Summary
Peter Milner (13 June 1919 – 2 June 2018) was a British-born Canadian neuroscientist.
Peter Milner | |
|---|---|
| Born | June 13, 1919 Silkstone Common, Barnsley, West Riding of Yorkshire, England |
| Died | June 2, 2018 (aged 98) Montréal, Canada |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Neuroscience |
Biography edit
Milner was born in Silkstone Common and grew up in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, England. His father was David William Milner, a research chemist, and his mother was Edith Anne Marshall, an ex-schoolteacher.[1]
He worked at the UK's Air Defence Research and Development Establishment before moving to Canada in 1944. He was an electrical engineer, but became interested in neuroscience while his wife Brenda Milner was studying the subject at McGill University; he became a graduate student under the same supervisor as she, and later taught at McGill himself.[2] In collaboration with James Olds, he is credited with the discovery of the pleasure centre and the pain centre in the rat brain.[3][4][5]
In his 1974 article "A Model for Visual Shape Recognition" Milner mentions a popular hypothesis suggesting that the features of individual objects are bound/segregated via synchronization of the activity of different neurons in the cortex.[6] The theory, called binding-by-synchrony (BBS), is hypothesized to occur through the transient mutual synchronization of neurons located in different regions of the brain when the stimulus is presented.[7]
Milner received the Gold Medal for Distinguished Lifetime Contributions to Canadian Psychology from the Canadian Psychological Association in 2005.[2]
Milner died on 2 June 2018 at Centre hospitalier de l'Université de Montréal in Montréal.[8][9]
References edit
- ^ White, Norman (6 June 2018). "Remembering Peter M. Milner". McGill.
- ^ a b Valji, Salim (11 June 2018). "Life Stories: Neuroscience pioneer Peter Milner taught at McGill". Montreal Gazette.
- ^ Kringelbach, ML; Berridge, KC (June 2010). "The functional neuroanatomy of pleasure and happiness". Discovery Medicine. 9 (49): 579–587. PMC 3008353. PMID 20587348.
- ^ Higgins, Edmund S; George, Mark S (2009). Brain stimulation therapies for clinicians (1st ed.). American Psychiatric Publishing. p. 8. ISBN 9781585628902.
- ^ Winocur, G (1991). "Editorial". Canadian Journal of Psychology / Revue canadienne de psychologie. 45 (1). doi:10.1037/h0084384.
- ^ Milner, Peter M. (1974). "A model for visual shape recognition". Psychological Review. 81 (6): 521–535. doi:10.1037/h0037149. PMID 4445414.
- ^ Romera, Miguel; Talatchian, Philippe; Tsunegi, Sumito; Yakushiji, Kay; Fukushima, Akio; Kubota, Hitoshi; Yuasa, Shinji; Cros, Vincent; Bortolotti, Paolo; Ernoult, Maxence; Querlioz, Damien (2022-02-15). "Binding events through the mutual synchronization of spintronic nano-neurons". Nature Communications. 13 (1): 883. doi:10.1038/s41467-022-28159-1. PMC 8847428. PMID 35169115.
- ^ "Life Stories: Neuroscience pioneer Peter Milner taught at McGill". Montreal Gazette.
- ^ "Peter MILNER Obituary (2018)". Legacy.com.