Brenda Milner

The founder of neuropsychology whose patient studies — above all of Henry Molaison — showed that memory comes in different kinds handled by different parts of the brain.

Brenda Milner was born in Manchester, England, in 1918. She studied psychology at Cambridge, moved to Canada in 1944, and earned her PhD at McGill University under Donald Hebb, famous for the idea that "cells that fire together wire together". She joined Wilder Penfield's team at the Montreal Neurological Institute.

Testing patients after surgery

Milner's method was careful, systematic testing of patients before and after brain surgery, comparing those with damage in different places. It is the foundation of neuropsychology: inferring how the healthy brain works from patterns of what is lost and spared after injury.

Henry Molaison

In 1955 she travelled to Hartford, Connecticut, to test William Scoville's patient H.M. Their 1957 paper showed that removing the medial temporal lobes on both sides causes a severe and selective loss of new long-term memory. Her mirror-drawing experiment showed he could still learn a motor skill, opening the study of multiple memory systems.

Beyond memory

Milner also showed that damage to the frontal lobes impairs flexible thinking — patients struggled to switch rules in card-sorting tests — and studied differences between the left and right hemispheres for verbal and visual memory. She continued working well past the age of 100, and her honours include the Kavli Prize in Neuroscience (2014).