Wilder Graves Penfield OM CC CMG FRS was
a pioneering neurosurgeon once dubbed
"the greatest living Canadian". He
expanded brain surgery's methods and
techniques, including mapping the
functions of various regions of the
brain such as the cortical homunculus.
His scientific contributions on neural
stimulation expand across a variety of
topics including hallucinations,
illusions, and deja vu. Penfield devoted
a lot of his thinking to mental
processes, including contemplation of
whether there was any scientific basis
for the existence of the human soul.
Biography 
= Early life and education =
Penfield was born in Spokane, Washington
on January 26, 1891 but spent most of
his early life in Hudson, Wisconsin. He
studied at Princeton University, where
he was a member of Cap and Gown Club and
played on the football team. After
graduation in 1913, he was hired briefly
as the team coach. He then obtained a
Rhodes Scholarship to Merton College,
Oxford, where he studied neuropathology
under Sir Charles Scott Sherrington. In
the meantime, he obtained his medical
degree from the Johns Hopkins School of
Medicine. He then spent several years
training at Oxford, where he met William
Osler. In 1924, he worked for five
months with Pio del Rio-Hortega
characterising the type of glial cells
known as oligodendroglia. He also
studied in Germany and New York.
= Medical career =
After taking a surgical apprenticeship
under Harvey Cushing, he obtained a
position at the Neurological Institute
of New York, where he carried out his
first solo operations to treat epilepsy.
While in New York, he met David
Rockefeller, who wished to endow an
institute where Penfield could further
study the surgical treatment of
epilepsy. Academic politics amongst the
New York neurologists, however,
prevented its establishment in New York,
so, in 1928, Penfield accepted an
invitation from Sir Vincent Meredith to
move to Montreal. There, Penfield taught
at McGill University and the Royal
Victoria Hospital, becoming the city's
first neurosurgeon.
In 1934, Penfield founded and became the
first director of the Montreal
Neurological Institute and Hospital at
McGill University, established with the
Rockefeller funding. That year, he also
became a Canadian citizen.
Penfield was elected a Foreign Honorary
Member of the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences in 1950 and retired ten
years later in 1960. He turned his
attention to writing, producing a novel
as well as his autobiography No Man
Alone.
In 1960, the year he retired, Penfield
was awarded the Lister Medal for his
contributions to surgical science. He
delivered the corresponding Lister
Oration, "Activation of the Record of
Human Experience", at the Royal College
of Surgeons of England on April 27,
1961. In 1967, he was made a Companion
of the Order of Canada and, in 1994, was
inducted into the Canadian Medical Hall
of Fame. Much of his archival material
is housed in the Osler Library at McGill
University.
= Later life =
In his later years, Penfield dedicated
himself to the public interest,
particularly in support of university
education. With his friends
Governor-General Georges Vanier and
Pauline Vanier, he co-founded the Vanier
Institute of the Family "to promote and
guide education in the home – man's
first classroom." He was also an early
proponent of childhood bilingualism.
Penfield died on April 5, 1976 of
abdominal cancer at Royal Victoria
Hospital in Montreal.
Scientific contributions 
= Neural stimulation =
Penfield was a groundbreaking researcher
and original surgeon. With his colleague
Herbert Jasper, he invented the Montreal
procedure in which he treated patients
with severe epilepsy by destroying nerve
cells in the brain where the seizures
originated. Before operating, he
stimulated the brain with electrical
probes while the patients were conscious
on the operating table, and observed
their responses. In this way he could
more accurately target the areas of the
brain responsible, reducing the
side-effects of the surgery.
This technique also allowed him to
create maps of the sensory and motor
cortices of the brain showing their
connections to the various limbs and
organs of the body. These maps are still
used today, practically unaltered. Along
with Herbert Jasper, he published this
work in 1951 as the landmark Epilepsy
and the Functional Anatomy of the Human
Brain. This work contributed a great
deal to understanding the localization
of brain function. Penfield's maps
showed considerable overlap between
regions a feature which he put down to
individual variation in brain size and
localisation; it has since been
established that this is due to the
fractured somatotropy of the motor
cortex.From these results he developed
his cortical homunculus map, which is
how the brain sees the body from an
inside perspective.
Penfield reported that stimulation of
the temporal lobes could lead to vivid
recall of memories. Oversimplified in
popular psychology publications,
including the best-selling I'm OK,
You're OK, this seeded the common
misconception that the brain
continuously "records" experiences in
perfect detail, although these memories
are not available to conscious recall.
Reported episodes of recall occurred in
less than five percent of his patients,
though these results have been
replicated by modern surgeons.
Penfield's hypothesis on this subject
was revised in 1970. His development of
the Penfield dissector, the
neurosurgical technique that produced
the less injurious meningo-cerebral
scar, became widely accepted in the
field of neurosurgery and remains in
regular use.
= Hallucinations =
Penfield's scientific contributions go
past the somatosensory and the motor
cortices, his extensive work of the
functions of the brain also included
charting the functions of the parietal
and temporal cortices. Of his 520
patients, 40 reported that while their
temporal lobe was stimulated with an
electrode they would recall dreams,
smells, visual and auditory
hallucinations, as well as out-of-body
experiences. In his studies, Penfield
found that when the temporal lobe was
stimulated it produced a combination of
hallucinations, dream, and memory
recollection. These experiences would
only last as long as the electrode
stimulations were present on the cortex,
and in some cases when patient
experienced hallucinatory experiences
that evoked certain smells, sensations
of flashing light, stroking the back of
their hand, and many others. While other
stimulations had patients experiencing
deja vu, fear, loneliness, and
strangeness. Certain areas of patients'
temporal lobes were stimulated with an
electrode in order to experience past
memories. Penfield called these
perceptual illusions interpretive
responses. According to Penfield, when
the temporal lobe was stimulated there
were two types of perceptions
experienced by patients:
Experential experience- where the
patient recorded hearing a song, or
seeing a flash of light.
Strip experience- The recall seems
familiar to the patient and comes from
the patient's past even though the
patient may not be able to pinpoint the
exact occasion. The recall of a memory
or memories could reenforce the emotion
tied to the experience.
Penfield stressed that the "things that
have been recorded are the things in
which once came within the spot-light of
attention." Penfield had over 25 years
of research using electrical stimulation
to produce experiential hallucinations.
His conclusions show that patients
experience a range of hallucinations
from simple to complex.
= Déjà vu =
Penfield's expansion of the interpretive
cortex includes the phenomena of déjà
vu. Déjà vu is defined as the sensation
that an experience an individual is
presently experiencing has previously
been experienced. Déjà vu is typically
experienced by individuals between the
ages of 15 to 25, and only affects
approximately 60-70% of individuals. It
is thought to be a mismatch of the
sensory input individuals receive and
the system in which the brain recalls
memory. Another thought on the cause of
déjà vu is that there is a malfunction
in the brain's short- and long-term
memory systems where memories become
stored in incorrect systems. There are a
couple of ways one can recognize
familiar experiences - by mentally
retrieving memories of a previous
experience, or by having a feeling that
an experience has occurred when it
actually has not. Déjà vu is having that
feeling of familiarity in a situation
that is completely new. Memory is good
at being familiar with objects, however
it does not do well with the
configuration or organization of
objects. Déjà vu is an extreme reaction
to the mind telling an individual that
they are having a familiar experience.
Déjà vu is thought to be a consistent
phenomenon. However, it has been
associated with multiple psychiatric
disorders such as epilepsy,
schizophrenia, and anxiety, but there
has not been a clear, frequent
diagnostic correlation between déjà vu
and psychiatric disorders, except with
patients that have a possibility of
being epileptic. Temporal lobe epilepsy
affects the hippocampus. Patients that
suffer from this medical diagnosis are
said to have a misfiring of the brain's
neurons. The neurons transmit at random
which results in the false sense of
experiencing a familiar situation that
had previously been experienced.
Different types of déjà vu are difficult
to pinpoint because researchers who have
studied déjà vu have developed their own
categories and differentiations. On a
broad perspective of research that is
available, déjà vu can be divided into
two categories - associative déjà vu and
biological déjà vu. Associative déjà vu
is typically experienced by normal,
healthy individuals who experience
things with the senses that can be
associated to other experiences or past
events. Biological déjà vu occurs in
individuals who suffer from temporal
lobe epilepsy. Their experience of déjà
vu occurs usually just before they
experience a seizure. Recent research is
looking at the new occurrence of chronic
déjà vu. Chronic déjà vu is when an
individual is experiencing a constant
state of déjà vu. Failure of the
temporal lobe is thought to be the cause
of this phenomenon because the circuits
that connect to memories get stuck in an
active state, and create memories that
never happened.
Legacy 
Avenue du Docteur-Penfield, on the slope
of Mount Royal in Montreal, was named in
Penfield's honour on October 5, 1978.
Part of this avenue borders McGill
University's campus and intersects with
Promenade Sir-William-Osler – meaning
medical historians and the like may
amuse themselves by arranging to "meet
at Osler and Penfield". A portrait of
Wilder Penfield hangs in Rhodes House,
Oxford. Penfield was elected a Fellow of
the Royal Society in 1943.
In popular culture 
Wilder Penfield was the subject of a
memorable Heritage Minute, dramatizing
his development of the Montreal
procedure. When Dr. Penfield stimulates
the seizure-producing part of her brain,
an epileptic patient exclaims: "I can
smell burnt toast!" This Heritage Minute
was widely shown and again made Penfield
a household name in Canada.
In Chapter 14 of Robert J. Sawyer's 2012
novel Triggers, it is revealed that the
major character of Dr. Ranjip Singh, a
Canadian, was inspired to pursue his
career in neuroscience by having seen
the "I can smell burnt toast" Heritage
Minute about Penfield.
In science fiction author Philip K.
Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric
Sheep?, characters use a household
device called a Penfield Mood Organ to
dial up emotions on demand.
The principal character in J.G.
Ballard's novel Super-Cannes is a
manipulative psychiatrist named Wilder
Penrose.
Shirow Masamune's anime series Ghost
Hound makes several references to
Penfield and his studies.
The song "Wilder Penfield" by the Dead
Sea Apes, a UK-based psychedelic rock,
from The Sun Behind The Sun, a
collaboration with Black Tempest
released in February 2013 on Cardinal
Fuzz records.
In Ray Loriga's 1999 novel Tokio ya no
nos quiere, Penfield's method of
stimulating the temporal lobes is
described and modified to treat the main
character who has issues with memory
recollection.
In the video game Xenosaga Episode I:
Der Wille zur Macht, "Penfield Mapping"
is seemingly the process of drawing a
cortical homunculus, necessary for one
to enter a virtual environment.
Notes 
References 
Selected books and publications 
Epilepsy and Cerebral Localization: A
Study of the Mechanism, Treatment and
Prevention of Epileptic Seizures.
Penfield, W., and Theodore C. Erickson.
Charles C Thomas, 1941.
Epilepsy and the Functional Anatomy of
the Human Brain. 2nd edition. Jasper,
H., and Penfield, W. Little, Brown and
Co., 1954. ISBN 0-316-69833-4
The Torch. Penfield, W. Little, Brown
and Co.; 1960. ISBN 1-299-80119-6. "A
story of love, treachery, and the battle
for truth in ancient Greece."
The Mystery of the Mind : A Critical
Study of Consciousness and the Human
Brain. Penfield, Wilder. Princeton
University Press, 1975. ISBN
0-691-02360-3
No Man Alone: A Surgeon's Life, Little,
Brown and Co., 1977. ISBN 0-316-69839-3.
Penfield's autobiography.
Something hidden : a biography of Wilder
Penfield . Jefferson Lewis, Doubleday
and Co., 1981. ISBN 0-385-17696-1.
Speech and Brain Mechanisms, Penfield,
Wilder and Roberts, Lamar, Princeton
University Press, 1959.
External links 
Famous Canadian Physicians: Dr. Wilder
Penfield at Library and Archives Canada.
Penfield's Order of Canada citation
Penfield Fonds at the Osler Library
Searchable Penfield-related data in the
Osler Library database
Penfield biography at the "Great
Canadian Psychology" website.
Wilder Penfield at the College Football
Data Warehouse
Wilder Graves Penfield, MD, OM, CC, FRS,
1891-1976 / text by Kate Williams and
Wilder G. Penfield III
