientist and professor at University College London - died of cancer.

I had never heard of Eleanor Maguire until her obituary popped up in a couple of papers I read regularly - The Guardian and The New York Times. And, what can I say? I've long been a devoted reader of The Irish Sports Pages, so when a death notice captures my attention, I'm there for it.

Maguire was known for her work on brain plasticity, notably a study of the brains of London cabbies, who - having acquired The Knowledge - were found to have a larger posterior hippocampus than those who didn't have The Knowledge. And the longer a cabbie'd been driving around Londer, the bigger their posterior hippocampus.

A couple of bits of info that may be needed here. (In other words, this was info I needed.)

First, what's the function of the posterior hippocampus? The posterior hippocampus takes care of spatial processing and long- and short-term memory retrieval. (As an aside, the word hippocampus comes from the Greek word for sea horse, because that's kinda-sorta what it looks like.) 

Second, what's The Knowledge? The Knowledge - also known as The Knowledge of London - is the exam that London cabbies are required to pass in order to get a license. It began in the mid-19th century, takes a few years to get through, and means memorizing thousands upon thousands of streets and landmarks within a six-mile radius of Charing Cross.

Other cities make - or at lease used to make in the pre-GPS days - drivers have at least rudimentary knowledge of their city in order to get a license, but there's nothing out there that's equivalent to the depth of The Knowledge. At least in Boston, in the pre-GPS era, I got in plenty of taxis where the cabbie couldn't find the most prominent of streets, the most well-known of locations. It was shocking how many times I had to tell the cabbie how to get someplace. 

But in London, even with GPS, drivers are still required to pass a rigorous exam. When a London cabbie is licensed, they're licensed.

Anyway, from early on in her career Maguire - who herself was navigational challenged (as I am) - wanted:

...to understand how people negotiate and recollect their paths through the world, and what happens when this capacity deserts them – as it did in some patients who had undergone brain surgery for intractable epilepsy. (Source: The Guardian)

She wanted to learn more, so:

The role of the hippocampus, not only in navigation, but also in episodic or personal memory, and in imagination, became the focus of her research. The unifying theme was scene construction theory, the idea that the hippocampus constantly builds and updates spatially coherent scenes that represent and anticipate the changing environment using information beyond what is immediately available to the senses.

After receiving her PhD at University College Dublin, Maguire -  like so many Irish folks over the centuries - made her way to London, which turned out to be a fortuitous decision. Not only was London a place where "functional neuroimaging was taking off" - so she could see what's going on in brains without cutting anything open - but there were all these London cabbies out there with brains that had aquired The Knowledge.

Maguire came upon knowledge of The Knowledge by happenstance. As a post-doc fellow in London:

...she was watching television one evening when she stumbled on “The Knowledge,” a quirky film about prospective London taxi drivers memorizing the city’s 25,000 streets to prepare for a three-year-long series of licensing tests.

Dr. Maguire, who said she rarely drove because she feared never arriving at her destination, was mesmerized. “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?’” (Source: NY Times)

And through her work, Maguire found that the posterior hippocampi of London cabbies grew as they mastered more and more of the streets they drove on.

The implications of Maguire's findings that "the key structure in the brain governing memory and spatial navigation was malleable" are immense. Think about how being able to grow your brain could help those suffering memory loss, let alone helping the spatially challenged. 

Shortly before Maguire's death, there "was a much-reported study in the British Medical Journal a few weeks earlier, showing that taxi drivers were somewhat protected against dementia. (Source:  back to  The Guardian)

Yay to that! 

I love that Eleanor Maguire was a Dublin girl. (Dublin Abú!)  I love that she was such a STEM girl. (STEM girls rock!) I love that she had an astounding career, and got to pursue science in a way that was so interesting. I don't love that she died so young. 

Happy Birthday, Eleanor Maguire! So sorry that there's an RIP attached to it.