Interview with Brenda Milner, Ph.D., Sc.D. American Academy of Neurology Oral History Project December 2, 2011 (c) 2011 by the American Academy of Neurology All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy and recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the American Academy of Neurology. American Academy of Neurology Oral History Project Interview with Brenda Milner, Ph.D., Sc.D. CC, GOQ, FRS, FRSC Dorothy J. Killam Professor of Psychology Montreal Neurological Institute [MNI] and Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery McGill University Montreal, Quebec, Canada Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital Montreal, Quebec, Canada December 2, 2011 Heidi Roth, MD and Barbara W. Sommer, Interviewers Brenda Milner: BM Heidi Roth: HR Barbara W. Sommer: BWS BWS: I’d like to start the interview for the American Academy of Neurology. It is December 2, 2011. We are interviewing Dr. Brenda Milner, Dorothy J. Killam Professor of Psychology at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery at McGill University. The interviewers are Dr. Heidi Roth, Associate Professor, Department of Neurology, University of North Carolina School of Medicine, and Barbara W. Sommer. We are in the conference room on the sixth floor of the Montreal Neurological Institute. We could start the discussion, you were talking a little bit about your – before we get into the discussion about the work that you do – would you talk to us a little about your background? HR: It’s so hard to know where to start – isn’t it? BM: I was going to ask you where to start – because, because there is so much that could be said. When you have lived to be ninety-three – there is a lot of background. [laughing] – [Tell us] a little bit about your education and how you feel your education, sort of, propelled you in the direction you took –. 1 HR: – maybe when you started – when you were growing up, maybe starting a little bit with your family. BM: Yes, I think I should start with my family. Well, I’m an only child, and my father was a musical critic on the Manchester Guardian, now the Guardian, a newspaper in England. I grew up in Manchester. He was also a grower of pleasure, of delphiniums and plants and so on. And he was also a professional pianist though his main work was a musical critic. And my mother – who came from a broken family in Birmingham – she went to my father – she was living in Manchester – she went to my father for music lessons, and that’s how she met him. And this is a point because he was twenty-three years older than my mother, and he died when I was eight. But during those first years, he was a tremendously important figure in my life because he would be going in the evening to an opera or a concert – Manchester was a big musical center then – and so he was at home in the mornings and I would have a lot of time with him. Neither of my parents were in science atall, but they assumed I would be musical, and I’m not atall, I’m absolutely not musical. And there was a long time of persuading them, but because I was so much in love with language, my father finally accepted that I was not musical. He found me practicing on the dumb piano – they had a dumb piano to loosen up your fingers before a concert1 – for a pianist – and I didn’t mind working there, I didn’t mind reading the notes or doing anything like that – as long as I didn’t have to hear music. And so –, but I loved language from the very beginning. And I read so much Shakespeare with my father and I used to go around, as a little child – I believe – spouting Shakespeare to the slight embarrassment of my mother everywhere. And so I got a little drunk with words very early, and I think I also got my love of foreign languages – and I really feel so strongly about that – because this was – it was, you know, I was born in 1918, and so near the end of the war [World War I] – but – Germany was really the place in music and my father was going to Europe and writing on early modern, all this kind of thing, and so German was a language that I heard a lot of. And the first foreign language I learned a little bit of – when I was very young – was German. And so, it always seemed to me – and I don’t speak German now – it always seemed to me very normal – and I 1 A dumb piano is a soundless piano used for practice and finger exercise as well as limbering up fingers before a concert. 2 feel very – this is where I agree with Dr. [Wilder] Penfield, the founder of this Institute [Montreal Neurological Institute - MNI] – that it is tremendously important to have more than one language early on. It’s a passion with me. So this was what I was like when I was very young. And so my education – my father didn’t approve very much of the normal kinds of schooling around – and so, as long as my father was alive I was at home working with him – I remember this – and I remember he would be upstairs, you know, resting and I would be doing some Shakespeare or something with him – and then there’d be a knock at the door and I would go down and answer the door – my mother would be out shopping or something. There would be the inspector for the schools, you know. I was six-and-a-half; why was I not in school? I would go upstairs – “He wants to know why I’m not in school.” And my father said, “Go down and ask him if he speaks German.” “My Daddy wants to know if you speak German.” “No, of course not.” And then I’d go back up. “Well, then, tell him he should go back to school.” [laughs] So this was how I remember those years with my – growing up. And then my – and oh – and something you should know before all that because I actually think this is interesting – is that, you know I was born in 1918 and I had the Spanish flu – the famous Spanish flu – when I was six months old; and my mother, who was thirty-four, also had it; and we both survived and my mother lived to be ninety-five. She had a much harder life than I had in many ways, but she lived to an – So, you know, we had that big stroke against us, and we must have had – I always say I owe – why I am sort of healthy at ninety-three – I say well I owe it to my genes, to my mother – but, you know, both of us must have been pretty resistant. My father didn’t catch it, and that’s the sort of age distribution they had for H1N1, right? My father was sort of older and he didn’t catch it, but we both caught it. And, but the consequence of that, which was a little unfortunate I think for me, was that I was supposed to – I don’t know whether I had or not because medicine was rather primitive – I was supposed to have a slightly funny, little weak heart thing, that I would grow out of because of the flu. And so I wasn’t allowed to play games – sports – until I was eleven, I think. And I’ve always been very bad – I’m tremendously interested in sports – I’m absolutely passionate – I was passionate about cricket and soccer in England – and last year having the soccer to watch was wonderful. And I make do, 3 I make do, with hockey – I’m not very interested in tennis. But my school that I went to later was very, you know – we had wonderful playing fields and we had hockey and lacrosse and netball in the winter and cricket and tennis in the summer and so on, but I wasn’t allowed to participate in any of this until I was eleven. And I wonder if some of the reason that I was so bad at it was because I started it so late. And I would have loved to have been, loved to have been, good at these sports, but I was not. I was the sort of person when they were picking teams, you know, I was left at the very end. “You have to go into one team or the other.” So anyway that was my early upbringing. And then when my father died – this was a big change, of course. We had no money. The Guardian did not – it was very prestigious paper – but it was not especially generous. My mother had a tiny little pension that disappeared totally in three years. And so, you know, it was a problem. But they managed to get me into – probably at a reduced rate, I don’t know (laughing) – into Withington Girls’ School, which has become a very, very prestigious girls’ school in England now. But not a –, but a day school you know, my mother didn’t want me going away. And so I went there, and this is where people now talk about high school being from twelve or something here, but there it was high school from the age of nine right through.