National Institute of Mental Health

Mortimer Mishkin received an AB from Dartmouth College (1946) and an MA (1949) and PhD (1951) from McGill University.  His MA thesis was directed by D.O. Hebb, and his PhD thesis, performed at Yale University, was directed jointly by H.E. Rosvold and K.H. Pribram.  In 1955, after completing postdoctoral research on monkeys with Pribram at the Institute of Living and on brain-injured war veterans with H.-L. Teuber at New York University's Bellevue Medical Center, he joined Rosvold at NIMH where, in 1980, he became chief of the Laboratory of Neuropsychology (LN), and, in 1994, an Associate Director for Basic Research in NIMH.  He stepped down from both positions in 1997 but remains chief of the Section on Cognitive Neuroscience within LN as well as acting chief of LN and Visiting Professor at University College London's Institute of Child Health (UCL/ICH).  He was president of the Society for Neuroscience in 1986, he is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he serves on the advisory boards of several scientific journals and university research institutes.

 In his research, Mishkin uses a multidisciplinary approach to investigate the neurobiological mechanisms underlying learning and memory in both humans and nonhuman primates.  In monkeys, this approach involves: (a) utilizing metabolic mapping techniques, including both autoradiography and neuroimaging, to delineate the cerebral territory belonging to a particular functional neural system; (b) studying the effects of selective lesions within that territory on the performance of specially designed learning and memory tasks in various sensory modalities, in the attempt to separate and identify different mnemonic functions and localize their critical neural substrates; (c) applying anatomical tracing techniques, to reveal how the different substrates belonging to a functional family are organized as components of a neural system or circuit; (d) recording electrophysiological activity within the identified substrates, to determine the nature of the information those neurons receive and transmit before, during, and after learning; and (e) injecting pharmacological agents into those same substrates, to relate the learning-dependent changes in behavior and neuronal activity to the underlying cellular and synaptic mechanisms. The learning and memory mechanisms uncovered in the research on monkeys serves as the basis for a search for homologous mechanisms in humans, including brain-damaged patients, examined both neuropsychologically and neurobiologically in collaboration with a team at the UCL/ICH.

Mortimer Mishkin Vita