Brenda Milner: A Life Devoted To Neuropsychology
Brenda Milner is considered the founder of neuropsychology. She is one of the researchers who has helped us the most to understand how our memory works. So we are talking about one of the most remarkable figures in cognitive neuroscience.
Brenda Milner was born on July 15, 1918 in the United Kingdom. She will therefore be 100 years old in a few months. His parents were very talented musicians. Brenda Milner, however, had a very different interest from the start. She began to work in the field of experimental psychology. Then she specialized in memory disorders related to injuries in the cerebral hemispheres and the resulting amnesic syndrome.
She is still a professor at the university. Brenda Milner is considered to be an eminence in the field of neuroscience.
The HM case: origin of neuropsychology
H. Molaison was run over by a cyclist when he was 9 years old. He hit his head as he fell and fractured his skull. It was then in 1935. HM consulted his doctor because he began to suffer from continuous convulsions which even led to the transient loss of consciousness.
He lived like this for two decades, until the seizures were so severe that they prevented him from leading a normal life. I l p erdait knowledge more often. So he was dismissed from his duties as a mechanic. So he found himself in despair, without work, without health and without family. The doctors told him about a neurosurgeon who could help him. This doctor was experimenting with new methods in patients with brain damage.
Dr Scoville tried all non-invasive treatments known to medical science so far. However, he did not manage to change in the life of HM Scoville decided to partially remove his temporal lobe. The convulsions were significantly reduced with this intervention. The consequences were nevertheless dramatic. The patient began to no longer remember what was happening to him.
Frightened by the result, he consulted Dr. Brenda Milner. At the time, she was specializing in memory disorders and working as a professor of cognitive neuroscience.
Brenda Milner performed a multitude of tests on the patient. She noticed that he didn’t recognize her when she visited him. Everything was new to HM. He couldn’t remember having done this before. He presented with anterograde amnesia. In other words, a loss of the ability to create new memories.
The conclusions of the work obtained by Brenda Milner with this patient were decisive in the field of neuropsychology. They made it possible to differentiate two types of memory : explicit memory and procedural memory.
Explicit memory is a type of long-term memory (MLT). It therefore refers to memories that can be evoked in a conscious way. These can be, among others, memories of childhood, experiences with certain people from childhood or adolescence and even the first images of our early childhood that we remember in the form of shards.
Procedural memory refers to unconscious memories. In other words, to skills acquired in the past, such as driving or cycling. In HM’s case, Milner noted that the patient’s explicit memory ceased to function after partial temporal lobe removal. In contrast, rehearsal tasks associated with procedural memory performance improved during testing. In other words, performance on a task involving learning through repetition improved.
