IN MEMORIAM. Professor emeritus Risto Näätänen

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Professor Emeritus Risto Näätänen, formerly of the Institute of Psychology of the University of Tartu, died on 5 October. Born on 14 June 1939, Risto was an honorary doctor not only of the University of Tartu, but also of Jyväskylä and St Petersburg universities and the universities of Barcelona and Helsinki. Moreover, he was appointed to the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Russian Academy of Sciences and Academia Europaea. Risto lived a long and productive life and gave to the world of science an index of cognitive dysfunction known as Mismatch Negativity (MMN). The brain’s ability to ascertain differences in input is not only a theoretically exciting quality of the brain, but represents a great opportunity to provide an objective indication of the state and potential of the brain. Risto’s fruitful scientific career is reflected in the more than 84,000 citations to his works in Google Scholar and an h-index of 143, making him one of the most widely referenced Estonian and Finnish scientists. He received a number of prestigious awards and broad recognition for his work: colleagues close to him say he was even nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Risto was born into the family of a military officer in Vyborg, a formerly Finnish territory later annexed by Russia. These Karelian roots meant he understood only too well what Soviet occupation meant for Estonia. He was one of the main instigators and biggest supporters of meetings between Estonian and Finnish psychologists well before Estonia regained its independence. The window Risto opened was the one through which Estonian psychology emerged into the international world of science. He began actively promoting Estonian psychology in 2007 when the University of Tartu selected him as its George Soros Professor of Psychology (in the field of cognitive neuroscience). He became a Professor Emeritus of the university in 2019.

In addition to being a great scientist, Risto was a convivial and observant colleague whose thoughts and conversation almost always led to MMN. This included when he ran with the idea of researching where the memory cell related to the ‘õ’ vowel was located in the brains of Estonian speakers, since this was missing in the brains of Finnish speakers like Risto himself. The article he published on this topic in Nature magazine in 1997 has since been cited more than 1500 times. Risto helped to set up a brain imaging laboratory in Tartu which would become the hub of MMN and other cognitive research in Estonia bearing the Näätänen trademark known the world over. Risto’s final book, The Mismatch Negativity: A Window to the Brain (Oxford University Press 2019), shows that MMN is one of the most sensitive tools for the early discovery of neurological and psychiatric illnesses, enabling intervention to at least slow their progress. Risto was very proud of the fact that over 6000 works mentioning MMN have been registered in the biggest global scientific database, the Web of Science. This reflects the ongoing work of universities, hospitals and laboratories around the world in further developing Risto’s discovery.

Risto will run no more marathons in Helsinki or elsewhere, or do smaller circuits around his Tartu neighbourhood of Toomemägi. Risto has come and gone, but MMN as a window into human cognition is here to stay.

University of Tartu Institute of Psychology