Re: Karl Pribram, in Memorium

[Roulette Wm. Smith, Ph.D.]

Thank you for posting this Fred. I had not seen any previous announcements of Karl's death. I knew him and his daughter Joan quite well, especially during his tenure at Stanford. Indeed, it was upon Karl's recommendation that I discussed my theory of the molecular basis of long-term memory with Linus Pauling. Although Pauling disagreed with my thesis, he (i.e., Pauling) in a passing remark provided the crucial clue that affirmed my thesis. US Patents #7,826,974 B2 and #8,954,284 are direct derivatives of those conversations with Karl and Linus.

Roulette Wm. Smith, Ph.D. - Director
Institute for Postgraduate Interdisciplinary Studies
P. O. Box 60846
Palo Alto, CA 94306 USA
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/pub/roulette-wm-smith/8/ab9/255/
Email: na...@postgraduate-interdisciplinary-studies.org

--- Original message ---
Subject: Karl Pribram, in Memorium
From: Frederick D Abraham <frederick...@gmail.com>
To: <chao...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Saturday, 07/02/2015 3:39 PM

 

	[ Image ] Karl Pribram 1919-2015 Karl H. Pribram, the eminent brain scientist, psychologist and philosopher, died of cancer on January 19, 2015, at age 95, at his home in Virginia. Dr. Pribram has been called the "Magellan of the Mind" for his pioneering research into the functions of the brain’s limbic system, frontal lobes, temporal lobes, and their roles in decision making and emotion. Born in Vienna, Austria in 1919, to a Czechoslovakian father and Indonesian mother (both distinguished bacteriological researchers) Pribram attended grammar school in Gstaad, Switzerland, and high school at Culver Military Academy in Indiana, from which he graduated in 1936. He received his BS degree from University of Chicago in 1939 and received his MD in 1941, becoming one of the first 300 board-certified neurosurgeons in the world. During his years as a practicing neurosurgeon (1941-1948) first in Memphis, Tennessee and then in Jacksonville, Florida, he began his collaboration on primate research with Karl Lashley at the Yerkes Primate Center, where Pribram succeeded Lashley as director and also introduced numerous human surgical techniques to the field of animal research. During Pribram's subsequent ten years (1948-58) on faculty at Yale University in New Haven, CT, Pribram simultaneously established a research lab at the Institute for Living in Hartford, which "became a mecca for students intensely interested in the relationship between brain and behavior.” In 1958-59, Pribram joined the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University in Palo Alto. During his subsequent 30 years at Stanford University (1959-1989), Pribram pioneered the field of neuropsychology (a term that he coined), leading groundbreaking research into the interrelations of the brain, behavior, and the mind. Upon becoming emeritus at Stanford in 1989, Pribram was named Eminent Scholar of the State of Virginia, and Distinguished Professor of Psychology and director of the BRAINS center (Brain Research and Informational Sciences), a research laboratory created for him at Radford University. Over this same period (1989-2013) he was also appointed Distinguished Professor in the Engineering and Computer Science Department at George Mason University, and (simultaneously, up to his death) also served as Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. Pribram authored more than seven hundred books and scientific publications, including: Plans and the Structure of Behavior (with George Miller and Eugene Galanter, 1960), which is credited with launching the “Cognitive Revolution in Psychology”; Languages of the Brain (1971), an early influence upon neural networks and pattern recognition; Freud’s Project Re-assessed (with Merton Gill, 1976); and Brain and Perception (1991) which expands Pribram's long-established holonomic theory of memory and perception, and has become the subject of numerous popular books, including Michael Talbot’s The Holographic Universe and Lynne McTaggart’s The Field,among many others. He edited the publications of the proceedings of a series he founded of international brain conferences with papers presented by distinguished scientists and Nobel laureates, through the 1990s. Pribram’s recent and final publication, The Form Within (2013), provides the 200-year history of brain research from his 70-year-long insider point of view. (Pribram's theory and data papers may be found on his website KarlPribram.com. Pribram was the recipient of more than sixty major international awards and honors, including a lifetime grant from the US Office of Naval Research; a Lifetime Research Career Award from the National Institutes of Health; a Lifetime Achievement Award from both the Society of Experimental Psychology and from the Washington Academy of Sciences; honorary doctorates in psychology and neuroscience from the universities of Montreal, Canada and Bremen, Germany; and an Outstanding Contributions Award from the American Board of Medical Psychotherapists. Pribram was also the first laureate to receive the Dagmar and Vaclav Havel Award for uniting the sciences and the humanities. [ Image ] Karl Pribram is survived by Katherine Neville, and his five children: John Pribram of Charlottesville, Virginia; Joan Pribram-Jones of Redwood City, California; Bruce Pribram of Brooklyn, New York; Cynthia Pribram-Byrne of Bruce,Wisconsin; and Karl S. Pribram of San Francisco, California. Also surviving him are five grown grandchildren: Sarah Pribram of Shelburne,Vermont; Megan Pribram of Brooklyn, New York; Aurora Pribram-Jones of Tustin, California; Thomas Pribram-Jones of Redwood City, California; and Andrew Pribram-Riddell of Prague, Czech Republic; as well as one great-grandchild, Aiyada Pribram-Jones of Thailand. A memorial service and tribute to Karl H. Pribram will take place in October, 2015, in Washington, DC; the date, when determined, will be posted at KarlPribram.com. Letters may be sent to website contact form. In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions may be made in support of The Smithsonian Libraries’ Neville-Pribram Mid-Career Educators Awards, established in 2013 by Karl H. Pribram and Katherine Neville. To learn more click here or call 202-633-2241. Oil Portriat by ZL Feng and Photo Credit: Katherine Neville

 

[gus koehler]

Thank you Fred.  I too had not read or heard of Pribram's passing.  The giants that shaped the thinking of our--my-- time are removed by death from the stage leaving us midgets to stand on our own now displaced from the shoulders of such giants.  Who are their replacements upon whose shoulders younger scholars than I are standing?  I missing the excitement of reading Pribram's books and articles. As the obit notes he will be well remembered. 

Gus

[Alan Bachers]

Roulette and Fred -

Having met Karl only at several neurofeedback related meetings and read his recent The Form Within, he deeply influenced the leading edge of the neurofeedback field's NeurOptimal system (www.neuroptimal.com) in the person of Valdeane Brown, its developer.  Similarly to Roulette, Pribram's mark remains also deep in the evolution of this leading edge technology. Val's tribute:

I encountered Karl while at Georgetown University as a undergraduate, majoring in Psychology and Philosophy. He presented to us as a guest lecturer and began revealing to us his perspective on perception and memory as distributed phenomenon mediated through interference pattern detection, an orientation he called the “Holographic Brain”. His discussed his emerging dialogs with Denis Gabor, the mathematician responsible for “Gabor Transforms”, who received the Nobel Prize for inventing Holography. Karl ended the presentation talking about Freud’s posthumously published “The Project For A Scientific Psychology”, and how, if you understood it’s mechanically energetic model as an information-processing based approach to energy management by and of the brain, that you begin to really understand “the go of it”. He ended by saying: “And at some point we’ll have technology that will allow us to do this real-time, to give information-based feedback directly to the brain, to help relieve suffering.” I asked a few questions and saw, for the first time, the look he gave to people as they understood and appreciated his work and, the vision for what became NeurOptimal® was born.

I ran into Karl many years later, in 2000 I believe, at a FutureHealth conference, where I had begun to present the transition from the Five Phase Model to the Period 3 Approach, and how the mathematics of Joint Time-Frequency Analysis coupled with Non-linear, Dynamical Control Processes was moving towards a truly integrated approach to neurofeedback that was significantly safer, more efficient, and easier to implement than the more usual, supposedly “operant conditioning” classical approaches. Later, in the lobby of the hotel, Karl approached me to say that I had “just summed up the last 25 years of my <his> professional career” and I mentioned his presentation at Georgetown from almost 30 years before. His eyes lit up and said: “Are you that young, long haired guy in the back who asked about Gabor Transforms?”; I said, “yes” and a professional connection turned into a collegial period of shared presentations and a friendship.

I can’t overestimate the influence on me of this amazing person. He will be profoundly missed but I hope also deeply honored for the fundamental and comprehensive work he did over 7 decades in pioneering the perspective of the Holographic Brain, and the “go of it” in minute detail.

Alan Bachers

[Frederick D Abraham]

This is such a touching eulogy to Karl that it brought me to tears.  I could not have come close to this eloquent insight into Karl and his work.

But it does prompt me to respond not about Karl, but about the people who were attracted to him.

Sam is a great example of someone who learned and benefitted and translated that into a life of exemplary professional and personal accomplishment.  For me, one of the main benefits of my occasional visits to Karl at Radford, was to meet Sam, who has been one of the best commentators on chaopsych over the years  We think alike, and perhaps form a mutual admiration society who regrettably have few moments in which to meet face to face.

I also have wanted to comment on Katherine, and Sam's comment on her really struck home.  Like Karl, she is an extremely talented, brilliant, and energetically engaged in life.  I wrote her that the best thing in Karl's life was finding her.  Brilliant, I remember having breakfast in their home once, and brought up my problem to distinguish words like metaphor and simile, etc, to which she rattled off pages worth of the distinctions.  You probably noticed that she was the photographer of the photo of Karl in the announcement.  She started as a model, and then became a professional photographer.  From there she segued somehow to some accounting expertise, and worked for a firm whose clients were mostly Forbes 500ers.  They sent her to the Mideast as sort of a way to get that competent female out of their hair. It turned out that this exile resulted in her informing the client (OPEC) that they were in a position to control the oil market, and the result was the long gas lines of the mid 1974 I think it was.  Her first novel made the NYT best seller list immediately and was partly borne of her experience in the Mideast.  Karl lamented to me that his recent book only went to so many copies while hers far eclipsed it in sales in no time at all.  It is true that I could read it faster than Karl's book, and found them equally fascinating.  Their fondness for each other was intense, like that of a couple of teenagers in love for the first time.  

Others people are writing their anecdotes, some on chaopsych and other lists/groups, and a few to me personally, and I will post some of those with permission, and others, such as Mark Filippi, who has a story similar to Sam's about Karl's help,I will urge to share. 

fred

On Mon, Feb 9, 2015 at 2:20 PM, <sam...@aol.com> wrote:

Fred was a friend of Karl's -- as was his brother.  So it's no surprise he could write warmly and wisely of the many contributions Karl and his many former students have made [and should continue to make].  His account was so fine I hesitate to write; but, as Fred knows, many of us owe Karl our own thoughts.  With apologies to my fellow lab rats, here goes:

Karl Pribram worked for, sought to guide, and seemed to live in the future.

He saw the many flaws -- and many more exaggerations -- in science, philosophy, and politics.

As a young man, he challenged the accepted wisdom of prefrontal lobotomy.  As a young professor, he worked with George Miller and Gene Galanter to provide rigor to cognitive psychology.  He brought the accomplishments of Russian psychophysiology [Luria, et al] to the West -- and constituted, from time to time, the primary scientific and humanistic link to the Soviet Union.  He led the movement to recover the wisdom of Freud's Project.  His experimental work on brain networks transformed the view -- emphasizing the role of dynamics and context [as Fred knows better than I]; his focus on the key roles the hippocampus plays led to the recent Nobel Prize.  Further, his resistant to the "common wisdom" led him to work with Dennis Gabor and others, suggesting the then-"absurd" notion of quantum effects in biological systems.

This last, still leading-edge view of brain physics led me to bring one of the leading computational physicists to his Center in the early 1990's.  Despite this expert's standing, he confessed to me that state-of-the-art theory could not even evaluate Karl's work.  The expert challenged Karl's use of some abstruse approaches; Karl answered so directly and transparently that I assumed [for a moment] that I could understand him.  The expert fell back in his chair [literally] and responded, "Karl, that's the clearest explanation of one of the deepest theory I've ever heard."  Karl responded, characteristically, "Everybody will grasp that fifty years from now."

My fellows in the Lab accepted Karl's statement as commonsensical.  The rule his lab rats lived by for half a century: what Karl said ten years ago remains controversial, what he wrote twenty years ago is now the leading edge, what he worked on 25 years ago remains inconceivable [for the moment].

Karl was as kind and generous as he was brilliant.  He worked to make life gentler all his life.  He ignored the hostility of those whose work he overturned -- even though his insistence that accepted theory need revision as learning continued.  His fearlessness, likely, cost him a Nobel more than once; he responded to the vanquished scholars with respect and generosity.

He was a wise and tolerant adviser who helped me navigate the NIMH when my son was stricken with a complex affective disorder.  He encouraged me to search continually for plausible treatments and to recognize when they were failing.  My son's recovery is due as much to his guidance and spirit as it is to the brilliance at NIMH and Josh's own courage.

Katherine and he were always open and welcoming; I owe them more than I can write.

As do the rest of us.

Sam Leven, PhD

Principal

Technical Paradigm, Inc.

West Palm Beach, FL

--

Frederick David Abraham, Chair, Green Mountain Swing Scholarship Fund

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