This discovery, as well as Milner’s future work, led to a greater scientific understanding of different types of memory

I talked with Milner by phone last week. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

How would you describe the field of neuropsychology?

I suppose it's the idea that as a psychologist, I'm a student of behavior, the scientific study of behavior. That’s my definition of experimental psychology. Where you make the leap into neuropsychology is by thinking that you should try to correlate these behavioral phenomena, such as memory or perception, with what is going on in the brain. And of course, before we knew so much about the brain, it was just speculation. But the more we found out about the brain, the more reasonable this approach seemed to be.

In World War II, you spent some time performing aptitude tests on fighter pilots and bomber pilots. What was that like?

In World War II, scientists in the U.K. were a reserved occupation; they couldn’t be drafted into the army. If I had gone into the arts, I would have been in uniform and maybe been in France. But scientists were considered brains that could be used at home, so I was in Cambridge. I had just completed my bachelor's degree in 1939 when war broke out. I had a scholarship from my college for two years research.

In Cambridge, we were very near a lot of airfields where planes were taking off and landing. It became very natural that our department was working on research that was relevant to the Airforce. What I had been interested to study, even before the war, was perception and what you do when you get conflicting information from different senses. Or what happens if you get sensations as you’re flying a plane that disagree with what your instruments are telling you. What we were doing in Cambridge—we were working with the Airforce to try to decide which of the incoming airmen who were going to be pilots, which of them should be directed to fly in bomber planes and which should be directed to fly in fighter planes.

Everybody had to trust their instruments, but there were many different tasks ... we were looking over the whole array of what these potential pilots had done on various tests. And of course it all depended on the needs of the moment. At the Battle of Britain, we needed fighter pilots, but later in the war, the emphasis was on bombing German cities. They were exciting years.

Did you face any sexism early in your career?

No, I’ve never seen any sexism. I didn't find it difficult. The Montreal Neurological Institute, when I went there, was a very authoritarian place. Dr. Penfield was a very dominant figure— when you were young and new there, you didn’t speak out of turn. It was hierarchical, but it was not sex discrimination.

The only gender discrimination I discovered was a structural one: When I was in high school, I decided I wanted to go to Cambridge University. There were very few women students at Oxford or Cambridge, and back then the women couldn’t go to the men’s colleges. In 1936, across the whole university and all three years it took to get your B.A., there couldn't be more than 400 women, and there were thousands of men. To get into one of these women’s colleges, there were very few places. And I had to get scholarships because I had no money. The situation that was competitive was structural in that there were so few women’s [places].