GoKawiilMine is not one of those inspiring stories of people who found their way to science against all odds. I grew up in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where science was handed to me on a platter, from the Children's School of Science to the summer courses one could just walk into uninvited, to the library of the Marine Biology Labs which was open at all hours every day of the year, to the Friday Evening Lectures, the place to see and be seen in town.
My first publication, on the physiology of diving birds, was co-authored with my dad a field biologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and his then-student Geir Wing Gabrielsen, now of the Norwegian Polar Institute (Figure 1).
Left photo: Me and Geir Gabrielsen, then my dad's student, in our back yard in Woods Hole in the summer of 1979. We raised baby cormorants at home, and then used acoustic heart rate transmitters (right photo) made by my dad to measure heart rate in cormorants when they dove voluntarily. We showed that "diving bradycardia", previously thought to be an adaptation to diving, was largely a fear response that resulted when scientists forcibly submeged animals. When our home-reared cormorants swam freely with us they showed very little "diving bradycardia". Geir is now an exotoxicologist at the Norwegian Polar Institute.
Adventures in Norway
In fact, an important part of my introduction to science took place in Norway. Long after my dad had pissed off pretty much all of his colleagues in the U.S., he still had scientific friends in Norway, and he travelled there regularly to collaborate with them. I first visited Norway when he brought our family on one of these trips. He bought an old Norwegian fishing boat in ill repair named the "Nordlys." I remember boarding the boat in Bergen harbor, where we feasted on smoked mackerel from the fish market and then headed down the coast on a voyage that was glorious, memorable and quite dangerous.
A few years later my dad was planning an expedition to study ptarmigans on the island of Karlsoy near Tromso with Geir and several other scientists. I wanted to join, but there was no funding to bring an unskilled 17-year-old along, and flights to Norway were expensive. So, I got a cheap flight to Amsterdam, where I bought a bicycle and made my way to Tromso by a combination of pedal-power and train, including a thrilling bike ride over the Dovrefjell from Oslo to Trondheim. On Karlsoy, we lived in an old farmhouse, and went tromping across the island under the midnight sun to run field experiments on nesting ptarmigans.
Working in Molly Potters lab
As an undergrad at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) majoring in biology, I struggled. Despite my privileged early exposure to science, I had not learned much in public high school and I was simply not prepared for MIT. I worked in a lab studying differentiation of blood cells, but I did not enjoy killing a mouse for each experiment. So, I sought refuge in a department where they did not kill their subjects: the (then) MIT Psychology Department. There I worked in the lab of Molly Potter, a towering intellect of cognitive psychology and also a warm, fun, and supportive mentor who fished me off the bottom of the wait list for grad school a year later. My dad was scandalized that I planned to study psychology, which in his mind had all the rigor of astrology.
But my dad was wrong. I learned from Molly how to make powerful inferences about the inner workings of the mind from humble behavioral data, which is a bit like trying to figure out how a car works just by driving it around. Still, in cognitive science, as in auto mechanics, there is no substitute for looking under the hood. During my first year in grad school, the first noninvasive brain imaging study of human visual cortex was published on the cover of Science magazine, showing a very blurry yellow blob at the back of the head when people looked at patterned visual stimuli compared to diffuse illumination.
I was blown away. I wrote a proposal to use this device to answer a suite of questions about the mind, and sent it to all the brain imaging labs in the world (there were four). Does mental imagery engage the same brain machinery as visual perception? Does attention modulate responses early in the visual processing pathway? Where in the brain do we match incoming visual information with stored descriptions of what familiar objects look like? I gave a draft of the proposal to Molly, and she was furious. In her mind I was "selling out" to neuroscientists who failed to understand the power of behavioral data in revealing the mechanisms of the mind. But she got over herself the next day and has supported my efforts to answer cognitive questions with brain data ever since.
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