BRAIN SCIENTIST IS ‘STILL NOSY’ AT 98
MEMORY RETRIEVAL FOCUS OF MILNER’S NEW RESEARCH
The driving instructor wiped his brow with a handkerchief, and not just because of the heat. His student — a grown woman, squinting over the dashboard — was ramming the curb in an effort to parallel park.
“We reached an agreement, right then and there: He let me pass the test, and I promised never to drive,” Brenda Milner said, smiling to herself at the decades-old memory. “You see, my spatial skills aren’t so good. That’s primarily a right-brain function.”
Milner, a professor of psychology in the department of neurology and neurosurgery at McGill University in Montreal, is best known for discovering the seat of memory in the brain, the foundational finding of cognitive neuroscience. But she also has a knack for picking up on subtle quirks of human behaviour and linking them to brain function — in the same way she had her own, during the driving test.
At 98, Milner is not letting up in a nearly 70-year career to clarify the function of many brain regions, usually by painstakingly testing people with brain lesions, often from surgery. Her prominence long ago transcended gender, and she is impatient with those who expect her to be a social activist. It’s science first with Milner, say close colleagues, in her lab and her life.
Perched recently on a chair in her small office, resplendent in a black satin dress and gold floral pin and banked by mouldering towers of old files, she volleyed questions rather than answering them. “People think because I’m 98 years old I must be emerita,” she said. “Well, not at all. I’m still nosy, you know, curious.”
Milner continues working, because she sees no reason not to. Neither McGill nor the affiliated Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital has asked her to step aside. She has funding: In 2014 she won three prominent achievement awards, which came with money for research. She has a project: a continuing study to investigate how the healthy brain’s intellectual left hemisphere co-ordinates with its more esthetic right one in thinking and memory.
And she has adapted to the life as an undeniably senior senior researcher. “I come into the office about three days a week or so, that is plenty,” Milner said.
“And I have some rules,” she added. “I will take on post-doctoral students, but not graduate students. Graduate students need to know you’ll be around for five years or so, and well” — she chuckled, looking up at the ceiling — “well, it’s very difficult if they have to switch to someone else, you know.”
Milner’s current project is, appropriately enough, an attempt to weave together two of brain science’s richest strands of research, both of which she helped originate a lifetime ago.
One is the biology of memory.
Milner changed the course of brain science for good as a newly minted PhD in the 1950s by identifying the specific brain organ that is crucial to memory formation.
She did so by observing the behaviour of a Henry Molaison, a 29-year-old Connecticut man who had recently undergone an operation to relieve severe epileptic seizures.
In a landmark 1957 paper Milner wrote with Molaison’s surgeon, she concluded that the medial temporal areas — including, importantly, an organ called the hippocampus — must be critical to memory formation. That finding, though slow to sink in, would upend the accepted teaching at the time, which held that no single area was critical to supporting memory.
Milner continued to work with Molaison and later showed that his motor memory was intact: He remembered how to perform certain physical drawing tests, even if he had no memory of learning them.
The finding, reported in 1962, demonstrated that there are at least two systems in the brain for processing memory: one that is explicit and handles names, faces and experiences; and another that is implicit and incorporates skills, like riding a bike or playing a guitar.
The other strand her new research project incorporates is hemispheric specialization: how the brain’s two halves, the right and the left, divide up its mental labour.
The new project is aimed at understanding how hemispheric co-ordination aids memory retrieval under normal circumstances, in people without brain injuries.
The findings hold tremendous potential to help people with early dementia, some brain injuries and even learning disabilities.
For Milner, after a lifetime exploring the brain, the motive for the work is personal as well as professional.
“I live very close; it’s a 10-minute walk up the hill,” she said. “So it gives me a good reason to come in regularly.”