The Canada’s Walk of Fame inductee started at The Neuro when “the word neuroscience wasn’t really a word” and worked well into her 90s.
Brenda Milner’s face and name may not be as immediately recognizable to every Canadian as some of the other stars on Canada’s Walk of Fame — celebrities like Ryan Reynolds, Céline Dion, Margaret Atwood, Jim Carrey and Leonard Cohen — but Milner is a superhero in the world of cognitive neuroscience and she earned that fame here in Montreal.
On Monday, which happened to be Milner’s 106th birthday, the pioneering neuropsychologist was honoured with a Hometown Star event at The Montreal Neurological Institute Hospital. During more than seven decades of research and teaching at The Neuro, where she worked well in her 90s, Milner made many scientific breakthroughs pertaining to the function of the human brain and memory formation.
Milner became the oldest living inductee into the ranks of Canada’s Walk of Fame at a ceremony in Toronto last year, although she could not attend in person. The Hometown Star initiative gives inductees a chance to celebrate in their hometowns, and although Milner again attended virtually from her apartment a few blocks away, she was roundly feted by the staff and students at The Neuro with speeches, musical performances and a birthday cake.
Jeffrey Latimer, CEO of Canada’s Walk of Fame, announced at the event that his non-profit organization will donate $10,000 in honour of Milner to The Neuro.
“She revolutionized the field of neuropsychology, combining neurology and psychology, and is considered one of the most important neuroscientists of the 20th century,” Latimer said.
Dr. Lesley Fellows, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at McGill, who is a neuroscientist herself and a former colleague of Milner, said The Neuro staff celebrate Milner’s birthday every year, because she is so respected and such an inspiration.
“It’s very nice to see a scientist, of course a woman scientist, and someone who has been inspiring for many, and certainly for me,” recognized with a star on Canada’s Walk of Fame, Fellows said. “The word neuroscience … wasn’t really a word when Brenda started. It wasn’t how we talked about the field. In those days, people were not convinced we would be able to understand the biological mechanisms of thought in the human brain.”
She said Milner’s work and the research it inspired around the world “shows that we absolutely can understand the biological basis of thought and we can understand the basis of disease and we can make a real difference in the lives of patients.”
She added that Milner has always had a “radical confidence and curiosity to be willing to take methods to the human brain and figure out how this thing works.”
City counsellor Alex Norris, speaking for Mayor Valérie Plante, thanked Milner for contributing to Montreal’s reputation as a destination of choice for researchers and students from around the world.
Milner was born Brenda Langford in Manchester, England, on July 15, 1918. She earned a degree in experimental psychology from Cambridge University in 1936, and worked on a scholarship for two years at the Cambridge Psychological Laboratory. During the Second World War, the work of that laboratory was converted into a war project and Milner became part of a team that developed aptitude tests to distinguish fighter pilots from bomber pilots.
While working in Britain’s Ministry of Supply during the war, she met her future husband Peter Milner, an electrical engineer, who eventually became a neuroscientist in his own right. They married and moved to Montreal in 1944, where Brenda Milner began teaching at the Institut de Psychologie at the Université de Montréal.
She completed a master’s through Cambridge in 1949 and a PhD at McGill in 1952 under Dr. Donald Hebb, investigating the effects of temporal lobe damage in humans. She attained a tenured research position with the famous neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield at The Neuro, studying the behaviour of patients who elected to have parts of their brain tissue removed to treat severe epileptic seizures.
Milner subsequently made important breakthroughs, including the concept of multiple memory systems, identifying the regions of the brain involved in language, bilingualism and in spacial memory. She pioneered the use of sodium amytal to deactivate parts of the brain temporarily before surgery as a way to assess memory functions, which became widely used throughout the world.
In 1989, Milner and her colleague Michael Petrides established a centre for cognitive neuroscience at The Neuro. She was director of The Neuro’s Neuropsychology/Cognitive Neuroscience Unit until 1990, when she became McGill’s Dorothy J. Killam Professor of Psychology. In recent decades, Milner’s research has focused on how the brains of bilingual individuals handle language and how structure in the brain’s medial temporal lobe serve in the memory to locate objects and recognize their features.
Milner has won many prestigious academic and scientific awards over the years, including the 2005 Gairdner Award for outstanding achievements in medical research. In 2007, Milner donated $1 million to The Neuro by setting up a foundation in her name. She has been inducted into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame, the National Academy of Sciences in the U.S., the Order of Quebec and was promoted to the Companion of the Order of Canada in 2004. She has been awarded honorary degrees from more than 20 universities in Canada, the U.S. and Europe.
Milner watched Monday’s event at The Neuro from her home via Zoom, and enthusiastically thanked those in attendance after Latimer and a former graduate student of Milner, Marilyn Jones-Gotman, unveiled a plaque commemorating her induction into Canada’s Walk of Fame. The plaque will be placed in The Neuro’s “healing garden.” Milner’s star can be found on Canada’s Walk of Fame, which is located along King St. W and Simcoe St. in downtown Toronto.