Peter Milner (13 June 1919 – 2 June 2018) was a British-born Canadian

neuroscientist A neuroscientist (or neurobiologist) is a scientist who has specialised knowledge in neuroscience, a branch of biology that deals with the physiology, biochemistry, psychology, anatomy and molecular biology of neurons, Biological neural network, n ...

Biography

Milner was born in

Silkstone Common Silkstone Common is a village in the metropolitan borough of Barnsley in South Yorkshire South Yorkshire is a ceremonial and metropolitan county in the Yorkshire and Humber Region of England. The county has four council areas which are ...

and grew up in

Barnsley Barnsley () is a market town in South Yorkshire, England. As the main settlement of the Metropolitan Borough of Barnsley and the fourth largest settlement in South Yorkshire. In Barnsley, the population was 96,888 while the wider Borough has ...

South Yorkshire South Yorkshire is a ceremonial and metropolitan county in the Yorkshire and Humber Region of England. The county has four council areas which are the cities of Doncaster and Sheffield as well as the boroughs of Barnsley and Rotherham. In N ...

, England. His father was David William Milner, a research chemist and his mother was Edith Anne Marshall, an ex-schoolteacher. He worked at the UK's

Air Defence Research and Development Establishment The Air Defence Research and Development Establishment (ADRDE) was a civilian research organization run by the War Office that primarily studied the development of radar for British Army use. It was formed in 1941 from the merger of the Air Defenc ...

before moving to Canada in 1944. He was an electrical engineer, but became interested in neuroscience while his wife

Brenda Milner Brenda Milner (née Langford; July 15, 1918) is a British-Canadian neuropsychologist who has contributed extensively to the research literature on various topics in the field of clinical neuropsychology. Milner is a professor in the Department ...

was studying the subject at

McGill University McGill University (french: link=no, Université McGill) is an English-language public research university located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Founded in 1821 by royal charter granted by King George IV,Frost, Stanley Brice. ''McGill Universit ...

; he became a graduate student under the same supervisor as she, and later taught at McGill himself. In collaboration with

James Olds James Olds (May 30, 1922 – August 21, 1976) was an American psychologist who co-discovered the pleasure center of the brain with Peter Milner while he was a postdoctoral fellow at McGill University in 1954. He is considered to be one of the fou ...

, he is credited with the discovery the pleasure centre and pain centre in the rat brain. 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 Synchronization is the coordination of events to operate a system in unison. For example, the conductor of an orchestra keeps the orchestra synchronized or ''in time''. Systems that operate with all parts in synchrony are said to be synchronou ...

of the activity of different neurons in the cortex. 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. Milner received the Gold Medal for Distinguished Lifetime Contributions to Canadian Psychology from the

Canadian Psychological Association The Canadian Psychological Association (CPA) is the primary organization representing psychologists throughout Canada. It was organized in 1939 and incorporated under the Canada Corporations Act, Part II, in May 1950. Its objectives are to imp ...

in 2005.

References

1919 births 2018 deaths People from Barnsley Canadian neuroscientists British emigrants to Canada People from Yorkshire {{neuroscientist-stub