Recollections of an accidental contrarian.

Abstract

First, I sincerely thank BBCS for this honour. It seems especially appropriate to receive this award in Montreal, where I started my studies many years ago at McGiIl University. As so often in life, I got to McGiIl somewhat by chance. I was finishing off my high school senior year with the Saskatchewan government correspondence school while teaching in a one-room schoolhouse in northern Manitoba. I noticed an ad in the Manitoba Teacher's magazine urging teachers to encourage qualified students to apply for an entrance scholarship to McGiIl. I applied, and to my delight was successful. So I ended up in 1953 living in Royal Victoria College at the corner of University and Sherbrooke, at that time the McGiIl women's residence. For a girl from a farming village in Saskatchewan this was quite a change. My teacherage in Manitoba had no telephone, no electricity, no running water, no central heating (in fact not much heating at all), and no indoor toilets (Figure 1). In two months I went from that to a stately and comfortable mansion in the heart of a big city. after-dinner coffee was served to us in gracious lounges by freshmen residents. It was quite another world (Figure 2). In my first year at McGiIl, I took Introductory Psychology taught by Dr. Hebb. Although he insisted that we not take notes, and in fact encouraged us to bring our knitting, his lectures were such a fascinating series of informed speculations about how the brain might work in mediating behaviour that it influenced all my subsequent research. There was an oral examination at the end of the Honours Psychology program. question to me was, what contribution had Tinkelpaugh made to psychology? I had never heard of Tinkelpaugh. For any of you in the same boat, Tinkelpaugh did a study on monkeys in the 1920s that Hebb was particularly fond of and you can read about it in both the Organization of Behavior (1949) and in introductory textbook (1958). I felt my ignorance had not made a great impression on Hebb, and when in my last year I went to talk to him about going into graduate school, somewhat at the last minute, he said Why would a nice girl like you want to go into graduate school? This seemed a strange question to me - and probably elicited a gasp from some in today's audience. But I believe, aside from an element of real concern, that it had another purpose, which was to determine how serious I was. He pointed out that I had been a teacher and that this was a satisfying occupation, whereas research could be very frustrating. But I persisted, and managed to convince him that within the limits of my experience, I had enjoyed research more than anything else I had done. He ultimately became extremely helpful, and was instrumental in getting me accepted at Berkeley. I was offered a research assistantship at Berkeley, which at that time meant that the first two years would be spent doing prescribed research entirely for someone else (admittedly a world-renowned researcher) while I studied for comprehensive exams. This really did not appeal to me, and I went back to Hebb with the letter. He had always argued that graduate students should get started on research of their own very early; he agreed that the Berkeley offer was unpalatable, and I was then and there admitted to graduate studies at McGUl. In the first year of graduate school, all students at that time took part in what was called only Hebb's seminar. In our first assignment, we did a group presentation and in my group I was designated the organizer. topic was The circumnavigation of cognition, the paper by that name spoofing the overarching learning theory of the time, which explained much of what is called cognition as a series of unidirectional S-R connections. Apparently I had redeemed myself from the Tinkelpaugh episode. Graduate School approach to graduate student education emphasized doing research right from the start. …