Read Online Born to Bark by Stanley Coren - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Stanley Coren
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ceiling. This gave us little privacy but lots of information about our neighbors’ private lives, since even whispers freely drifted through the walls and gaps into our apartment. Nonetheless, it was a place to live and it was very inexpensive.
At that time, Stanford had one of the most respected psychology departments in the world. It could boast more winners of the American Psychological Association’s Distinguished Psychologist Award (psychology’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize) than any other department in existence. I was going to work with one of their superstars, Leon Festinger, who is best known for his
theory of cognitive dissonance
, which explains the ways that people form and change their attitudes, but who also madesignificant contributions to social psychology, learning, perception, statistics, and even paleopsychology (which is the attempt to reconstruct social and other everyday behaviors from the kinds of things that archeologists and paleontologists turn up when exploring the caves and primitive settlements where primitive humans lived tens of thousands of years ago).
One of the most brilliant people that I have ever met, Leon could shed new insights on any problem to which he turned his attention. His analytic abilities were astonishing. In his weekly research meetings with his students and a few colleagues, he was a delight to watch as his mind worked behind the ever-present cloud of cigarette smoke. He would tease apart theoretical notions and then reassemble them in new forms. He had a talent for extracting the essence of a theory and then creating a very simple experimental procedure to test it.
In spite of my admiration of him, Leon and I clashed several times during my first year at Stanford because I did not want to be a technician simply carrying out a principal researcher’s instructions, no matter how much of a genius he was. I had my own research ideas and my own interests, and Leon admitted that some were very interesting. Ultimately, he offered me a compromise. He gave me a large room as a laboratory and told me that as long as I completed the various research projects that we were doing collaboratively, I could do any other research that I wanted to do on my own and he would support it financially. This worked for both of us, and I always had three or four experiments going at the same time, each set up in a different corner of my big lab space.
I was yearning for a dog, but pets were not permitted in our housing complex. So although cats are really not my cup of fur, I allowed myself to get involved in a research project thatinvolved a cat. Socializing with a cat is certainly better than having no animal companion. She was a purebred Siamese with the registered name of Shen Wa’s Just Fu Too, but I just called her Fu. She had been selected because she was extremely cross-eyed and because of the odd way that the visual system of Siamese cats is wired to their brains. If we could, in essence, get her to tell us what she was actually seeing by teaching her to respond to some special types of visual displays, it might shed light on a newly developed theory about how humans see their world.
I designed the apparatus that Fu was to be tested in. She had only a very simple task to perform. All that she had to do was to look at a display that controlled the information that came into each eye separately, and then push a lever on the right if she saw one line and a lever on the left if she saw two. Pigeons can do this sort of task, so there was no reason to expect that a cat would have any difficulty. The actual testing was being done by a more junior graduate student named Charlie. Leon had asked me to keep an eye on Charlie’s progress, which I gladly did since it gave me the excuse to drop by the lab at various times and, if testing was not in progress, I got to play a bit with Fu. She was incredibly beautiful, with deep blue eyes, and was, at least for a cat, very
At that time, Stanford had one of the most respected psychology departments in the world. It could boast more winners of the American Psychological Association’s Distinguished Psychologist Award (psychology’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize) than any other department in existence. I was going to work with one of their superstars, Leon Festinger, who is best known for his
theory of cognitive dissonance
, which explains the ways that people form and change their attitudes, but who also madesignificant contributions to social psychology, learning, perception, statistics, and even paleopsychology (which is the attempt to reconstruct social and other everyday behaviors from the kinds of things that archeologists and paleontologists turn up when exploring the caves and primitive settlements where primitive humans lived tens of thousands of years ago).
One of the most brilliant people that I have ever met, Leon could shed new insights on any problem to which he turned his attention. His analytic abilities were astonishing. In his weekly research meetings with his students and a few colleagues, he was a delight to watch as his mind worked behind the ever-present cloud of cigarette smoke. He would tease apart theoretical notions and then reassemble them in new forms. He had a talent for extracting the essence of a theory and then creating a very simple experimental procedure to test it.
In spite of my admiration of him, Leon and I clashed several times during my first year at Stanford because I did not want to be a technician simply carrying out a principal researcher’s instructions, no matter how much of a genius he was. I had my own research ideas and my own interests, and Leon admitted that some were very interesting. Ultimately, he offered me a compromise. He gave me a large room as a laboratory and told me that as long as I completed the various research projects that we were doing collaboratively, I could do any other research that I wanted to do on my own and he would support it financially. This worked for both of us, and I always had three or four experiments going at the same time, each set up in a different corner of my big lab space.
I was yearning for a dog, but pets were not permitted in our housing complex. So although cats are really not my cup of fur, I allowed myself to get involved in a research project thatinvolved a cat. Socializing with a cat is certainly better than having no animal companion. She was a purebred Siamese with the registered name of Shen Wa’s Just Fu Too, but I just called her Fu. She had been selected because she was extremely cross-eyed and because of the odd way that the visual system of Siamese cats is wired to their brains. If we could, in essence, get her to tell us what she was actually seeing by teaching her to respond to some special types of visual displays, it might shed light on a newly developed theory about how humans see their world.
I designed the apparatus that Fu was to be tested in. She had only a very simple task to perform. All that she had to do was to look at a display that controlled the information that came into each eye separately, and then push a lever on the right if she saw one line and a lever on the left if she saw two. Pigeons can do this sort of task, so there was no reason to expect that a cat would have any difficulty. The actual testing was being done by a more junior graduate student named Charlie. Leon had asked me to keep an eye on Charlie’s progress, which I gladly did since it gave me the excuse to drop by the lab at various times and, if testing was not in progress, I got to play a bit with Fu. She was incredibly beautiful, with deep blue eyes, and was, at least for a cat, very
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