98-year- old research pioneer gives no thought to slowing down
MONTREAL — At 98, Brenda Milner is not letting up in a nearly 70-year career to clarify the function of many brain regions — frontal lobes, and temporal; vision centers and tactile; the left hemisphere and the right — 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.
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 behavior and linking them to brain function.
Perched recently on a chair in her small office, resplendent in a black satin dress and gold floral pin and banked by moldering 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 that came with money for research. She has a project: a continuing study to investigate how the healthy brain’s intellectual left hemisphere coordinates with its more aesthetic 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 postdoctoral 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 Ph.D. in the 1950s by identifying the specific brain organ that is crucial to memory formation.
She did so by observing the behavior of a 29-yearold Connecticut man who had recently undergone an operation to relieve severe epileptic seizures. The operation was an experiment: On a hunch, the surgeon suctioned out two trenches of tissue from the man’s brain, one from each of his medial temporal lobes, located deep below the skull about level with the ears. The seizures subsided.
But the patient, an assembly line worker named Henry Molaison, was forever altered. He could no longer form new memories.
Concerned and intrigued, the surgeon contacted researchers Wilder Penfield and Milner at the Montreal Neurological Institute, who had previously reported on two cases of amnesia in patients treated there. Thus began a now-famous collaboration.
She started taking the night train from Montreal to give a battery of tests to Molaison, who was known in research reports as H.M. to protect his privacy.
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, upended 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 having learned 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.
“I clearly remember to this day my excitement, sitting there with H.M. and watching this beautiful learning curve develop right there in front of me,” Milner said. “I knew very well I was witnessing something important.”
The other strand her new research project incorporates is hemispheric specialization: how the brain’s two halves, the right and the left, divide its mental labor.
The new project is aimed at understanding how hemispheric coordination aids memory retrieval under normal circumstances, in people without brain injuries. Milner leads a research team that has been taking exhaustive MRI brain images from participants while they solve problems and take memory tests.
Does the artistic right hemisphere provide clues to help its more logic-oriented other half retrieve words? If so, which kinds of clues seem most powerful?
In one experiment, participants in the brain scanner tried to recall a list of words they had just studied. Some of those words were concrete, like dog or house, conjuring specific imagery; others, like concept or strategy, were not. The scans carefully track activation across hemispheres moment to moment, as retrieval happens. The findings hold tremendous potential to help people with early dementia, some brain injuries and even learning disabilities.
“People with early signs of dementia can have trouble with imagery, and by the time the disease is advanced, they’ve lost that ability,” said Joelle Crane, a clinical psychologist at the Montreal Neurological Institute. “One area this new work might help us with is in training people to learn in a more visual way.”
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.”