For reasons as inexplicable as my own, Alfonso left for Harvard in 1995. He was a hot property, and his new wife was a lawyer who had gotten the itch to live in Boston or something like that. For whatever reasons, Dartmouth’s cognitive neuroscience slot opened up, and they started seeking a replacement. They first invited Harvard’s distinguished psychologist Daniel Schacter (who had moved there from Arizona) to visit. A little tit-for-tat must have been in play. Dan was happy where he was, so he left them with the message that they should try to get me to return. Good friends at the college promoted the idea, and, while always open to any ideas about Dartmouth, at first I didn’t really think about it all that seriously. For one thing, I had spent the preceding twenty years of my life in medical schools. You know: get paid more and don’t teach.
But by then I had been given ten positions to fill at Davis and had filled them all in a little over three years. I was in my prime, and I wanted to do more. I was itchy in my usual sort of way, and I longed for New England. Our weekends in Tahoe kept snow, trees, skiing, and log fires all very much alive in our personal lives. Still, I couldn’t imagine going through another move, another disruption of the family, and another time sink. Somewhere along the way, one of my new nonacademic friends in Davis told me how executives move, or how they used to move. The corporation that wanted to move someone from place A to place B did the heavy lifting. They bought your house where you were, so you could have the cash to buy a house were you were going. It is called “executive hiring.” I sat there listening to him and felt somewhat like a chump. Academics don’t do that, I thought. He must be out of his mind.
When the next wave of nostalgia hit, I raised the idea of “executive hire” and almost instantly back came the reply, “We can do that.” Armed with that, plus a couple of trips to check it all out again, we decided to move back to Dartmouth. It was all crazy, made even more so by the fact that the real estate agent found us a beautiful house in Sharon, Vermont, that inflamed the imagination, overlooking eighty acres of Vermont landscape with Mount Killington in full view. After Davis, everything looked green and lush. Right next to the house was an inviting pond to swim in, which in turn was next to a barn, which was fenced in with a twenty-acre post-and-rail fence. You get the idea. Oh yes, hiking trails all over the place. I took videos of the house, flew back to Davis, sat the family down to watch my new conquest, and we decided to do it. Of course, it is impossible to know what really kicks you over the decision line. It may have been that I missed not seeing and testing J.W. Or it may have been the tractor.
CHAPTER 8
STATELY LIVING AND A CALL TO SERVICE
It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure.
—ALBERT EINSTEIN
SOME PLACES DEMAND RESPECT FROM US. We usually think of institutions doing that, and when under their spell, we crank up our game as high as it can go. What took us by surprise was that our new home in Sharon, Vermont, had the same effect on us. In many ways, we had no business owning and living in such a stately place. It was situated on a plateau called Point of View, which the early settlers of our little town had so dubbed because of its 180-degree views of the Green Mountains. As we stood outside our back door, we could see Mount Ascutney straight ahead and, to the right, the Killington and Pico ski areas. The lawn swept down to a barn and pond (Figure 44). Soon after moving in, Antonio and Hannah Damasio visited us, stepped out to the back, stood there for a moment quite stunned, and then turned to us and said, “Why would anybody ever leave here?”
FIGURE 44. Our magnificent home with a view in Sharon, Vermont. We shared countless memories here.
(Courtesy of the author)
Even though we would live there for ten years, it was always called the Phillips House. Ellis Phillips, heir to the Long Island Electric Company, and Marion Grumman Phillips, heir to the Grumman aircraft company, had built it and nurtured its glory, with fences, gardens, and trails. They were extremely wealthy and in fact had several homes. With the financial distress of the early 1990s, however, they decided to sell it. By the time we were looking, the price had dropped to $575,000. That was still outside of my range. Nonetheless, I was captivated and for more than the usual reasons. The house had a John Deere tractor with all the attachments. I have been addicted to tractors ever since my high school days, when I thought I was going to go into farming as a livelihood. The tractor loomed large in my mind.
The real estate agent, Sue Green, was a good friend and the wife of a dear colleague, the psychiatrist Ron Green. Recalling Vermont winters, the wisdom of buying a home some twenty-five minutes from Hanover, most of which was a gravel road, had me vacillating. The other options were in town, more staid, highly functional, but none had tractors. Finally, I geared up my courage to make a lowball offer. I called Sue and said, “Sue, four hundred and twenty-five thousand, with the tractor.” There was a pause on the phone and Sue finally replied, “Mike, I can’t in good faith pass that along. Also, you should keep the tractor out of it. Make a separate offer.”
I thought for a moment. I teetered the other way. The family had seen the house only via videos that I had brought home on a previous trip. I teetered back: I was tired of looking. I suddenly found myself saying, “Okay, four hundred fifty thousand, and five thousand for the tractor.” She said she would see what she could do, but was not encouraging. Five minutes later she called back. “Mike, four fifty is fine, but Mr. Phillips wants seven thousand for the tractor.” This did not seem at all crazy to me. I knew there was something about a man and his tractor. Of course, none of this would have been possible without the executive hire deal I had made. My home in Davis had not sold, and I was cashless. Dartmouth advanced me the agreed-upon price for the Davis house, and I was ready to do business. The Phillips House had sat empty for a couple of years and needed some tuning up. We offed the wallpaper, ripped up the skanky wall-to-wall carpets, installed hardwood floors, and redid the kitchen. In addition, an unfinished space over the garage had to be finished off for my office. I contacted the original builder of the house, Hank Savelberg, who lived in nearby Woodstock. Hank not only remembered the home; he had designed it as well. He came over in a flash, basked in his beautiful work and our praise, gave a price, and the deal was done.
A few months later, the moving van pulled in from Davis, and we were set up for a life-changing experience. Over the years, I had developed a ritual to smooth each move. I went to our new home a week ahead of the family and unpacked the furniture, put the kitchen in order, and put some shine on the place. My real concern was the pond. My daughter Francesca, and Zack, my son, had grown up with a big blue kidney-shaped pool that radiated relief from the hot Davis sun. They lived in that frog-free, crystal clear pool, diving off the diving board and floating around in see-through plastic rafts. How were they going to respond to a greenish, slightly opaque pond loaded with frogs, scum, and more? Charlotte and I had an idea. Francesca could bring three of her Davis friends with her, one of whom was a frog freak! She loved the outdoors, loved the natural world. Maybe, just maybe . . .
After the long flight from San Francisco, they landed in Boston on a very warm July day. They jumped into a car and a couple of hours later were pulling into our new driveway. It swept up a gentle hill past green fields on the left and a row of maple trees along the right, which extended to the front door. Everyone was excited. I had my fingers crossed that it was all going to work. The doors sprang open and the kids piled out of the car. We were still exchanging hugs when Francesca’s friend, Kirsten, grabbed her bag and yelled, “Let’s get our bathing suits on and go to the pond.” Within five minutes all were trunked up and running down the path. One after another they leapt into the pond, boom, boom, boom: all of them. Kirsten immediately caught a frog, beamed at her accomplishment, and all was well. The kids swam and played for two hours.
Charlotte and I
were relieved and happy, but we also had one other slightly important event on the agenda: My oldest daughter, Marin, was getting married right there in our new home in less than a month. Her husband-to-be was, get this, Charlotte’s brother! How does that work? Well, being married twice does the trick. My first wife and I had four beautiful girls, including Marin. Charlotte and I had been together about twenty years by then and during that time there had been lots of family gatherings. Marin and Chris had fallen in love. It was as simple as that.
“How many people are coming to the wedding?” Charlotte asked. Oh, about two hundred or so, Marin said. For Charlotte, that was no problem. For the next four weeks, the extended Smylie clan (there are nine brothers and sisters) and the Gazzaniga clan (a mere six) tackled the grounds and the house, preparing for the wedding. Our efforts only needed to be augmented by a tent in case of Vermont weather. The culinary needs were handled by Charlotte’s Texas brother, Ray, king of Texas barbecue. She had asked him if he would prepare his famous, mouthwatering, mesquite-flavored brisket, which he slowly barbecues in refurbished steel drums for twenty-four hours. He cooked eighteen of them in Uvalde and air-shipped them for the big day.
With the preparations for the wedding, this house began to define our family. It wasn’t long before Francesca’s sense of music, planning, acting, and writing came together in what proved to be a ten-year enterprise: musicals in the barn. The summer musicals evolved from the audience sitting in the horse paddock to full-scale productions in the barn. By the age of fifteen she was running the event as a summer camp for children of the Upper Valley. I put my carpentry skills to work and finished off a stage inside the barn, installing spotlights and a sound system along with a stage curtain. By the time she was in high school and her production of Aida came around, the Dartmouth stage designer took an interest in her “Sharon Players” and helped her with the stage scenery. The two-week summer school for kids became the place to be. She began to charge for the school and was befriended by a local businessman, who counseled her on insurance matters, unemployment issues, and finally in investing her profits in a Roth IRA. Throughout her life, Francesca has always set clear goals and achieved them with intelligence and verve. She is now a Ph.D. in molecular biology.
Meanwhile Zack, with the boyish energy of a ten-year-old, and I were discovering the woods. We ultimately installed an Amish ready-built one-room cabin at the far end of the property. In the summer we could walk to it, and in the winter we skied, snowshoed, or snowmobiled to it. Zack had mastered the land, set up paintball war zones, and soon became enthralled with the outdoors. Of course, this was in no small part due to Charlotte’s honoring her pledge to him when leaving Davis that he could join the Boy Scouts. When we arrived, however, we discovered that Sharon did not have a troop, so Charlotte became the first female Scout leader in Vermont. That was cool with the other Vermont woodsmen. They taught her how to throw an axe and hit a tree at fifty feet, scale up mountains, and everything else. Every summer until Zack was fourteen, they went off to Scout camp. Charlotte had her own tent and became a bit of local legend. Zack and his two other buddies rose to the level of Eagle Scouts in record time.
Sharon was having its way with Charlotte and me as well. The little tweaks we had done to the interior’s stunning rooms and the remake of the kitchen, with its capacity to serve a crowd, if necessary, all captured not only our imagination but also the imagination of the hundreds of scientists we had to dinner parties throughout the years.
There was always an element of family life that seemed perfectly natural in Vermont. Anyone who walked into our home felt the warmth and beauty of the place. Once, Bill Buckley came to visit. As he walked in the front door, he spotted the grand piano in front of the bay windows overlooking the Green Mountains. He dropped his suitcases, walked over, and started to play. Francesca immediately picked up on it and sat down next to him, and before long, they were playing duets. After dinners with visiting scientists, we would all adjourn to the living room for coffee and cognac, and Francesca and Zachary would come down from their rooms and play a tune or two. Zack had learned the trombone and Francesca played the piano or sax or steel drum. To this day, they are not the least bit shy about speaking or performing around adults (or anybody else, for that matter). The house in Sharon was magic. And, as we shall see, the inspiration of the place may also have served to prompt me to accept duties that went beyond the laboratory.
RELAUNCHING IN HANOVER: THE INTERPRETER II
I can’t stand the daily routine of academic life. Departmental meetings rank right up there as, in my book, a complete waste of time. The reason they are tolerated as much as they are is that a lot of people do like to fill up their time with such “necessary, thoughtful decisions.” These “important” decisions might include whether to add a unit of credit to a statistics course, or whether to promote somebody, or whether to discipline a student, or how many pencils should be bought and, in fact, are necessary. I simply didn’t care about any of it, even though somebody has to. My solution to this ambivalence about faculty meetings, and it came to me early in my career, was: Don’t go. To my colleagues’ credit, they rolled with it. Soon my behavior became one of my descriptors: “Oh, Mike doesn’t do meetings.” And that was that.
Of course, this kind of behavior only works if you do something else for the group (and they realize it). I was good at bringing together talent and masterminding large research grants. Those efforts take inordinate amounts of time and require knowing not only the research but the intricate layers of politics that exist on both the local and national level. Dartmouth College, not known for a hard-driving research program, suddenly had a nationally recognized program in cognitive neuroscience that was buzzing. At one point, we were responsible for more than half of the total research funds brought into the college. We were up and running.
By then, J.W. was driving and no longer accompanied by his mother or wife; he would drive down the interstate to our labs at Dartmouth on his own. We were following up on all sorts of issues, not the least of which was the nature and underlying mechanism of the “interpreter”—that special left brain device that generates a story about why we do the things we do. George Wolford, a longtime professor at Dartmouth, had taken an interest in this idea. He and Mike Miller, who had come with us from Davis, wondered if a very simple, tried, and tested probability game, devised for understanding the nature of decision making, would be handled differently by the two half brains. It was painfully simple in design yet utterly provocative in its implications.
Imagine fixating on a dot displayed on a computer monitor; the chore is to guess if one of two different words is going to appear. Simple as that. Meanwhile, the experimenter is doing a little manipulation of the words. In fact, one of the words comes on the screen 70 percent of the time. What is the best strategy for guessing if the goal is to guess correctly as often as you can? To give some context, when a rat is given this kind of problem, it learns which choice leads to a reward more often, and then chooses that one all the time. In that way, it’s guaranteed a 70 percent rate of success. This is known as probability maximizing. What do humans do? We think we are so smart! We think that there is a pattern that we can figure out: We try to deduce what the exact sequence of the stimuli is, so we can guess the correct answer on every trial. That is to say, we try to figure out the actual probability that a certain word will appear each time. So if we know that a word shows up 70 percent of the time, we guess that word 70 percent of the time. This is called probability matching. This yields us correct answers only 63 percent of the time. We humans are always trying to find the pattern, the cause and effect, the meaning of stuff. In doing so, we find our bizarre uniqueness. Here is how Lewis Thomas put it years ago.
Mistakes are the very basis of human thought, embedded there, feeding the structure like root nodules. If we were not provided with the knack of being wrong, we could never get anything useful done. . . . The hope is in the faculty of wrongness, the tendency to
ward error. The capacity to leap across mountains of information to land lightly on the wrong side represents the highest of human endowments. . . .
The lower animals do not have this splendid freedom. They are limited, most of them, to absolute infallibility. Cats, for all their good side, never make mistakes. I have never seen a maladroit, clumsy or blundering cat. Dogs are sometimes fallible, occasionally able to make charming minor mistakes, but they get this way trying to mimic their masters.1
We found that only the left, smarty-pants hemisphere would try to guess the probability. The right hemisphere took the easy route and maximized, acting like a big rat. There was quite a bit of excitement about this simple experiment, meaning that people were quick to challenge its interpretation. That is how it should be and should go on in the very lab that gives rise to an idea. Mike Miller took this observation to another level. When he learned that goldfish and other simple creatures didn’t just maximize, but at times also did probability matching, he began to wonder about our initial, simple interpretation. Within the code of the scientific method, a scientist’s job is to disprove a hypothesis. Whenever I came out of my office into the bullpen, the graduate students and the postdocs were always talking, always thinking about assaults on what we thought was true.
As Miller was stewing about it, another postdoctoral fellow, the talented Columbia-trained psychologist Paul Corballis, started to wonder if the right hemisphere had its own kind of interpreter, one that specialized in visual information. Miller decided to see if the difference in strategy used by the left and right brain was actually based on something simple, such as the kind of stimuli that were being used. Instead of using a word as the stimulus, he switched to faces—which face was going to appear? Detection of words was a left hemisphere specialty, whereas detection of faces was known to be a specialty of the right hemisphere. Maybe the right hemisphere would change its strategy and try to guess the probability of whether the next stimulus was Face A or Face B. That is exactly what happened. Suddenly, the right hemisphere appeared to have those fancy left hemisphere skills, too, and was probability matching. Now it was the left hemisphere acting like a rat and maximizing.2 What was going on?
Tales from Both Sides of the Brain : A Life in Neuroscience (9780062228819) Page 29