Ulric Neisser

they accepted me into the graduate program. I was happy to be a Harvard student again, but felt
that I had lost a lot of time in the intervening four years. To make up for lost time I moved
quickly, taking qualifying exams in my first year and completing a dissertation by the end of the
second. My choice of topic was not governed by any theoretical commitment - Gestalt
psychology and information theory had both lost their allure by this time - but by how quickly I
could do the required research. That criterion led me to a rather obscure topic: S. S. Stevens'
"neural quantum" hypothesis of the auditory threshold. I did not have much rapport with Stevens
himself, but his hypothesis made clear predictions and the necessary apparatus was already in
place. I ran subjects, analyzed data, identified certain artifacts in the "quantal method" (cf.
Neisser, 1957) and got my degree.
By that time, oddly enough, I had begun to think that I was leaving Harvard too soon.
Surely it had more to offer than I had learned in two hasty years! So I arranged to stay a third
year after all, supported by a Harvard instructorship (teaching "Sensation and Perception") and
an NIH fellowship. To get the fellowship I proposed a new technique for the measurement of
pain thresholds - still another obscure topic in which I was again not really interested. (The pain
itself, created by focusing a beam of light onto the back of the subject's hand, was not severe.) In
the upshot I did conduct the research but didn't like it much. A complex apparatus had to be built
and calibrated, and I was beginning to realize that I am not good with apparatus. Other people at
Harvard were much better: George Sperling (1960), for example, was doing elegant
tachistoscopic studies of what he then called the "visual image." Later, in Cognitive Psychology,
I would call it "iconic memory."
Pattern recognition
It was time to move on, and an opportunity soon presented itself. Richard Held, with
whom I had been acquainted since my Harvard undergraduate days, was now teaching at
Brandeis and suggested that I apply for a job there. I don't remember my job talk now, but it
must have been OK: I was appointed assistant professor at $4000/year. By this time Anna and I
had four children (Mark, b.1954, Julie, b.1956, Phil, b.1957, Toby, b.1958), so we certainly
needed the money. We lived for a while in Boston and then built a house in Lincoln Mass.; I
commuted to Brandeis (in Waltham) on a motor scooter. We spent most of our summers in
Maine, courtesy of my artist father-in-law Waldo Peirce. It was a strenuous domestic life, and
unfortunately one in which Anna and I were increasingly at odds.
Intellectually, my 7 1/2 years at Brandeis were years of development. The psychology
department itself was best known for the humanistic psychology of its Chairman, A.H. Maslow. I
liked Maslow's idealism, which reminded me of Gestalt psychology. I also resonated to his
insistence that psychology needed a "third force," i.e., a theoretical approach that was neither
behaviorism nor psychoanalysis. (He hoped that the third force would be humanistic/existential
psychology, but it turned out to be cognitive psychology instead.) Harvard was not far away, and
I often attended talks at the recently established "Center for Cognitive Studies" there. All this
was intriguing, but the theorist who influenced me most was neither at Brandeis nor Harvard and
not even a psychologist: Oliver Selfridge of the M.I.T. Lincoln Laboratory. Introduced by a
mutual friend, Oliver and I soon found many interests in common. At his suggestion I soon
began to spend Thursdays at his Lab as a consultant, an arrangement that benefited me
financially as well as intellectually. Oliver had no advanced degree; nowadays he would be
called a "cognitive scientist, but no such category existed then. He was working on machine
pattern recognition, especially of patterns such as hand-written letters or Morse code. He
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