Peter Milner

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

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 relocating 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 with the same supervisor as her, and later taught at McGill himself.^[2] In collaboration with James Olds,^[3] he is credited with the discovery of the pleasure centre and the pain centre in the brains of rats.^[4][5][6]

In his 1974 article "A Model For Visual Shape Recognition" Milner mentions a popular hypothesis suggesting that the features of individual objects are segregated and bound by means of synchronization of the activity of different neurons in the cortex.^[7] The theory, termed 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.^[8]

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.^[9][10]

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