Cognitive Processes and the Brain: An Enduring Problem in Psychology

The volume does not advance a single thesis but instead frames the relationship between cognition and the brain as an 'enduring problem' in psychology. The editors, Peter M. Milner and Steven E. Glickman, assembled selected readings that represent fundamentally different approaches to this problem. By juxtaposing texts from behaviorist, Gestalt, physiological, and emerging information-processing traditions, the collection forces readers to confront the fact that these traditions do not share basic assumptions about what cognition is or how it should be studied. The 'enduring' quality of the problem lies precisely in this conceptual pluralism: there is no neutral ground from which to adjudicate among these perspectives, and each generation of researchers must confront the same foundational disagreements.

The volume was edited by Peter M. Milner and Steven E. Glickman. Peter M. Milner was a psychologist at McGill University and was Brenda Milner's husband; they married in 1952. The shared surname has caused persistent cataloguing confusion, with some sources incorrectly attributing the volume to Brenda Milner rather than Peter Milner. Steven E. Glickman was a psychologist known for work on motivation and learning. The volume appeared in Van Nostrand's 'Insight Book' series, a line of affordable paperbacks designed to make classic readings accessible to students. It includes a contribution by Brenda Milner titled 'Memory Disturbance After Bilateral Hippocampal Lesions,' which appeared on pages 97–111.

Brenda Milner's contribution, 'Memory Disturbance After Bilateral Hippocampal Lesions,' is a key chapter in the volume's treatment of brain-behavior relationships. It draws on her pioneering work with patient H.M., the amnesic patient whose bilateral medial temporal lobe resection in 1953 produced profound anterograde amnesia while leaving other cognitive functions intact. Milner's chapter demonstrates that memory is not a unitary faculty but depends on specific brain structures, and that the hippocampus and adjacent regions play a critical role in the formation of new long-term memories. Her inclusion in the collection reflects the editors' recognition that clinical neuropsychology—the study of patients with focal brain damage—provided some of the most compelling evidence for linking cognitive processes to specific neural substrates.

The 1965 publication date places the volume at a transitional moment. Behaviorism still dominated much of academic psychology, but the cognitive revolution was gaining momentum through work in linguistics, information theory, and computer science. Physiological psychology and clinical neuropsychology offered alternative routes to understanding cognition by studying brain-damaged patients and animal models. The volume's organization around an 'enduring problem' rather than a settled paradigm reflects this period of ferment: the editors were not presenting a unified cognitive psychology but documenting the diversity of approaches that coexisted—and competed—at the time. Its inclusion of both classic texts and contemporary research made it a useful teaching resource for courses grappling with these foundational questions.

The volume is a period piece, not a current survey. Its readings reflect the state of knowledge in the early 1960s, before functional neuroimaging, before the molecular biology revolution in neuroscience, and before cognitive psychology consolidated into the paradigm that would dominate the following decades. The specific findings reported in several chapters have been superseded, and the theoretical frameworks—particularly behaviorist approaches to cognition—have largely been abandoned. However, the volume retains historical value as a documentary record of how psychologists and neuroscientists conceptualized the mind-brain problem at a pivotal moment. For readers interested in the development of Brenda Milner's work, her chapter provides an accessible summary of her early memory research and its theoretical implications.