In memoriam

John Lisman spent his entire scientific life at Brandeis University. He arrived as an undergraduate in physics, graduating in 1966, then took a PhD in physiology at MIT — a study of the ventral eye of the horseshoe crab Limulus polyphemus — followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard with the Nobel laureate George Wald. He returned to Brandeis as an assistant professor in 1974 and never left, holding the Zalman Abraham Kekst Chair in Neuroscience.

Two of his ideas became foundational. The first was a molecular model of long-term memory built around the autophosphorylating kinase CaMKII — a proposal, developed across decades, that a single protein switch could serve as a stable substrate for memories that outlast the molecules carrying them. The second was the theta-gamma neural code, set out in a 1995 Science paper with Marco Idiart and Ole Jensen, and refined in a landmark 2013 Neuron review: the idea that gamma oscillations nested within slower theta rhythms give the brain a clock for ordered information, with each gamma cycle representing a discrete item and each theta cycle binding roughly seven of them into a chunk. That framework reshaped how a generation of researchers thinks about working memory, capacity limits, hippocampal–prefrontal interaction, and the curious finding that the mind seems to hold about seven things at once.

Colleagues remember a polymath of infectious curiosity — a large, soft-spoken man who could see across fields and was unfailingly generous with his time. He worked into his final weeks, delivering a scientific talk by video from his hospital ICU bed not long before he died on 20 October 2017, aged 73.

His CSN conversation, recorded against the backdrop of his lecture, is one of the few extended recordings in which he presents the theta-gamma framework in his own voice.

Sources

• Lisa M. Lynch, “Professor John Lisman, renowned for work on molecular basis of memory, 1944–2017,” BrandeisNOW, 23 October 2017. brandeis.edu/now/2017/october/john-lisman.html
• Ole Jensen, Marco Idiart and colleagues, “John Lisman (1944–2017),” Neuron in memoriam, December 2017. cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(17)31088-7
• Marco Idiart, “Memories of John Lisman,” Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience / PMC, 2018. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5880948
• “John Lisman (1944–2017),” Science at Brandeis blog, 21 October 2017.
• “John Lisman – In Memoriam,” Volen National Center for Complex Systems, Brandeis University.
• Wikipedia: John E. Lisman. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_E._Lisman
• Lisman, J. E. & Idiart, M. A. P. (1995). “Storage of 7 ± 2 short-term memories in oscillatory subcycles.” Science, 267, 1512–1515.
• Lisman, J. E. & Jensen, O. (2013). “The theta-gamma neural code.” Neuron, 77, 1002–1016.