Mortimer Mishkin (December 13, 1926 – October 2, 2021) was an American neuropsychologist, and winner of the 2009

National Medal of Science The National Medal of Science is an honor bestowed by the President of the United States to individuals in science and engineering who have made important contributions to the advancement of knowledge in the fields of behavioral and social scienc ...

awarded in Behavior and Social Science.

Life and career

Born in

Fitchburg, Massachusetts Fitchburg is a city in northern Worcester County, Massachusetts, United States. The third-largest city in the county, its population was 41,946 at the 2020 census. Fitchburg is home to Fitchburg State University as well as 17 public and private e ...

in December 1926, Mishkin graduated from

Dartmouth College Dartmouth College (; ) is a private research university in Hanover, New Hampshire. Established in 1769 by Eleazar Wheelock, it is one of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution. Although founded to educate Native ...

in 1946, and took a 1949 M.A. and 1951 Ph.D. from

McGill University McGill University (french: link=no, Université McGill) is an English-language public research university located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Founded in 1821 by royal charter granted by King George IV,Frost, Stanley Brice. ''McGill Univer ...

under

Donald O. Hebb Donald Olding Hebb (July 22, 1904 – August 20, 1985) was a Canadian psychologist who was influential in the area of neuropsychology, where he sought to understand how the function of neurons contributed to psychological processes such as l ...

. His Ph.D. thesis was partly directed by surgeon and theorist

Karl H. Pribram Karl H. Pribram (; ; February 25, 1919 – January 19, 2015) was a professor at Georgetown University, in the United States, an emeritus professor of psychology and psychiatry at Stanford University and distinguished professor at Radford Univer ...

. In 2010 Mishkin won the National Medal of Science for his five decades of work on the mechanisms of cognition and memory, and the discovery that the brain processes memories in two separate processes: cognitive memory dealing with events and fresh information, and behavioral memory related to skills and habits. As of 2016 Mishkin was Chief of the Section on Cognitive Neuroscience, Laboratory of Neuropsychology,

National Institute of Mental Health The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) is one of 27 institutes and centers that make up the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The NIH, in turn, is an agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services and is the prima ...

, chartered to explore neurobiological mechanisms of perception and memory. He is also recognised for his role in establishing the

two streams hypothesis The two-streams hypothesis is a model of the neural processing of vision as well as hearing. The hypothesis, given its initial characterisation in a paper by David Milner and Melvyn A. Goodale in 1992, argues that humans possess two distinct visu ...

on the organisation of extrastriate visual cortex (with Leslie Ungerleider). Mishkin died in October 2021, at the age of 94.

Awards

* APA Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Psychology, 1985 *

William James Fellow Award The William James Fellow Award is an award of the Association for Psychological Science which "honors APS Members for their lifetime of significant intellectual contributions to the basic science of psychology". The requirement is that "recipient ...

, awarded by the

Association for Psychological Science The Association for Psychological Science (APS), previously the American Psychological Society, is an international non-profit organization whose mission is to promote, protect, and advance the interests of scientifically oriented psychology in ...

, 1989 * Ariëns Kappers Medal, 1989 *

Karl Spencer Lashley Award The Karl Spencer Lashley Award is awarded by The American Philosophical Society as a recognition of research on the integrative neuroscience of behavior. The award was established in 1957 by a gift from Dr. Karl Spencer Lashley. Recipients * 20 ...

, for "pioneering analysis of the memory and the perceptual systems of the brain, and his seminal contributions to the understanding of the higher nervous system function", 1996 * Metlife Foundation Award for Medical Research in Alzheimer's Disease, 1999 *

, 2010 *

Grawemeyer Award The Grawemeyer Awards () are five awards given annually by the University of Louisville. The prizes are presented to individuals in the fields of education, ideas improving world order, music composition, religion, and psychology. The religion awa ...

given by the

University of Louisville The University of Louisville (UofL) is a public research university in Louisville, Kentucky. It is part of the Kentucky state university system. When founded in 1798, it was the first city-owned public university in the United States and one ...

, 2012 *

NAS Award in the Neurosciences The NAS Award in the Neurosciences is awarded by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences "in recognition of extraordinary contributions to progress in the fields of neuroscience, including neurochemistry, neurophysiology, neuropharmacology, develop ...

, 2016

References

External links

2006 video oral history interview with Mishkin on History of Neuroscience
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mishkin, Mortimer 1926 births 2021 deaths People from Fitchburg, Massachusetts American cognitive neuroscientists National Medal of Science laureates Scientists from Massachusetts Dartmouth College alumni McGill University alumni 20th-century American scientists 21st-century American scientists Members of the National Academy of Medicine