About two months ago, on October 16th, I attended an amazing lecture at McGill...
My Life in Science: The Excitement of Discovery was the title of the autobiographical lecture given by none other than Brenda Milner aka the mother of neuropsychology. I was looking forward to see her again as I’ve seen her twice already at other lectures. This one however, was quite different as Brenda Milner was speaking about her own life and the discovery of her passion. Before her lecture, there was a fifteen to twenty minutes ceremony with prizes for undergraduate students presenting a research project. Then, Milner’s colleague introduced her and mentioned that science has been defined as a gradual accumulation of knowledge, and that in Milner’s case, she invented a whole field! He also emphasised that, this year, Brenda Milner will be awarded the Balzan Price, worth a million dollars.
Brenda Milner celebrated her 91st birthday this summer and mentioned in her speech that it was the first time she would give a lecture seated due to recommendations from her medical colleagues. In that matter, Brenda Milner began her speech by introducing her dream as an undergraduate at Cambridge University which was to become a mathematician (to this day, she still wants to be a mathematician). She soon got lonely in mathematics and decided to try philosophy and psychology. After that, Brenda told us that she got lucky at many instances. The first luck was that as she got married to the engineer Peter Milner, they ended up moving to Montreal because of an atomic energy project Peter was interested in. That is when she worked at the University of Montreal (having always a great passion for French) teaching experimental psychology. Her second stroke of luck occurred when she went to a seminar given by Donald Hebb. She was very inspired by Hebb and convinced him to let her work for him. Then, the third lucky instance was that Hebb worked with Dr. Penfield (the founder of the Montreal Neurological Institute) and referred her. Hence, Brenda Milner was in the heart of the action concerning what is now called neuropsychology. Brenda Milner was studying visual perception in patients with lobotomies to the temporal lobes. Those were performed and still are to different extents to relieve a person from epilepsy. However, we all know Brenda Milner for her major work in memory and the different kinds of memory systems. Milner soon had to change interests as her patients complained of memory problems.
This is where it got interesting. She had one patient that suffered from anterograde amnesia (being the loss of the ability to make new memories) which is a very serious memory loss as a result of his unilateral temporal lobotomy (removing the temporal regions on one side of the brain, usually in the left). Later on, Brenda Milner was sent at the HartfordHospital to study another similar case in a patient called H.M. that had undergone bilateral lobotomies (to both temporal lobes). We can now call him Henry Gustav Molaison as he died this very year to my greatest deception. Brenda Milner said that she was often asked if she was sad. She replied that she cannot be as Mr. Molaison continually saw her every time for the first time. Thus, Henry never recognised her in the decades she worked with him. These two patients (P.B. and H.M.) led her to hypothesise that in order to create anterograde amnesia, both temporal regions must be lesioned in some way. This meant that P.B. had already a damaged right temporal lobe before the surgery. This was in fact correct and was determined only after his death as the technology was not invented to look at live brains. From there, research flourished on memory processing and separating different kinds of “memories” since both amnesic patients showed deficits in specific types of memory for example episodic memory (of events) but not procedural memory (of skills acquired such as riding a bicycle).
Finally, I stopped writing frantically after loads of more interesting findings and discoveries told by this amazing speaker. I remember thinking to myself “God, I wish she was my grandmother!”. This, of course, would have been the most convenient as I’m aiming for a career in neuropsychology. In any case, her speech was fun, interesting and very educational as the knowledge on the subject came from the horse’s mouth. I strongly encourage you (as Brenda Milner did also) to watch the movie Memento (2000): a uniquely filmed thriller focusing on an anterograde amnesiac. It will not only peak your interest on memory processing, but keep you on the edge of your seats for the duration of the movie.
