Health
Eleanor Maguire, Memory Expert Who Studied London Cabbies, Dies at 54
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, 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 — 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 (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.
“She was absolutely one of the leading researchers of her generation in the world on memory,” Chris Frith, an emeritus professor of neuropsychology at University College London, said in an interview. “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 Dr. Frith’s lab, 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?’”
In the first of a series of studies, Dr. 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.
Dr. Maguire kept digging. Using M.R.I. 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.
Dr. 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.”
Dr. 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, Dr. Maguire’s findings revealed the scientific underpinnings of the ancient Roman “method of loci,” a memorization trick also known as the “memory palace.”
This technique involves visualizing a large house and assigning an individual memory to a particular room. Mentally walking through the house fires up the hippocampus, eliciting the memorized information. Dr. Maguire studied memory athletes — people who train their brains to memorize 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 millennia in virtually unchanged form.”
But recalling information was only half the story.
In studying patients with damage to the hippocampus, including those with amnesia, Dr. Maguire found that they couldn’t visualize 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 visualizing 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,” Dr. 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 27, 1970, in Dublin. Her father, Paddy Maguire, was a factory worker. Her mother, Anne Maguire, was a receptionist.
Growing up, Eleanor was obsessed with “Star Trek.”
“My first scientific hero was fictional — Spock, science officer on the Starship Enterprise,” she told the journal Current Biology in 2012. “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).
Dr. Maguire joined the faculty at University College London in 1995 and never left.
She is survived by her parents. Her brother, Declan, died in 2019, also of cancer.
At Dr. Maguire’s memorial service, Dr. Price spoke about the energy and excitement her friend and longtime colleague generated at the lab, recalling that Dr. Maguire’s mother had called nightly to remind her daughter to go home.
“It wasn’t just a job,” Dr. Price said. “It consumed us, day and night.”
There was a sense that they were onto something big.
“We were among the first to use cutting-edge technology to peer inside the healthy, living human brain and witness its functions in action,” Dr. Price said. “It was an exhilarating and transformative time in neuroscience, and Eleanor’s curiosity and creativity were instrumental to numerous discoveries.”
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Research continues to uncover new details on how fasting may help extend life.
A new study published in the journal Nature Communications investigated how intermittent fasting can boost longevity in small worms often used in aging research.
Researchers from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas compared worms that were fed normally to those that underwent a 24-hour fast in early adulthood and were then fed again, according to a press release.
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The scientists measured a variety of factors, including stored fat, gene activity related to fat metabolism and lifespan.
The results showed that the life-boosting benefit did not depend on the fasting itself but on the body’s behavior after eating again.
Experts say sustainability is key when choosing a long-term weight-loss strategy. (iStock)
Study lead Peter Douglas, associate professor of molecular biology and a member of the Hamon Center for Regenerative Science and Medicine at UT Southwestern, suggested that these discoveries “shift the focus toward a neglected side of the metabolic coin – the re-feeding phase.”
“Our data suggest that the health-promoting effects of intermittent fasting are not merely a product of the fast itself, but are dependent on how the metabolic machinery recalibrates during the subsequent transition back to a fed state,” he said.
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“Our findings bridge a gap between lipid metabolism and aging research,” he added. “By targeting aging, the single greatest risk factor for human disease, we move beyond treating isolated conditions toward a preventive model of medicine that enhances quality of life for all individuals.”
Lauri Wright, director of nutrition programs at the University of South Florida’s College of Public Health, called this a “high-quality” study that adds an “important nuance to how we think about fasting and longevity.”
Intermittent fasting typically involves limiting meals to an eight-hour daily window or fasting every other day. (iStock)
The benefits of the refeeding phase after fasting were “especially interesting,” Wright, who was not involved in the study, told Fox News Digital.
“The researchers showed that longevity was linked to the body’s ability to turn off fat breakdown after fasting, allowing cells to restore energy balance,” she reiterated.
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“From a scientific standpoint, that’s a meaningful shift because it suggests fasting is not just about burning fat, but about metabolic flexibility.”
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Fasting may support longevity through triggering metabolic switching, enhancing cellular repair and stress resistance and improving markers like insulin sensitivity, research shows.
Limitations and cautions
Although this study provides “important insight” on the power of refeeding, Wright noted that the findings should be approached with caution, as the study was done on worms and cannot always be translated to humans.
“Additionally, it explains how a process might work in a controlled lab condition rather than real-world eating behaviors,” she added as a limitation. “Finally, the study is short-term and doesn’t give us the long-term translation on lifespan outcomes.”
The review found intermittent fasting was barely more effective than doing nothing, according to the study authors. (iStock)
Wright cautioned that fasting is “not a magic solution for longevity, and how you eat overall matters more than when you eat.”
“I advise, first and foremost, to focus on diet quality, including a variety of fruits and vegetables, healthy fats and minimally processed foods,” she said.
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For those who are considering fasting, it’s better to stick with a moderate plan — like a 12- to 14-hour overnight fast — rather than going to extremes, Wright said. After fasting, she recommends focusing on well-balanced meals.
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Several groups of people should be cautioned against fasting, according to Wright, including those with diabetes who are on insulin or hypoglycemic medications, those who are pregnant or breastfeeding, anyone with a history of eating disorders and older adults at risk of malnutrition.
Anyone considering intermittent fasting should consult with a doctor before starting.
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More than three million people travel to undergo cosmetic surgery each year, statistics show — but the potential savings come at a cost.
Most people opting to pursue this so-called “medical tourism” are chasing budget-friendly price tags.
International surgeries, such as hair transplants in Turkey, can cost as little as $4,000 to $5,000 compared to $20,000 to $30,000 in the U.S., but often come with extreme risks, according to board-certified plastic surgeon Dr. Sheila Nazarian of California.
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The doctor recently joined Lisa Brady on the “The FOX News Rundown” podcast to discuss the rising trend of medical tourism. One of the biggest risks, she said, is the lack of safety regulations in popular destinations like Mexico and Turkey.
As demand spikes in these medical tourism “mills,” there have been reports of non-medically trained staff performing procedures like hair transplants.
Most people opting to pursue “medical tourism” are chasing budget-friendly price tags. (iStock)
“I’ve heard that they [international clinics] are even recruiting people who maybe were taxi drivers and then putting them through their own training program … to become hair transplant technicians,” Nazarian said. “That’s how high the demand has become.”
In the U.S., medical school graduates are granted a “physician and surgeon” license, which means doctors — including pediatricians or OB-GYNs — can legally perform cosmetic surgeries, even if they didn’t receive specialized training for those procedures during residency, Nazarian noted.
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Instead of pinching pennies, the doctor recommended paying whatever amount is necessary to ensure quality treatment.
“People think of it as, you know, going to the mall. … It’s surgery, and surgery has risks,” she said. “You need to be with someone who not only can perform a beautiful surgery, but who can handle possible complications well.”
“You need to ask them: ‘What was your residency training in? And if you wanted to, would you be allowed to do this procedure in a hospital?’”
Aftercare is another critical factor in the success and safety of a cosmetic procedure, as the doctor emphasized that 20% of a surgical result depends on post-operative care.
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This can be difficult or even impossible to manage when a doctor is in a different time zone, she cautioned, or if the clinic disappears shortly after the procedure.
Nazarian also noted the importance of addressing the psychological component of plastic surgery, noting that no procedure will fix underlying unhappiness. The doctor said she uses screening questionnaires to ensure that patients are truly seeking self-improvement rather than a “cure” for deeper issues.
International surgeries, such as hair transplants in Turkey, can cost as little as $4,000 to $5,000 compared to $20,000 to $30,000 in the U.S., but often come with extreme risks. (iStock)
“If you’re not already generally very content with your life, a knife in my hand is not going to bring you there,” Nazarian said.
“The analogy I always give is you don’t want a paisley couch — you want a neutral couch and you can put paisley pillows on it,” she said, noting that a procedure should “make you look normal, God-given, athletic. And then you can change your clothes when the trends come and go.”
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Samuel Golpanian, M.D., a double board-certified plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills, said he has also seen an increasing number of patients undergoing cosmetic procedures abroad, sometimes with “devastating consequences.”
“The key is being extremely careful before embarking on this journey.”
“I’ve seen a wide range of complications, including infections, poor wound healing, significant scarring and tissue necrosis (skin death),” he told Fox News Digital. “These complications often lead to prolonged pain, ongoing medical problems, and significant additional costs to repair the damage.”
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Golpanian said he’s treated patients who received unsafe or non-medical-grade injectable materials, which can lead to serious long-term health issues.
One surgeon said he’s treated patients who received unsafe or non-medical-grade injectable materials, which can lead to serious long-term health issues. (iStock)
“I’ve also seen damage to underlying structures, asymmetry and results that are extremely difficult — sometimes impossible — to correct.”
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“That said, I’ve also seen some good outcomes, so it’s not all bad,” he noted. “The key is being extremely careful before embarking on this journey.”
Quick tips for safe ‘medical tourism’
Fully vet the surgeon. “Most surgeons will provide information about their education and training, but it’s important not to accept these claims at face value,” Golpanian said. “Verify them directly by contacting the institutions where they trained.”
Ask for references from prior patients. Ideally, it’s best to get references from U.S.-based patients who can speak candidly about both their experience and their results, the surgeonsaid.
Think beyond the cost. Golpanian emphasized the adage “you get what you pay for.” “Cost should take a back seat to experience, training, judgment and proven results,” he advised.
Be cautious about relying on before-and-after photos. These can be selective or even enhanced, Golpanian warned.
Keep aftercare in focus. “Make sure the practice emphasizes comprehensive follow-up care and has a clear, realistic post-operative plan in place.”
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