Remembering Eleanor Maguire
thinking anew about human memory
I’ve been a little bit slow at posting recently – it’s been for somewhat mundane reasons – basically obligations arising from work have sucked up all my spare time (tl,dr: I closed my old lab down, emptied it of years of accumulated equipment, had it deep cleaned, rebuilt it, and started some entirely new research questions using novel techniques with new funding which I feel very lucky to have obtained).1
Here are the last few posts:
I’ve given all paid subscribers a three-month comp on their subs as a ‘thank you’ for sticking with me. Anyway, normal service is resuming, with a somewhat more personal post this time.
Recently, the International Neuropsychological Society held their mid-year meeting in Dublin – in Trinity College, to be precise.
I was invited to speak at the inaugural Memorial Symposium held in honour of the late Eleanor Maguire – a remarkable scientist who changed the way we think about memory and the brain in ways both profound and important. She is most famous in the public mind for her early work on plasticity in the brains of taxi drivers: Eleanor demonstrated that taxi drivers who had spent many years learning the many thousands of streets in London showed marked changes in a brain region, the hippocampal formation, which we know from many studies is absolutely central to learning and memory. This work struck a major public chord as a real-life, tangible demonstration of the plasticity of certain brain regions and how they change because of experience.
Here, I explore what I think are probably much, much more important studies by Eleanor, and I record my impressions of her as a scientist as well as her personally. I have taken the opportunity to add some additional comments and thoughts here beyond those I presented at the memorial lecture itself.
It is a great privilege to be able to say a few words at this inaugural Eleanor Maguire Memorial Lecture.
Memorial lectures matter, for they are not simply occasions to rehearse a distinguished career or list an extraordinary succession of achievements. Memorial lectures allow us to ask what a scientist changed about how we understand the world: which new questions they made possible, which assumptions they overturned, and what new paths they opened for others. In Eleanor’s case, the answers are unusually substantial.
Eleanor studied psychology at University College Dublin, and first became interested in the neural basis of memory through her work with patients at Beaumont Hospital. Her doctoral research was already characteristically ambitious, examining real-world spatial memory following temporal-lobe surgery under Prof Teresa Burke. From there, she went to UCL, where she built an exceptional career as Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow, and the leader of the Memory and Space Laboratory.
Her scientific distinction was recognised at the highest levels: she was elected to the Academy of Medical Sciences, the British Academy and, in 2016, the Royal Society (the oldest scientific society in the world, and which placed her formally among the most distinguished scientists of her generation, although those who knew her work required no such confirmation).
I think I first met Eleanor at a Royal Society meeting on the prefrontal cortex in the late 1990s, perhaps in 1997. We subsequently met at various Wellcome Trust gatherings and we also stayed occasionally in touch by email. I also had the particular pleasure of acting as her formal proposer and sponsor for election as an Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy, and later of introducing her for her Academy Discourse, “The Anatomy of Memory”. These are memories I value greatly.
In the public eye, Eleanor will probably always be best known for her studies of experience-dependant changes in the brains London taxi drivers. Those studies were wonderfully conceived and deservedly famous, because they provided one of the first and also most vivid demonstrations that the structure of the adult human brain reflects the effects sustained experience and learning. The taxi driver studies reached far beyond neuroscience, becoming central to the public understanding of brain plasticity.
But I think Eleanor’s deepest and most lasting empirical and conceptual contributions lie elsewhere, in the body of work through which she transformed how we think about memory, imagination, and the hippocampus.
I want to mention two papers which, for me, capture that legacy particularly clearly.
The first is the 2007 paper with Demis Hassabis, Dharshan Kumaran and Seralynne Vann: “Patients with hippocampal amnesia cannot imagine new experiences.”
The title is almost deceptively straightforward – you feel like you know the contents of the paper from the title, and that you don’t need to read the paper. But you should read it! The question it explored was not straightforward at all. Amnesia had traditionally been investigated by asking what patients could no longer remember. Eleanor and her colleagues wondered about a quite different question: could amnesiac people with bilateral hippocampal damage construct an experience that had never happened?
This was a transformative and brilliant conceptual move, because it took a difficult, private and apparently inaccessible mental act, imagining a possible future experience, and made it experimentally tractable. The method was straightforward: patients with circumscribed hippocampal lesions were given brief verbal cues describing ordinary situations, and were then asked to construct new imagined scenes; they found that hippocampal patients could produce individual elements and fragments, but these patients really struggled to bind these elements into a spatially coherent whole – they could not really construct an imagined world, for the imagined world did not come together.
The importance of that finding goes far beyond the study of amnesia, because it helped move the hippocampus out of a narrowly retrospective or backward looking account of memory. Memory was no longer simply an archive of the past, because the same neural machinery that allows us to reconstruct what has happened in the past also profoundly supports our ability to construct what might happen in the future.
These findings opened ‘mental time travel’ as a central problem for cognitive neuroscience: we do not merely use memory to think about and recall the past. We use the residues of experience to project ourselves forwards: recombining elements, rehearsing possibilities, testing futures and imagining worlds that do not yet exist.
And that capacity does not end at the boundary of the individual mind. Human beings imagine futures together. The political scientist Benedict Anderson famously described nations as ‘imagined communities’. Groups, institutions and nations are sustained partly by shared accounts of the past and shared imaginings of what the future might become.
Eleanor’s work does not, of course, provide a simple neural explanation of collective identity, but it illuminates one of the foundational cognitive capacities on which collective imagining depends: the ability to construct coherent scenes, possibilities and futures that are not presently before us.
The second paper is the 2018 study of mind-wandering in people with hippocampal damage, led by Cornelia McCormick with Clive Rosenthal, Thomas Miller and Eleanor.
Again, the experimental imagination employed here was striking: rather than confining participants to conventional laboratory memory tasks, the researchers shadowed people with selective bilateral hippocampal damage over several days and sampled (at regular intervals, by asking them!) what they were thinking about spontaneously, in the moment.
They found patients mind-wandered just as often as control participants, but the key difference was not mainly in the frequency of thought, but in its form. Control participants moved between past, present, and future (mental time travel, ftw!), often experiencing vivid, visually-constructed scenes about the past, present, and future, whereas the patients’ thoughts were much more likely to remain in the present and to take a verbal, semantic, and relatively abstract form.
This was a subtle but profound result: hippocampal damage did not abolish the stream of thought; instead, it altered the kinds of places the mind could go in real time during the course of everyday life. The hippocampus was not simply active when people were explicitly instructed to remember something: it is found in the spontaneous texture of ordinary mental life - in daydreaming, planning, imagining, moving through possible futures and constructing scenes beyond the immediate present.
These papers exemplify something characteristic of Eleanor’s research work: she had a remarkable ability to identify a question that was simple to state, difficult to investigate and theoretically transformative. Her work combined neuropsychology, neuroimaging, and ecologically meaningful experimental designs, but with chosen methods always in the service of the question being asked. She did not merely apply new techniques to familiar problems: she found ways of turning elusive aspects of human experience into rigorous experiments that changed how we conceive of deep aspects of brain function.
Her own deep theoretical formulation was that memory is not principally an accurate record of the past; rather, memory is reconstructive. Once that idea is taken seriously, the questions you might ask about memory change, and differing psychological functions - memory, navigation, imagination, dreaming, perception, future thinking and mind-wandering - begin to look less like separate faculties and more like expressions of common constructive (neurocognitive) processes.
Eleanor’s death was an enormous loss to her family, her friends, her colleagues, and to the wider scientific community. She died far too young, with much more still to contribute. But her work will continue to shape how we think about memory and the hippocampus for many years to come. Her work will also continue to shape how experiments are conceived: beginning not with the method that happens to be available, but with the important question that has not yet been properly asked.
Eleanor was engaging, funny, direct, and great company. She was ferociously clever, intellectually fearless, and extraordinarily imaginative. She combined formidable clarity of thought with a willingness to entertain large, creative and sometimes audacious ideas – ideas that mattered and which could be empirically tested. Ideas that have become part of textbooks. The motto associated with her laboratory was that they wanted to plant seeds rather than prune hedges - an apt description of what she achieved.
There was also something wonderfully human about the world authority on navigation who was famously capable of getting lost, and the lifelong Crystal Palace supporter who had apparently chosen the club because she imagined the Crystal Palace itself must be beautiful.
A memorial lecture is especially fitting for Eleanor, for she understood better than most that memory is not passive preservation, but an active, constructive capacity through which we recreate the past, inhabit the present, and imagine the future. Through this lecture, and through the science that will continue to grow from her work, we do not simply look back. We carry her questions, her standards, her intellectual courage and her imagination forward.
Next time, I’m going to tell a different story - there’s something to my mind wrong with contemporary brain memory research – a kind of open secret, acknowledged in the margins of conferences and in papers, and occasionally discussed in detail, but really not shifting the dial in terms of the research being conducted. I will discuss my misgivings next time. There’s some fun pieces coming up as well - especially if you’re a minions fan.
Pangram tells me this was 100% human written. Well, it was.