In 2000, the cognitive neuroscientist Eleanor Maguire published the study that would bring her worldwide fame. It showed that a brain region called the posterior hippocampus was larger in London taxi drivers who had acquired the Knowledge – a mental map of the British capital complete with streets, routes and landmarks – than in people who lacked those navigational skills. The longer the cabbie’s career, the bigger the posterior hippocampus.
Maguire, who has died aged 54 of cancer, had joined the young Functional Imaging Laboratory (FIL) at University College London (UCL) only five years earlier. Her stunning demonstration of the brain’s plasticity was immediately plastered over newspapers’ front pages. It won her an Ig Nobel prize, awarded for discoveries that “make people laugh, then think”, and landed her uncomfortably on a panel where her work upstaged that of three Nobel laureates.
