Most of us know researcher and Dana Alliance member Brenda Milner from her decades-long work with amnesiac Patient H.M. (Henry Molaison) and the peek into memory he offered. While Mr. Molaison died in 2008, she still is at the lab bench, continuing to delve into the mind and brain.

In this week’s New York Times, she told interviewer Claudia Dreifus she’s working to tease out what are left/right brain differences. Here’s my favorite exchange:

We all loved H.M. Yet it was very strange, psychologically, because when he died we all felt as if we’d lost a friend. And this is funny because one thinks of friendship as a bilateral thing. He didn’t recognize us or know us, and we felt we’d lost a friend.

We also did a Q&A with Milner, in 2010, with this fabulous photo of her: 

    She was generous with her time, and just as excited about her work. And she gave us great quotes, like this one:

I had a chance to change fields at the end of the first year, and I thought, ‘I’ll do philosophy!’ And then people from my college said, ‘Brenda, don’t you have to earn a living?’ (I was as poor as a church mouse then, I was on scholarships.) They said, ‘No one ever learned a living doing philosophy, so forget that!’ And now comes the real bit of luck. In England, in Cambridge pre-World War II, experimental psychology was grouped with philosophy and ethics, under the “moral sciences.” Since I had mentioned philosophy, they suggested psychology because [as a psychologist] you could always get a job as a factory inspector.

Then I discovered I was good at it. I was a good observer and I enjoyed working with people in the lab. But it was luck, you see. I didn’t even know what psychology was!

In 2007, a Dana Gray Matters radio segment featured her work with Mr. Molaison—you can listen to or read a transcript of the segment, which includes the voices of both Dr. Milner and Mr. Molaison. Following Mr. Molaison’s death, the Dana Foundation partially funded the dissection and digital preservation of his brain as part of the Brain Observatory Project. Now we all can be brain researchers. Investigate the micrometer-thin slices built into 3-D images and see what in his surgically damaged anatomy could have led to the extreme and specific memory losses he showed.

--Nicky Penttila

Formal education often does not address the social and emotional backgrounds of children and their ability to learn, according to Ingrid Wickelgren, moderator at a recent New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS) event titled Social and Emotional Learning: Preparing our Children to Excel. She argued that parents and other caregivers send children to school, assuming that the teacher will pour math, reading, and science into their tiny little brains. Bam! Done! In reality, learning is infinitely more complicated—some students are better-behaved, pay closer attention, complete homework assignments, and others don’t. The level of learning, she pointed out, is due to differences in executive functions such as attention, memory, planning skills, problem solving, and task switching in the brain. While being presented with new information and skills, children should also be given better ways such as mindfulness and other mental training to absorb and learn that information.

One of the event’s speakers, Amishi Jha, Ph.D., associate professor of psychology at the University of Miami, focused on the concept of mindfulness, defining it as “a mental mode characterized by attention to present moment experience without conceptual elaboration or emotional reactivity.” At first, I wondered: Is she suggesting that we don’t use our brains to think? Am I “mindful”? Jha said mindfulness can train our brains to function more efficiently and calmly, without analyzing or thinking about the past or future. Most importantly, it can improve attention and other executive functions.

She then addressed the concept of “wandering attention,” a phrase coined by psychologist William James, who believed taming wandering attention produces an excellent education. Jha agrees. Wandering attention is a central issue in brain conditions such as ADHD, but it also refers to losing one’s focus. To test our ability to manage selective attention and resist distraction, Jha asked us to close our eyes, select one aspect of our breathing, and focus on it. I thought about coffee, the Lincoln biography I’m reading, how I would get home from the event, etc. She prompted the audience to “gently return our attention” and remarked that we probably weren’t aware that our thoughts had wandered – often a subconscious action caused by the way our brains are wired. She told us that mind wandering can have harmful effects on a person’s well-being when manifested as “rumination or worry” but, positive effects when expressed as “constructive internal reflection.”