Dr. Karl Pribram

Georgetown University, Washington, DC

Curator and author

• Holonomic brain theory
• (2007) Karl Pribram

Articles sponsored or reviewed

• Intentionality
• (2007) Walter J. Freeman

FEATURED AUTHOR

SCHOLARPEDIA ARTICLES

Holonomic Brain Theory

Scholarpedia, 2(5):2735(2007).

Karl H. Pribram

Karl H. Pribram (b. February 25th 1919, Vienna, Austria) came to the USA in 1927. He received his BS and MD degrees at the University of Chicago and went on to become certified in the specialties of neurological surgery and behavioral medicine. Most of his career has been devoted to brain/behavior research which he pursued at the Yerkes Laboratory of Primate Biology; at Yale University and for thirty years at Stanford University where he received a lifetime career award from the National Institutes of Health as Professor of Neuroscience in the Departments of Psychology and of Psychiatry. The photo was taken at Stanford in the late 1980s.

Upon becoming emeritus at Stanford, Dr. Pribram became the James P. and Anna King Distinguished Professor at Radford University, supported for 12 years by the Virginia Commonwealth Eminent Scholars Program. He is currently Distinguished Research Professor in cognitive neuroscience at Georgetown and George Mason Universities. In 1992, he received an honorary doctorate in psychology from the University of Montreal, and in 1996 he received an honorary doctorate in philosophy from the University of Bremen.

Dr. Pribram is author of more than 700 papers and books such as Plans and the Structure of Behavior (with George Miller and Eugene Galanter); Languages of the Brain; Brain and Perception; and Freud’s Project Reassessed (with Merton Gill).

Among his 100 pre and post-doctoral students are the (emeritus) head of the Department of Experimental Psychology at Oxford and two heads of Laboratories at the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Pribram has received many awards -- including the Václav Havel Prize for “his fundamental contribution to the understanding of science as an integral part of general culture” and from the Society of Experimental Psychologists “for his seminal role in the cognitive revolution and for his pioneering contributions to the computational, theoretical and physiological foundations of brain function and behavior.”

He is currently working to finish an overview of what he has learned during his seven decade career.

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(originally featured on 18 April 2007)

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