Peter Milner

Peter Milner (1919 to 2018) was a British-born Canadian neuroscientist who trained first as an electrical engineer. He studied electrical engineering at the University of Leeds, worked on radar display systems for a British defence research establishment during the Second World War, and moved to Canada in 1944 to work on nuclear energy research at the Chalk River Laboratories. His interest turned to the brain through his wife, the neuropsychologist Brenda Milner, and he became a graduate student at McGill University in Montreal, where he later taught in the Department of Psychology for most of his career. Working with James Olds, he is credited with helping to establish the study of electrical self-stimulation of the brain and the neural basis of reward, including the discovery of brain areas in rats that act as pleasure and pain centres. He also wrote on visual shape recognition and discussed the binding-by-synchrony hypothesis of how neurons in different cortical regions are linked. In 2005 the Canadian Psychological Association gave him its Gold Medal for Distinguished Lifetime Contributions to Canadian Psychology.