Celebrated neuroscientist Wilder Penfield (1891-1976) is the subject of today's animated Google Doodle on what would have been the 127th anniversary of his birth.
A brilliant man once hailed as "the greatest living Canadian", Penfield is known for developing the Montreal Procedure along with colleague Herbert Jasper in 1950, a treatment for cerebral seizures that destroys troublesome nerve cells by zapping them with electrical probes while the patient is still awake.
More famously, Penfield's experiments with charged stimulation led to his being able to map the brain's sensory and motor cortices and discovering in the process that physical parts of the brain could be teased into evoking memories, like recalling the unmistakeable odour of burnt toast.
Google Doodles
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1/80 Virginia Woolf
Google Doodle celebrating Virginia Woolf
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2/80 Wilder Penfield
Google Doodle celebrating Wilder Penfield
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3/80 Sergei Eisenstein
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4/80 Winter Solstice
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5/80 St Andrew's Day
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6/80 Gertrude Jekyll
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7/80 Children's Day 2017
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8/80 Cornelia Sorabji
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9/80 Pad Thai
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10/80 Jackie Forster
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11/80 Halloween 2017
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12/80 Studio for Electronic Music
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13/80 Selena Quintanilla
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14/80 Olaudah Equiano
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15/80 Fridtjof Nansen
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16/80 Amalia Hernandez
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17/80 Dr Samuel Johnson
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18/80 Sir John Cornforth
Google Doodle celebrating Sir John Cornforth
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19/80 British Sign Language
Google Doodle celebrating British Sign Language
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20/80 Eduard Khil
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21/80 James Wong Howe
Google Doodle celebrating James Wong Howe
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22/80 Eiko Ishioka
Google Doodle celebrating Eiko Ishioka
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23/80 Eva Ekeblad
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24/80 Fourth of July
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25/80 Wimbledon Championship
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26/80 Victor Hugo
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27/80 Google Doodle celebrating Oskar Fischinger
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28/80 UK General Election 2017
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29/80 Zaha Hadid
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30/80 Richard Oakes
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31/80 Google Doodle celebrating the Antikythera Mechanism
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32/80 Ferdinand Monoyer
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33/80 Google Doodle celebrating Giro d'Italia's 100th Anniversary
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36/80 Google Doodle celebrating Sergei Diaghilev
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37/80 Google Doodle celebrating St. Patrick's Day
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38/80 Google Doodle celebrating Holi Festival
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39/80 Google Doodle celebrating St. David's Day
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40/80 Abdul Sattar Edhi
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41/80 Seven earth-sized exoplanets discovered
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42/80 Bessie Coleman
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43/80 Caroling
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45/80 Walter Cronkite
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46/80 Ladislao José Biro
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48/80 The history of tea in Britain
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49/80 Autumnal equinox 2016
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50/80 Paralympics 2016
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51/80 Nettie Stevens
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52/80 Father's Day 2016
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53/80 Elizabeth Garrett Anderson
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57/80 World Twenty20 final
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58/80 William Morris
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59/80 St Patrick's Day 2016
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62/80 International Women's Day 2016
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64/80 Leap Year 2016
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65/80 Lantern Festival 2016
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66/80 Stethoscope Inventor, René Laennec
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This finding enabled Canada to lead the post-war world in neuroscience and healthcare and offer better lives to those suffering with epilepsy. His work also advanced our understanding of such phenomena as hallucinations, illusions and deja vu.
Penfield was actually born in Spokane, Washington, in the US, however. He grew up in Hudson, Wisconsin, before studying at Princeton and earning a Rhodes scholarship to Merton College, Oxford, in 1915. Interrupting his neuropathology studies almost immediately to serve in a French military hospital during the First World War, he was wounded the following year when the SS Sussex was torpedoed.
Returning to Oxford, Penfield married his sweetheart Helen Kermott and returned to the US to study at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, before spells in Boston, New York City and Germany.
From the mid-1920s, Penfield spent his days at the Neurological Institute of New York working on a cure for epilepsy. However, when academic politics saw Rockefeller-funding for a new research institute blocked in 1928, Penfield relocated to Quebec, teaching at the prestigious McGill University and Royal Victoria Hospital before serving as Director of the former's new Montreal Neurological Institute. He became a Canadian citizen in 1934 and went on to achieve the breakthroughs for which he is best known.
The recipient of innumerable honours, Penfield was immortalised by the great science fiction writer Philip K Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), the basis for Ridley Scott's film Blade Runner (1984). Dick used his name for the "Penfield Mood Organ", which allowed his characters to dial up any emotion they wish to feel on demand. His first name was adopted by another dystopian author, J.G. Ballard, for the protagonist of his late novel Super-Cannes (2000), one Wilder Penrose.
- More about:
- Wilder Penfield
- Canada
- Brains
- Neuroscience
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