Milner was born in Silkstone Common and grew up in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, England.
His father was David William Milner, a research chemist, and his mother was Edith Anne Marshall, an ex-schoolteacher.
[1] He worked at the UK's Air Defence Research and Development Establishment before moving to Canada in 1944.
[4][5][6] In his 1974 article "A Model for Visual Shape Recognition" Milner mentions a popular hypothesis suggesting that the features of individual objects are bound/segregated via synchronization of the activity of different neurons in the cortex.
[7] The theory, called binding-by-synchrony (BBS), is hypothesized to occur through the transient mutual synchronization of neurons located in different regions of the brain when the stimulus is presented.