More about Henry Molaison (Wikipedia)

Henry Gustav Molaison (February 26, 1926 – December 2, 2008), known widely as H.M., was an American who had a bilateral medial temporal lobectomy to surgically resect the anterior two thirds of his hippocampi, parahippocampal cortices, entorhinal cortices, piriform cortices, and amygdalae in an attempt to cure his epilepsy. Although the surgery was partially successful in controlling his epilepsy, a severe side effect was that he became unable to form new memories. His unique case also helped define ethical standards in neurological research, emphasizing the need for patient consent and the consideration of long-term impacts of medical interventions.

More about Hubel & Wiesel (Wikipedia)

David Hunter Hubel FRS (February 27, 1926 – September 22, 2013) was an American Canadian neurophysiologist noted for his studies of the structure and function of the visual cortex. He was co-recipient with Torsten Wiesel of the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (shared with Roger W. Sperry), for their discoveries concerning information processing in the visual system.

Torsten Nils Wiesel (born 3 June 1924) is a Swedish neurophysiologist. With David H. Hubel, he received the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, for their discoveries concerning information processing in the visual system; the prize was shared with Roger W. Sperry for his independent research on the cerebral hemispheres.

Wikipedia: Neuroscience of free will

On several different levels, from neurotransmitters through neuron firing rates to overall activity, the brain seems to “ramp up” before movements. This image depicts the readiness potential (RP), a ramping-up activity measured using EEG. The onset of the RP begins before the onset of a conscious intention or urge to act. Some have argued that this indicates the brain unconsciously commits to a decision before consciousness awareness. Others have argued that this activity is due to random fluctuations in brain activity, which drive arbitrary, purposeless movements.

A re-enactment of the discovery of self-stimulation in 1954. Left to right: Seth Sharpless, Peter Milner, Jim Olds. The rat is being placed in a box with a runway to test its tendency to return to the place where it previously received stimulation.

Peter Milner (13 June 1919 – 2 June 2018) was a British-Canadian neuroscientist.

He worked at the UK’s Air Defence Research and Development Establishment before moving to Canada in 1944. He was an electrical engineer, but became interested in neuroscience while his wife Brenda Milner was studying the subject at McGill University; he became a graduate student under the same supervisor as she, and later taught at McGill himself. In collaboration with James Olds, he is credited with the discovery of the pleasure centre and the pain centre in the rat brain.

In his 1974 article “A Model for Visual Shape Recognition” Milner mentions a popular hypothesis suggesting that the features of individual objects are bound/segregated via synchronization of the activity of different neurons in the cortex. The theory, called binding-by-synchrony (BBS), is hypothesized to occur through the transient mutual synchronization of neurons located in different regions of the brain when the stimulus is presented.

Milner received the Gold Medal for Distinguished Lifetime Contributions to Canadian Psychology from the Canadian Psychological Association in 2005.

James Olds (May 30, 1922 – August 21, 1976) was an American psychologist who co-discovered the pleasure center of the brain with Peter Milner while he was a postdoctoral fellow at McGill University in 1954. He is considered to be one of the founders of modern neuroscience and received numerous distinctions ranging from election to the United States National Academy of Sciences to the Newcomb Cleveland Prize of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.