Karl Pribram’s Biography

While Dr Karl Pribram is widely known for his quantum “Holonomic Brain Theory” of memory storage and retrieval, he was once dubbed “The Magellan of the Mind” for his breakthrough research on the functions of the forebrain, the frontal lobes, temporal lobes, and limbic system, and their roles in decision making and emotion. His holonomic theory of memory and perception has been the subject of numerous popular books, including Michael Talbot’s The Holographic Universe, Marilyn Ferguson’s The Aquarian Conspiracy, and Lynne McTaggart’s The Field, among many others.

Born in Vienna in 1919, Pribram received his medical degree from the University of Chicago at the age of twenty-three, becoming one of the first 300 certified brain surgeons in the world. During his next decade as a neurosurgeon in Memphis and Jacksonville, he joined Karl Lashley at the Yerkes Primate Center, became its director, and pioneered the field of neuropsychology—a term that Pribram invented. 

He spent the following sixty-five years leading groundbreaking research into the interrelations of the brain, behavior, and the mind: ten years at Yale University, thirty years at Stanford University, and more than twenty years (simultaneously) as distinguished professor of Psychology at Radford University, of Neural Networks in the Engineering School at George Mason University, and as distinguished professor of Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.

Pribram was the author of more than 700 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); Freud’s “Project” Re-assessed (with Merton Gill, 1976); Brain and Perception (1989); andThe Form Within (2013.) 

During his long career, he was the recipient of more than 70 major awards and honors, including a Lifetime Grant from the U.S. Office of Naval Research; a lifetime Research Career Award from the National Institutes of Health; Lifetime Achievement Awards from 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. He was the first recipient of the Dagmar and Vaclav Havel VIZE 97 Award for excellence in his contributions toward uniting the Sciences and the Humanities.