Not a textbook case
Brenda Milner: Founder of neuropsychology
This week, in honor of Brain Awareness Week, Neurocracy will profile trailblazing and influential scientists.
An understanding of exactly how memories are stored and retrieved in the brain is a puzzle that still eludes neuroscientists. The research of Brenda Milner has been instrumental in providing much of what is now known about the brain regions responsible for short- and long-term memory processing. Born in England in 1918, Milner (née Langford) earned her B.A. and M.A. from the University of Cambridge before pursuing her Ph.D. in psychology at McGill University. In 1950, while still studying at McGill, she began working at Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI), where she designed and performed cognitive tests for neurosurgery patients. Her research involved testing memory and cognition in individuals with severe epilepsy who had undergone partial lobotomies. She made a name for herself as an expert in memory research and soon was invited by neurosurgeon William Beecher Scoville in 1955 to work with his patient, then called H.M.
The case of patient H.M. is one of the most famous in psychology history, and the work that Milner carried out over the next three decades would not only redefine the study of learning and memory but would also create an entirely new field of study. After years of suffering from severe seizures that made a normal life impossible, H.M.—or Henry Molaison, as he has since been revealed to be—underwent a surgery to remove the parts of his brain in which his seizures were localized, the temporal lobes. After his surgery, his seizures disappeared, but he was left unable to create new memories. It was at this time that Milner began working with him, using the rigorous tests of her own design to assess every aspect of his memory.
Milner eventually came to realize that while Henry’s working memory was mostly normal, he was completely unable to retain long-term memories. She described how after 30 years of working with him, Henry had no memory of her and would introduce himself every time they met, even after a separation of only a few moments. From her work with Henry, Milner determined that the removal of his medial temporal lobes, and more specifically, the hippocampus, had eliminated his ability to form long-term memories. Milner was the first researcher to directly link the hippocampus with the formation and consolidation of memories. Milner’s work with Henry and others like him also led to the discovery that more than one neural signaling pathway is involved in memory formation, evidenced by the fact that Henry could learn how to solve a task (e.g. a visual puzzle) over a period of time but had no memory of ever learning to do so.
“I’m driven by curiosity. I’m nosy, and I have always been observant.”
Brenda Milner is widely credited with creating the field of cognitive neuroscience, also called neuropsychology, which as it name suggests, combines elements of neuroscience and psychology. Among her many groundbreaking discoveries was the importance of the frontal cortex in memory processing and determining that the brain is capable of functional reorganization following injury. Even today, at the age of 95, Dr. Milner continues her research at McGill University and MNI, studying memory, speech, and language perception.
—A.I.
