Biography
Born in Manchester, England, Milner received her undergraduate degree at the University of Cambridge in 1939, and her Ph.D. degree under Donald Hebb at McGill University in 1952. She joined Wilder Penfield at the Montreal Neurological Institute in 1950 and published landmark papers with Penfield and William Beecher Scoville in 1957 and 1958. She was the Dorothy J. Killam Professor of Psychology, Montreal Neurological Institute and Department of Neurology & Neurosurgery at McGill University.
Milner was a pioneer in the field of neuropsychology and in the study of memory and other cognitive functions in humans. She was the first to study the effects of damage to the medial temporal lobe on memory and systematically described the deficits in the most famous patient in cognitive neuroscience, Henry Molaison, formerly known as patient H.M. Through a series of landmark studies, Dr. Milner showed that the medial temporal lobe amnestic syndrome is characterized by an inability to acquire new memories and an inability to recall established memories from a few years immediately before damage, while memories from the more remote past and other cognitive abilities, including language, perception and reasoning are intact. She also showed that in patients with this syndrome the ability to learn certain motor skills remained normal. This finding introduced the concept of multiple memory systems within the brain and stimulated an enormous body of research.
Milner has made major contributions to the understanding of the role of the frontal lobes in memory processing, in the area of organizing information. She demonstrated the critical role of the dorsolateral frontal cortex for the temporal organization of memory and her work showed that there is partial separability of the neural circuits subserving recognition memory from those mediating memory for temporal order. She described the inflexibility in problem solving that is now widely recognized as a common consequence of frontal-lobe injury. These refinements in the understanding of memory and exposition of the relevant brain regions revealed the diffuse nature of complex cognitive functions in the brain.
Milner helped describe the lateralization of function in the human brain and has shown how the representation of language in the cerebral hemispheres can vary in left-handed, right-handed and ambidextrous individuals (see handedness). These studies of the relationship between hand preference and speech lateralization led to an understanding of the effects of early unilateral brain lesions on the pattern of cerebral organization at maturity. Her studies were among the first to demonstrate convincingly that damage to the brain can lead to dramatic functional reorganization.
More recently, she expanded her research to the study of brain activity in normal subjects using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission tomography. These studies focus on the identification of brain regions associated with spatial memory and language, including the neural substrates of unilingual and bilingual speech processing. She led the research group at the Cognitive Neuroscience Unit of the Montreal Neurological Institute in the exploration of the anatomical basis of cognition.
Read more about this topic: Brenda Milner
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