Brenda Milner

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Brenda Milner (2011)

Brenda Milner , CC , GOQ , FRS (* as Brenda Langford on July 15, 1918 in Manchester ) is a British - Canadian neuropsychologist who is a pioneer in cognitive neuroscience.

Life

Milner, daughter of a music critic and a singer, studied mathematics at Newnham College in Cambridge and then experimental psychology with Frederic Bartlett and Oliver Zangwill with a bachelor's degree in 1939. During World War II, she worked as a psychologist for the military, for example on aptitude tests for Pilots. In 1944 she married the electrical engineer Peter Milner and moved with him to Canada because he was employed there on the atomic bomb project. From 1950 she was at McGill University and the Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI), where she did tests and examinations on Wilder Penfield patients who had been operated on for epilepsy. In 1952 she received her doctorate under Donald O. Hebb . She was later Dorothy J. Killam Professor of Neurology and Neurosurgery.

plant

In 1957/58, together with the neurosurgeons and neurologists involved, she published groundbreaking papers on neuropsychological findings in patients after epilepsy surgery . Her best-known patient is HM Diesem. In 1953, William Scoville removed the medial areas of both temporal lobes (temple lobes) of the brain, which prevented the transfer of information into long-term memory. However, some forms of memory worked and he was also able to recall memory contents from the time before the operation. Even though she worked with him for three decades, he could never remember her name. Milner's work was of great importance for memory research . She differentiated between several types of memory and located them in certain brain regions.

From her systematic studies of HM Milner derived three important principles about the biological basis of complex memories:

  1. Memory is a clearly defined function of the mind, clearly distinguished from other perceptual, motor and cognitive skills.
  2. The contents of the short-term and long-term memory can be saved separately. The loss of the medial temporal lobe , especially the loss of the hippocampus , destroys the ability to transfer new contents of the short-term memory into the long-term memory.
  3. At least one type of memory is tied to certain areas of the brain. The loss of brain substance in the medial temporal lobe and in the hippocampus leads to massive impairment of the ability to create new long-term memories, while losses in other brain regions do not affect memory.

She was also involved in researching the distribution of functions between the right and left hemispheres and the interaction between both hemispheres.

Awards (selection)

She is a member of the Royal Society of Canada , the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , the Royal Society , the Norwegian Academy of Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences .

Publications

  • with WB Scoville: Loss of recent memory after bilateral hippocampal lesions. In: J Neurol Neurosurg Psychiatry. 20, 1957, pp. 11-21. Scoville_Milner (1957) .pdf
  • Psychological defects produced by temporal lobe excision. In: Proceedings of the Association for Research in Nervous and Mental Diseases. 36, 1958, pp. 244-257.
  • with S. Corkin and H. Teuber: Further analysis of the hippocampal amnesic syndrome: 14-year follow-up study of HM In: Neuropsychologia. 6, 1968, pp. 215-234.
  • Disorders of learning and memory after temporal lobe lesions in man. In: Clin. Neurosurg. 19, 1972, pp. 421-466.
  • with Larry Squire and Eric Kandel : Cognitive neuroscience and the study of memory. In: Neuron. 20, 1998, pp. 445-468.

Recent publications on the patient HM by other authors

  • Suzanne Corkin et al .: HM's Medial Temporal Lobe Lesion: Findings from Magnetic Resonance Imaging. In: The Journal of Neuroscience. 17 (10), May 15, 1997, pp. 3964-3979.
  • G. O'Kane, Elizabeth Kensinger , S. Corkin: Evidence for semantic learning in profound amnesia: An investigation with the patient HM In: Hippocampus. 14, 2004, pp. 417-425.
  • S. Corkin: What's new with the amnesic patient HM? In: Nature Reviews Neuroscience . 3, 2002, pp. 153-160.
  • DH Salat et al: Neuroimaging HM: A 10-Year Follow-Up Examination. In: Hippocampus. 16, 2006, pp. 936-945.
  • VD Bohbot, S. Corkin: Posterior parahippocampal place learning in HM In: Hippocampus. 17, 2007, pp. 863-872.
  • B. Preilowski: Memory of an amnestist (and half a century of memory research). In: Advances in Neurology - Psychiatry. 77 (10), 2009, pp. 568-576.

Web links

Commons : Brenda Milner  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ WB Scoville, B. Milner: Loss of recent memory after bilateral hippocampal lesions. In: J Neurol Neurosurg Psychiatry . tape 20 , 1957, pp. 11-21 .
  2. ^ W. Penfield, B. Milner: Memory deficit produced by bilateral lesions in the hippocampal zone. In: Arch Neurol Psychiatry . tape 79 , 1958, pp. 475-497 .
  3. ↑ Eric Kandel : In Search of Memory. Goldmann, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-442-15570-5 .
personal data
SURNAME Milner, Brenda
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British psychologist
DATE OF BIRTH July 15, 1918
PLACE OF BIRTH Manchester