Ulric Neisser

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commentator H. V. Kaltenborn. He must have liked me: I went to Harvard (the first Sewanhaka student to do so) with a $400 scholarship. In those days, that was full tuition. Discovering psychology College is supposed to be a transforming experience, and it certainly was for me. I entered Harvard in 1946 with an insecure personal identity, weak social skills, few political commitments, little understanding of history or literature or culture, and no career goals beyond a vague allegiance to "science." Four years later I knew just who I was, what I cared about, and what I was going to do: to become an experimental psychologist and fight the good fight against behaviorism. Meanwhile I had also acquired a political identity, making many friends in the Harvard Liberal Union. We picketed racist establishments, sang leftist songs, campaigned for Democratic candidates, sat through long dreary meetings, debated current issues. I still have a happy "flashbulb memory" of the 1948 election, in my junior year. Everyone was sure that Dewey would win; the Harvard Young Republicans had rented a huge expensive hall for their victory party. We few Truman supporters gathered around a radio in a small common room for a "moral victory party," and waited for our guy to fall behind. He never did: at midnight, we marched up to jeer happily at the Republican losers. Glorious! Being enrolled in stimulating courses on history and government and literature, having acquired sophisticated friends who read novels and enjoyed classical music, I soon began to value the cultural life that I had so determinedly avoided in Floral Park. I attended concerts and rallies, brooded over freshman conundrums like freedom of the will, played cards far into the night with my roommates. My only problem was the resolve that had brought me to Harvard in the first place: the commitment to become a scientist. I soon discovered that I hated chemistry and was bored by physics. What to do? E.G. Boring's introductory psychology course came to my rescue. I do not know if it rescued anyone else: Boring was not an exciting lecturer, and his syllabus - reflecting a recent bitter split between the departments of Psychology and Social Relations - excluded every socially interesting topic. But whatever he may have excluded, the psychology that remained - mostly sensation, perception and learning - was a young and vigorous science. One could see that it would soon be ready to address important human questions, especially with a push or two in the right direction. I said to myself "I can do this!" and changed my major to Psychology. Parapsychology Another stimulus to my growing psychological interests was J.B. Rhine's book The Reach of the Mind (1947), a survey of research on extra-sensory perception (ESP). The topic was immediately intriguing, and became more so when I made the acquaintance of S. David Kahn. Kahn, my classmate, had a sort of personal commitment to the paranormal: his family took reincarnation seriously and consulted psychics before making major decisions. It was not long before David and I began to think about doing some ESP research of our own. To make it official, we called ourselves The Harvard Society for Parapsychology. At that time, most ESP research was based on shuffled decks of cards. This seemed problematic because it left open the possibility of errors in recording the scores, perhaps even of outright cheating. We therefore abandoned cards in favor of the standard IBM multiple-choice answer sheets (then very familiar) in which the respondent uses a pencil to blacken one of five spaces in each row. In our experiments one such answer sheet, filled out with the aid of a table of random numbers, was hidden away to serve as target. The subjects, given blank answer sheets 4
and pencils, were asked to duplicate the target as best they could. Their responses were then mechanically scored against that target, eliminating the possibility of error or bias. These experiments produced surprisingly positive results, so we published them in the Journal of Parapsychology (Kahn & <strong>Neisser</strong>, 1949). My interest in ESP did not last long. David Kahn and I later spent a summer doing ESP research at the American Society for Psychical Research in New York, but all our experiments there were failures. We couldn't even replicate the experiments we had carried out successfully at Harvard! This was discouraging, and I did not pursue the paranormal any further. It may be, however, that this early exposure to an exotic research area had a subtle influence later on. I have long had - and perhaps still have - a soft spot in my heart for exciting but unlikely hypotheses. Becoming a psychologist Meanwhile, I was a busy psychology major. It was probably in the history course that I was first exposed to conflicting theories, especially behaviorism and Gestalt psychology. Choosing sides immediately, I rejected the former and was strongly attracted to the latter. My antipathy to behaviorism stemmed not only from its dreary mechanical view of human nature but from the sheer fact of its dominance. I was already a committed infracaninophile, and Gestalt psychology was clearly the underdog in any department that included B.F. Skinner. I was particularly intrigued by the way that Max Wertheimer and the other Gestalt theorists viewed human nature "from above" rather than mechanically "from below." Köhler's principle of psychophysical isomorphism, for example, impressed me as an important new approach to the mind-body problem. Other courses brought me up to date. I took a lab course from Fred Frick and a methods course from J.C.R. Licklider, who insisted that statistics required "vigor, not rigor." Jerry Bruner and Leo Postman taught a course on perception and motivation, focusing on what was then being called the "New Look." A new course on language and communication, taught by my adviser George Miller, introduced me to linguistics and information theory. Miller encouraged me to take more mathematics, especially advanced algebra; he was sure the psychology of the future would require it. I took his advice, albeit without enthusiasm. Later I was one of two seniors (the other was Marvin Minsky) enrolled in a graduate seminar that discussed Hebb's new book The Organization of Behavior (1949). For my senior honors thesis I needed a topic far enough out of the mainstream to be "original" (which was very important to me then), but not so far out as to seem crazy (i.e., no parapsychology). What I came up with was obscure indeed: the influence of visual stimulation on the auditory threshold. A Russian psychologist had reported such an influence, but his results were not widely accepted. In my theoretically naive state, such an intermodal effect seemed attractively Gestalt-like. Miller helped me generously even though he wasn't especially interested in the hypothesis. Using standard psychophysical methods for the auditory threshold, I manipulated visual stimulation by turning the room lights on or off. The results were negative, but I got honors anyway. Swarthmore It was time to go to graduate school, and I knew just where. Wolfgang Köhler, one of the founders of Gestalt psychology, had fled Germany in the 1930s and was teaching at Swarthmore College. To attract Köhler, Swarthmore had also created a position for his colleague Hans Wallach and an M.A. program to provide them both with graduate assistants. The students in the 5
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Page 7 and 8: they accepted me into the graduate
Page 9 and 10: of processing. This was already a r
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Ulric Neisser

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