So did my lab. We now had yet another powerful tool to study how the brain operated. It was going to allow us to make a more detailed analysis of the brain function of the patients with their callosum sectioned. Now we could study what one half brain was up to, without interference from the competing functions of the opposite half brain. In fact, the opposite half brain could serve as a control. We could try to find out whether perceptual or cognitive processes of one half brain were calling upon cortical and/or subcortical processes to carry out its activity. If fibers had been spared during split-brain surgery, we could study both their discrete functions and any information that they were carrying. And what would come about if we combined all of these techniques to study our patients? To say we were excited is an understatement. We were champing at the bit.
The small meetings I had organized were having an impact on my thinking and research. Not only did we do the regular meetings that I have already described, but we began to hold meetings in which we explored particular topics. These meetings focused on the early history of humans and what made them special, Leon’s new passion. We explored areas rich in archaeological interest and prehistory, such as Jerusalem, Seville, and the South of France. Being part of those explorations was teaching me to paint a larger canvas when thinking about the brain. This kind of cross-disciplinary work is almost impossible to achieve within a university structure, where one is tied to a particular field of study both by inclination, time, and, yes, group affiliation, rivalries, and turf wars. Probing at the edges of scientific fields, or even trying to incorporate other disciplines into your own, takes major intellectual and social effort. What started out as a form of intellectual curiosity morphed into a serious agenda for scholarly growth. In the end, these special meetings proved to be a big part of my academic life. Their message was clear and motivating: Take risks at the edges of scholarship and seek integration. Most forays won’t yield anything, but some certainly will.
We decided that we wanted to use all available approaches to brain imaging, and we wanted to do those studies with only the best scientists. In the past, we had welcomed them into our labs when they had simple computer-based tests to run. Now, for the heavier-duty brain imaging tests that required advanced, expensive equipment, we traveled to their labs with our patients. “Have patients, will travel” became our motto. That meant we could live anywhere. Did it really matter which airport you flew out of or into to get the work done? Forces were conspiring to move me from New York.
SIMPLIFYING OUR LIVES
Charlotte and I were the proud parents of two small children. Try as we might, New York City proved challenging, especially as we felt more comfortable living the more leisurely country life. We were also tired of driving the Eleganza up Interstate 95 once a month, year after year. While it had been tremendously fun for us and convenient for the patients, it was getting old. Our testing equipment was getting more complex, and the trips were not hospitable to our electronics. On almost every trip, we had to run into the local computer store for various repairs on the spot, as critical pieces had been jostled and broken by the journey. Meanwhile, the storage of the van back in New York was becoming an irritant. One of the postdocs was moving it and managed to back into a Rolls-Royce. I started talking up the idea that we get a place in Vermont, and Jeff got on board. Jeff and I were the ones doing most of the driving and testing and were convinced we had to do something. We could sell the van and cobble together a down payment for the small house, where we could both stay and test. This would cut down on our travel costs and benefit everyone. We egged each other on, even though deep down we still thought the idea had a snowball’s chance in . . . ah, Palm Springs.
It was early in the spring of 1985 that we met our solution. On one of our trips, Charlotte and I saw the perfect house. Nestled in the woods, yet close to the main street in Norwich, it was just across the Connecticut River from Hanover, New Hampshire, where Dartmouth is located. We had looked at others in our spare time, but this one caught our fancy. Designed by a young South African architect and freshly built by two spectacular local craftsmen, Christopher Jackson and Michael Whitman, it was a post-and-beam clapboard cabinlike structure on ten acres. I fell in love with it even though there was one problem. The asking price was $195,000, a sum that seemed impossibly high for a research project. I took a picture of it and we returned to New York.
Phil Guica was Cornell’s financial head at the time, and I gave him a call. He knew all about our troubles with the van. I told him all the logic of buying the house and the plan for covering the costs. He sort of listened but then simply asked, “How much?” I winced and said, “Well, one hundred and ninety-five thousand.” He said, “One hundred and ninety-five thousand, for the whole thing? Do you know what a studio apartment in Manhattan costs? Sure, go ahead.” And bingo, the deal was done. Then tragedy hit. Jeff came down with his lung disease in the next weeks and died. He never saw the place.
As we spent more time in Norwich, the Dartmouth community grew on me once again. It’s the whole package, rooted in the sublime beauty of the Connecticut River’s Upper Valley. Add to this the support of everyone from neurologists to psychiatrists. It wasn’t long before my wife and I grew to love it.
My work at Dartmouth was also going well, and Alex Reeves, the chair of neurology at Dartmouth, very matter-of-factly asked me if I would like to move to Dartmouth Medical School. I blathered something. Before I knew it, Alex had arranged for an endowed chair and a position in the psychiatry department. Tenure at Dartmouth Medical School for a Ph.D. could only be granted to someone in a department that was part of the medical school. It could not be granted to a clinical grouping such as neurology. I had pretty much decided to take it when Fred Plum asked to see me.
Fred started in with a “life-is-bigger-than-all-of-us” voice and I could see what was coming. So I said, “Fred, before you go on, I thought I should tell you I have decided to take a position up at Dartmouth. What with all the work I do up there, I thought it would make a lot of sense.” Well, a big smile broke out, followed by a hardy round of congratulations, and all ended well. For all I know, Fred knew all about the offer and was going to nudge me to take it. After all, I already had tenure at Cornell and that was getting expensive for him.
Exhilaration always accompanies a move. People in different regions think about both academic and personal life differently. The fast, buzz-saw New York life gives way to the “aw-shucks, let’s do this together” kind of life in a small town. Some of that is good and some of it can be a little jarring, especially if a move happens quickly.
SCIENCE IN THE WOODS
In the years following Jeff’s death, and in the waning days of my life in New York, I turned into a bit of a loner and was somewhat depressed. We would go up to New England for long periods of time, and I started to do all the experimental preps and to run the experiments myself (Figure 31). It was a lot like being a graduate student again. At the same time, I was still running a large lab down at Cornell, and I had many responsibilities. Every lab of any size has key individuals playing almost selfless roles to keep it all working. Helping me keep these two lives together were all kinds of talented people, some of them with traditional training and some with unique styles and talents. Bob Fendrich was unique and everybody loved him. He represented the best in science and yet, paradoxically, was elusive, almost invisible.
FIGURE 31. At my office in the Norwich, Vermont, house lab. In many ways, it was exhilarating to conduct all the experiments by myself: running the camera, programming the computers, designing the experiments, and administering the tests.
(Courtesy of the author)
Bob was another eye-tracker specialist and had also trained at the New School for Social Research. I hadn’t realized that Jeff had been bringing Bob to our labs after work for the past several years. Bob would fix this or that and help Jeff in various ways. Right after Jeff died, Bob and I met to discuss the possibility that he join the lab. I really knew n
othing about him, so I gave him a grant to read and suggested that he get back to me with what he thought about the research. Within a couple of days, a five-page summary was in my hands, beautifully written, perceptive, and just plain first-rate. Bob, with all of his quirks, was now part of the lab. He brought with him tremendous scientific talent and standards. Bob was and remains the real deal and a wonderfully kind and gentle soul to boot.
With the formal move to Dartmouth, it was time to abandon my double life of two labs, two places to live, and the wear and tear that life inevitably brings. I needed a solid scientific group in the Upper Valley. I needed to recruit my team, and I needed to raise money to pay for it all. Life as a lone country scientist working away at his home-based lab wasn’t going to cut it. And there was plenty to do. To my delight, Bob, though a veteran New Yorker, said he was in. Next was Mark Tramo, a young neurologist just finishing his residency with Plum. Mark was also a musician and had a driving passion to understand more about music and the brain. After a couple of delicious meals overlooking a dramatic waterfall at the Simon Pierce restaurant in Quechee, he was in as well. Kathy Baynes was easy to recruit. She was part of the granite of New Hampshire and had gone to Plymouth State College. Even though she had just received her Ph.D. in neurolinguistics from Cornell, she thought it was a great idea to head north. Another talented postdoctoral student, Patti Reuter-Lorenz, opted in as well. And finally, one of Hillyard’s students, Ron Mangun, called. His wife wanted to do a residency in neurosurgery at Dartmouth. He asked, “If that works out, how about a job?” It did. A couple of years later, Ron became part of the backbone of my efforts. We started professional societies, wrote books, and got some great science done, too.
Of course, there is always the problem of space: None was available. We were all wondering what to do when someone figured out we could have the basement and first floor of an old white colonial house, Pike House, right across the street from Mary Hitchcock Hospital (Figure 32). The second floor was housing the AIDS program at Dartmouth, but the rest could be ours. We went to look it over. While we had our doubts that there was enough room, it looked sort of classy and was definitely one of a kind. We squeezed in. Fendrich took one of the basement rooms, and Tramo crammed a soundproof booth into the other. He didn’t use it much, so Mangun took it over when he arrived for his electrophysiological studies.2 Baynes took a first-floor room for an office, two more were set aside for testing patients, one for a small seminar room, another for our secretary, and I had the back room. Tramo took a front room upstairs, and others were squeezed into corners. It worked.
FIGURE 32. Our beloved Pike House at Dartmouth.
(Courtesy of the author)
All such enterprises, of course, require money. At Cornell we had successfully launched what is called a “program project” grant from the NIH. It was the first “cognitive neuroscience” program project in the country. It showed that the interdisciplinary approach to dealing with topics in mind/brain research could compete with the more traditional topics of straight neurophysiology or behavioral analysis. Such grants have five or six separately funded sections and, in the aggregate, amount to a lot of money. Fortunately, we were able to bring along the grant we’d used at Cornell, and, in due course, successfully renew it at Dartmouth.
As I already mentioned, we also brought along the Cognitive Neuroscience Institute, which, after all, was simply a checkbook that gave us access to funds for our unusual ideas. At one of these meetings, held in Venice, a golden moment occurred. We had met to think about evolution and the brain. Our group included the paleontologist and evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould; David Premack; Terry Sejnowski, who was the leading expert on computational theories of brain functions; Jon Kaas, the leading expert on comparative anatomy and brain evolution; Leo Chalupa, an expert on visual system development; and Gary Lynch, our expert on the cellular basis of memory and always a big thinker. Gould decided to make his presentation via walking tour through San Marco Cathedral. There we were, hearing from Gould his notions of adaptations and his spandrel theory beneath the very spandrels that had triggered his theory. (As Gould waxed on about the spandrels, people joined the group thinking they were getting a “free” architectural tour. They slowly began to look confused and drift away.)
A couple of years later we again gathered in Venice to hear more from Gould, and from Jean-Pierre Changeux, the leading French neuroscientist on brain evolution and function. Premack was there along with Steve Pinker, Wolf Singer, the leading German expert on visual function; Gary Lynch; Gilbert Harman, the distinguished philosopher from Princeton; the distinguished immunologist Manny Scharf; the psychologist David Rumelhart; and neurobiologist Ira Black. We’d met to discuss the challenge Danish Nobel laureate Niels Jerne had written about years earlier—the importance of selection versus instruction.3 His idea was that maybe the brain, like the immune system, does not respond directly to the environment. Rather the environment, which impinges on any kind of biologic system, including the brain, selects preexisting (that is, innate) capacities. This was a radical idea.
It was an intellectual feast. Pinker stole the show with one of his first lectures on what would become his landmark book, The Language Instinct.4 I remember Premack, dazed by how penetrating and lucid Pinker was, remarking, “If Pinker was any better, I would have just shot him.” Indeed, years later Dave told me “You know, Pinker’s book on language is the best book ever written explaining complex science.” Dave is not freewheeling with his compliments. Everyone seemed to love those meetings. Overall, the idea of selection versus instruction is so powerful and the meeting was so provocative, that I spent a good amount of my time back in Hanover writing a book about it—Nature’s Mind.5
LAUNCHING A SCIENTIFIC JOURNAL
Another idea was brewing. We wanted to start an academic journal, called the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, and we needed a publisher. I sent out queries to Johns Hopkins University Press, MIT Press, and the fledgling publishing house of Larry Erlbaum. I was hoping that one of the university presses would pick up the contract. I thought their prestige would encourage scientists to contribute. Scientists hate to think that their efforts may wind up off the grid in a sort of intellectual limbo, because their paper had been published in a journal that later closed up shop and was no longer accessible. While both Hopkins and MIT wanted to publish our journal, neither offered financial support. That was a problem: We had no extra funds. I was disappointed and complained to Leon. He told me to have lunch with Erlbaum, who was a straight shooter and a mutual good friend. Larry said let’s have lunch at Piccolo Mondo.
We sat down to a lunch of calamari fritti—the restaurant fried each batch of calamari in fresh olive oil. (It always took twenty-five minutes to arrive at the table.) I explained my plight. Larry smiled and said that he would give us thirteen thousand dollars for editorial expenses. He told me to think about it and said he would send the contracts over the next day. I went back to my office and, after stewing awhile, let MIT Press know about the new offer. I remained concerned about the prestige factor. In seconds, MIT agreed to the same terms. I immediately called Larry to let him know, and he completely understood my decision to go with MIT. Larry went on to fame and fortune in the academic publishing business, and MIT Press has been an outstanding partner. It was my first scrape with a business decision, and while it worked out well for both parties, I didn’t enjoy the conflict between cold economics and personal loyalties. Nevertheless, we had assembled a stellar group of editors and all seemed well.
Like everything else, the realities of the commitment were an entirely different matter. How were we going to start a journal that had not yet had any articles submitted? How was it going to be readied for printing? My wife and I looked at each other and said, “Looks like we do it.” I got on the phone and twisted the arms of many a famous friend and asked them to submit an inaugural article. They all did, and the manuscripts started to arrive. Next step: How does this get printer-ready? Well, it was r
ight about the time that the new program PageMaker had been introduced to the world, a program that let one electronically assemble, format, and deliver copy-ready material for printing. Charlotte became an expert. Final step, where were we going to do this? Once again we figured we could use a room in our Vermont cabin. We were running out of rooms, however, so we converted the garage (Figure 33).
FIGURE 33. Finishing the area below the lab used for patient trials. This would become the office for the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. Jeff’s close friend came to visit after his death, so we put him to work.
(Courtesy of Joseph Mehling, Dartmouth College)
We were beaming with our cleverness and decided to invite our associate founding editors, Ira Black from Cornell, Gordon Shepherd from Yale, and Steve Kosslyn from Harvard, up to Vermont. Ira and Gordon were molecular and cellular neuroscientists with a great interest in the nature of the mind. Kosslyn, perhaps one of the brightest and most clever cognitive psychologists of our time, held up that end of the equation. It was a cold winter night when they all arrived. Cars were slipping off roads all over the place. Yet nothing could daunt the energy of these determined scientists and their commitment to the project. Plans were made, standards were set, review requirements established, and workloads assigned. We had a big party, and we were all set.
Tales from Both Sides of the Brain : A Life in Neuroscience (9780062228819) Page 21