Mortimer Mishkin, neuroscientist who unlocked mysteries of the brain, dies

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 Oct. 2 at his home in Bethesda, Md. He was 94.

His daughter Wendy Mishkin confirmed his death but did not cite a cause.

Dr. 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, reflecting on his career. “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 the amygdala. Mishkin, she said, was an “early proponent” of the idea “that 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 behavioral memory is centered in the basal ganglia.