Mortimer Mishkin, Ph.D.
Chief, Section on Cognitive Neuroscience.
Mortimer Mishkin, a cognitive neuroscientist in the Laboratory of Neuropsychology (LN) at the NIMH, studies brain/behavior relations in humans and nonhuman primates. With his colleagues, he helped to identify some of the areas in the cerebral cortex that are essential for perception and memory. This work showed that knowing what a stimulus is and knowing where it is depends on the activity of separate sensory "pathways" or "streams", each made up of many cortical areas arranged in a hierarchy. He and his colleagues discovered further that the cortical sensory streams in each modality stimulate two different brain circuits required for memory: a cortico-limbic circuit, responsible for the memory of facts and events; and a cortico-striatal circuit, responsible for the learning of different types of habits and motor skills. Mishkin began his graduate work in 1947 at McGill University under D.O. Hebb, with whom he did his Master's thesis on perception in the left and right visual fields. In 1949 he moved to Yale University, where he completed his Ph.D. thesis for McGill on the effects of temporal lobe lesions
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in monkeys on visual perception and learning under the tutelage of H.E. Rosvold and K.H. Pribram. From 1951 to 1955 he was a Postdoctoral Fellow with Pribram at a primate neurobehavioral research laboratory they set up at the Institute of Living in Hartford, Connecticut; during this same period he traveled biweekly to the New York University-Bellevue Medical Center to work with H.-L. Teuber on the cognitive effects of brain injuries in wounded war veterans.
In 1955, Mishkin moved to the NIMH to rejoin Rosvold who had just established a Section on Neuropsychology within the Laboratory of Psychology. The section later gained the status of a laboratory, and Mishkin became its chief in 1980, when Rosvold retired. In 1994 he became an Associate Director for Basic Research at the NIMH. In 1997, he stepped down from these positions to become chief of the Section on Cognitive Neuroscience within LN. Mishkin was president of the Division of Physiological and Comparative Psychology of the American Psychological Association in 1969, and of the Society for Neuroscience in 1986. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine, and he serves on the advisory boards of several scientific journals and university research institutes.
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