James Olds

James Olds (May 30, 1922 – August 21, 1976) was an American psychologist who co-discovered the pleasure center of the brain with Peter Milner while he was a postdoctoral fellow at McGill University in 1954. He is considered to be one of the founders of modern neuroscience and received numerous distinctions ranging from election to the United States National Academy of Sciences to the Newcomb Cleveland Prize of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Olds was born in Chicago, Illinois, and grew up in Nyack, New York. His father, Leland Olds, later became chairman of the Federal Power Commission under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. His grandfather George D. Olds was the ninth president of Amherst College.

Olds attended college at a number of schools including St. John's College, Annapolis, and the University of Wisconsin but received his undergraduate B.A. from Amherst College in 1947. His undergraduate years were interrupted by military service in the U.S. Army during the Second World War as part of the Persian Gulf Command. Following the war, Olds went on to get his Ph.D. at Harvard University in the Department of Social Relations under Professor Talcott Parsons. His thesis was focused on motivation and led to his subsequent interest in the biological basis of motivation. Olds married fellow neuroscientist Marianne E. Olds in 1946. They had two children, Jacqueline Olds and James Leland Olds.

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