Lawrence Weiskrantz FRS (28 March 1926 – 27 January 2018) was a British neuropsychologist. Weiskrantz is credited with discovering the phenomenon of blindsight, and with establishing the role of the amygdala in emotional learning and emotional behavior.^[1] Blindsight is when a person with a brain injury causing blindness can nevertheless detect, point accurately at, and discriminate visually presented objects.^[2]

Weiskrantz originally attended Girard College, a boarding school in Philadelphia, due in part to the death of his father when he was six.^[3] After graduating, he attended Swarthmore College and served in World War II.^[3] Shortly before his graduation, he was awarded a Catherwood fellowship at Oxford University.^[3]

Weiskrantz became Professor of Psychology at Oxford University where he remained a full professor until retirement in 1993.^[3] He then became an emeritus professor of the university and an emeritus fellow of Magdalen College.^[3] Weiskrantz had a lifelong interest in the writings and research of the Russian neuropsychologist Alexander Luria, whom he had met and befriended while Luria was still doing research.^[4] The two remained colleagues until Luria's death in 1977.^[4] In the 1950s Weiskrantz went on to ellucidate the region of the temporal lobe responsible for the erratic emotional behaviors in Klüver-Bucy syndrome, a phenomenon known since the 1930 which came to inspire the limbic brain hypothesis of emotion.^[1] Although this hypothesis did not live to its claims, Weiskrantz used instrumental fear conditioning in lesioned animals to identify the temporal structure responsible for Klüver-Bucy syndrome.^[1] Ever since, the amygdala has remained crucial in the scientific understanding of emotion.^[1] Weiskrantz is generally credited with having discovered the phenomenon of blindsight following his book on this subject in 1986, which is the voluntary visually evoked response to a stimulus presented within a scotoma.^[4]

Academic and service positions he held included:

• Part-time Lecturer, Tufts University, 1952
• Research Associate, Inst. of Living, 1952–55
• Senior Postdoctoral Fellow, US National Research Council, 1955–56
• Research Associate, University of Cambridge, 1956–61
• Assistant Director of Research, Cambridge, 1961–66
• Reader in Physiological Psychology, Cambridge Univ., 1966–67.
• Founding President of the European Brain and Behaviour Society, 1969
• Professor of Psychology, Oxford University, and Fellow, Magdalen College, Oxford, 1967–1993;
• Professor Emeritus, Oxford University, 1993–2018 and Emeritus Fellow, Magdalen College, Oxford, 1993–2018.
• Honorary President of European Society for Philosophy and Psychology.
• Inaugural President of European Brain and Behaviour Society.
• President of Association for Scientific Study of Consciousness.

Weiskrantz supervised at least 10 PhDs, including Alan Cowey, Charles Gross, Nicholas Humphrey, Susan Iversen, and Melvyn A. Goodale.

Weiskrantz was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1980.^[5][6] He was on its council in 1988–1989.^[3] He was a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and of Academia Europaea.^[3] Weiskrantz served on the Council of the Fyssen Foundation.^[3]

Weiskrantz was a medalist of the Royal Society of Medicine and a medalist of the American Association for Advancement of Science.^[3] He delivered the Heisenberg Lecture of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences/Siemens Foundation and the Ferrier Lecture of the Royal Society.^[3] In 1997 he was awarded with an honorary doctorate at Tilburg University, the Netherlands.

• Analysis of Behavioural Change, 1967
• The Neuropsychology of Cognitive Function, 1982
• Animal Intelligence, 1985
• Blindsight: A case Study and Implications, 1986 ISBN 0198521294
• Thought Without Language, 1988
• Consciousness Lost and Found, 1997