Karl H. Pribram 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. However, most of his career over the past six decades has been devoted to brain/behavior research which he pursued at the Yerkes Laboratory of Primate Biology; at Yale University where Pribram taught neurophysiology and physiological psychology; 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 Psychiatry.

Upon becoming emeritus at Stanford, Pribram accepted the position of James P. and Anna King Distinguished Professor at Radford University where he remained for 12 years as an Eminent Scholar of the Virginia Commonwealth. He is currently teaching as 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.

Pribram is author of more than 200 data and 200 theory papers as well as 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). He is currently completing an overview of what he has learned during his career.

Among his 100 pre and post-doctoral students are many professors including the (now emeritus) head of the Department of Experimental Psychology at Oxford and two heads of Laboratories at the National Institutes of Health. Pribram has received over 20 major awards from psychological, biological, engineering and philosophical societies for his experimental and theoretical contributions – and was the first recipient of the prestigious European Havel Prize for “his fundamental contribution to the understanding of science as an integral part of general culture”. His most recent award was presented by 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.”