Memory Pioneer: Interview with Brenda Milner
Shortly after arriving at Â鶹AV from her native England in 1950, Brenda Milner began a fateful 30-year research collaboration with a patient named Henry Molaison—a collaboration that helped establish Milner as a pioneer in the new field of cognitive neuroscience, which merges neurology and psychology. Following an operation to control his epilepsy, 27-year-old Molaison—who, until his death in December 2008, was publicly identified as “HM”—lost the ability to convert short-term memories into long-term. Although HM’s severe amnesia prevented him from recognizing Milner from one day to the next, she discovered he was able to retain certain kinds of new knowledge. Milner’s resulting demonstration of multiple human memory systems dramatically changed our understanding of how the brain works.
Today, Milner is the Dorothy J. Killam Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the MNI and Â鶹AV, where she continues her research. Her many honours include: induction into the Order of Canada, National Academy of Sciences (USA), American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Royal Society of London and Royal Society of Canada; the Gairdner International Award in 2005; and being named a finalist for NSERC’s Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering in 2009. Not bad for someone who started out studying mathematics at Cambridge, then followed a hunch that her future lay elsewhere. “I would have been a bad mathematics teacher somewhere in England!” she muses. “I always tell my students not to be afraid to change.”