Concept

Mark Rosenzweig (psychologist)

Summary
Mark Richard Rosenzweig (September 12, 1922 – July 20, 2009) was an American research psychologist whose research on neuroplasticity in animals indicated that the adult brain remains capable of anatomical remodelling and reorganization based on life experiences, overturning the conventional wisdom that the brain reached full maturity in childhood. Rosenzweig was born on September 12, 1922, in Rochester, New York, to Jews of Eastern European origin, in which his bilingual parents (his lawyer father and homemaker mother spoke both English and German) helped foster an interest in language and learning. He attended the University of Rochester there planning to major in history, but ended up switching to psychology and receiving a bachelor's degree in 1943 and a master's degrees in 1944 with a focus on auditory perception. Following the completion of his studies in 1944, he enlisted in the United States Navy, initially serving as a radar technician at the Anacostia Naval Station. He was later relocated to Tsingtao in China, where he was stationed on the seaplane tender USS Chincoteague. He attended Harvard University after completing his military service in 1946, and was awarded a Ph.D. in 1949. His thesis showed that the connections between the cochlea and the cerebral cortex could be monitored using electrodes placed on the scalp, without requiring cranial surgery. Rosenzweg was hired by the University of California, Berkeley in 1949 as an assistant professorship in physiological psychology, and remained on its faculty until he retired in 1991. Dissatisfied with existing textbooks in biological psychology, he and colleague Arnold Leiman wrote a textbook in the 1980s that is still in print. Rosenzweig initiated experimental research upon enriched environment and the brain. Donald O. Hebb, in 1947, had found that rats raised as pets performed better on problem solving tests than rats raised in cages. But his research did not investigate the brain directly nor use standardized impoverished and enriched environments.
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.