Scientist probed how brain keeps memories
Proponent of focus on ‘entire neural circuit’
Mortimer Mishkin, a neuroscientist who received the National Medal of Science for his role in unlocking some of the most vexing mysteries of the brain, including how memories are made and kept, died Saturday at his home in Bethesda, Md., He was 94.
His daughter Wendy Mishkin confirmed his death but did not cite a cause.
Mishkin spent more than six decades at the National Institutes of Health, where he served for years as chief of the Laboratory of Neuropsychology within the National Institute of Mental Health. He became renowned within his field for his findings related to perception, memory and the circuits that connect one part of the brain to another.
“Studying the brain is both horribly and wonderfully complicated,” Mishkin once remarked. “It’s so frustrating it takes such a long time to figure out even a few of the thousands of circuits, but every discovery is a fantastic high.”
Mishkin was credited with contributing to numerous such discoveries.
Betsy Murray, the current chief of NIMH’S Laboratory of Neuropsychology, said in an interview that before Mishkin, many neuroscientists were preoccupied with understanding the various structures of the brain, such as the hippocampus or amygdala. Mishkin, she said, was an “early proponent” of the idea “we had to understand the entire neural circuit.”
His research illuminated the differences between cognitive memory — which involves specific information, such as a phone number, and discrete events like a birthday party — and noncognitive memory, which forms the foundation of habits and skills like making a daily commute or playing a musical instrument. Cognitive processes, he argued, take place in the limbic lobe of the brain, whereas behavioural memory is centred in the basal ganglia.
Mishkin conducted extensive research on primates. By studying lesions on monkey brains, he and colleague Karl Pribram helped demonstrate that the inferior temporal cortex, a part of the brain located far from the primary sensory area, figured in visual discrimination of objects.
His National Medal of Science, awarded in 2010 by President Barack Obama, recognized “his contributions to understanding the neural basis of perception and memory.”