The foregoing is an excerpt from my tell all memoir “Eye of the Storm” about my 50+ year career in neuroscience. Enjoy. -BGB

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It was the early 1970s in Boston, and the air was electric with intellectual ferment. It was a time when on any given day, you might be at open mic night in a Cambridge coffee shop listening to Carla Shatz read her dreadful beat poetry (“I study plasticity in this city, this plastic city, this is the last shitty ditty that I’ll blast you with my pretties, I’m visually depriving my last few kitties by sewing up their tiny eyeliddies. <mic drop>”) Or, you might be on a peyote-fueled 3-day vision quest on Joe Perry’s farm in western Mass, sitting in a naked drum circle with Peter Fonda, Ed Furshpan, and an extremely coked out David Crosby. Crosby’s pupils were like pinholes, by the way. Hypothetically speaking, of course.

The Harvard Neurobiology department was the home of the Masters Of The Universe for a field in its infancy. Bob and I entered graduate school to run with the big dogs, and we scored benches in the lab of the biggest dog of all: department founder, NAS member, and OG BSD Stephen Kuffler. Kuffler did no drugs, and he forbade his lab members from taking them as well, so Bob and I smoked like chimneys when we were in the lab. I also acquired my renowned taste for expensive scotch. Those were the sacrifices we made to become the men of influence that we are today.

Bob and I shared a squalid garden apartment on Trowbridge Street in Cambridge with Steve Pinker, Nick Spitzer, and Nick’s already formidable mustache. You may be wondering why Bob and I even spoke to, much less were flatmates with, a ‘cognitive scientist’ like Pinker, but the arrangement paid handsome dividends. First of all, surely you’ve seen Steve’s hair? The man is well into his 60s and currently it is positively magnificent, so you can imagine its glory in those days. Bob and I would bag much higher quality babes simply drifting in that guy’s wake than we ever even encountered hanging out with the neurophysiologists in Longwood.

Second and just as important was the fact that Steve was our contact to the psychology department, which despite having fired Timothy Leary years earlier had failed to expunge his many acolytes. There were still guys there who started their PhDs in the late 50s, some of whom I suspected were squatting in the old jail cells that one of the social psychologists had installed years prior as part of a collaboration with Phil Zimbardo that went sour. Anyway, the only thing that these people had accomplished in 15 years of graduate study was learning how to cook up some exceptional acid.

Late in graduate school, Bob and I went to a Halloween party. I was dressed as Jimi Hendrix and Bob went as Travis Bickle, which honestly didn’t require much modification from his usual look. Every single trainee from the Hubel and Weisel labs wore only an eyepatch. They really thought that was hilarious.

I was working on picking up a tipsy Margaret Livingstone, when Bob elbowed me.

“Oh shit! Here comes David Marr! Don’t make eye contact – he’s going to ask us for our data.”

We all averted our eyes, but it was too late

“Oh hey guys. Maggie”

“Hi David,” we all muttered.

I think you all know that in my opinion, those who can’t do theorize. I understand that this kind of intellectual vampirism has become fashionable of late, and I have made an uneasy peace with that, but at the time, Bob and I (along with all serious scientists) considered Marr and his ilk to be truly execrable. At this point, his ideas remain particularly dangerous due to their utility for adding a high concept veneer of intellectual relevance to the circuit du jour among the shameless and dishonest invertebrate neuroscientists. This is how those vermin manage to still walk among us without contributing whatsoever to solving #cortex. Fortunately, I managed to deflect his attention by telling him about some lucifer yellow neuronal fills in crayfish that the first year student in Ed Kravitz’s lab was working on.

Moments later, I turned and saw Pinker’s hair coming toward us through the crowd. He looked like a cross between a majestic african lion and Farrah Fawcett. He was always referring to his hairdo as a “sign stimulus,” whatever that means.

Bob, mesmerized by the swirling fractal geometry of Steve’s locks, reached out slowly to touch his hair. Pinker pulled back.

“Hands off the plumage, Bob! That’s how I signal fitness to potential mates. And I’m foreign, so females are evolutionarily programmed to subconsciously assume I carry beneficial alleles that are rare in this ecosystem.”

He shot us an appalling wink and scanned the room wolfishly, moistening his lips just slightly. He narrowed his eyes and his nostrils flared as his gaze fell on the target of my clumsy pickup lines.

“You look enchanting this evening, Margaret,” he said as he took her hand and kissed it.

“I have a collaboration I’d like to discuss with you,” he hissed seductively.

Steve turned toward me and Bob. “Take leave of us, gentlemen.”

As he led Margaret away, he muttered his personal Attenborough narrative just loud enough for us to hear: “The female is captivated by the male’s lustrous mane. Just like on the savannah…” He trailed off with what sounded like Quebecois obscenities,

Bob’s unfocused stare followed Steve’s mesmerizing cymotrichous visage into the haze of smoke and pheromones. I turned to Bob. “I think we just got Pinkered.”

As I was scanning the room looking for someone important to talk to, a couple came up to me and Bob. They were dressed like the Wonder Twins, Zan and Jayna.

“Hi! I’m Lily!”

“And I’m Yuh Nung!”

“And we’re the Jans!” they shouted in unison.

These were the the new postdocs in the Kuffler lab. They stood facing each other and they bumped fists.

“Form of an ice T maze!”

“Form of a drosophila!”

They giggled as they ran away. West coast neuroscientists were all nut jobs in those days.”

I met the eyes of Kuffler lab veteran U. Jack McMahan, who had been watching the action from across the room. He just shook his head at the silly duo. It was unusual to see him outside of the lab, much less at a party. He was a serious guy, who didn’t have time for activities that didn’t yield data. Bob and I worshipped him. In fact, we gave him a nickname that reflected his intense work ethic: “U. Jack: Hustler.”

It was just then that I was distracted by a fracas at the door. It was Kandel arriving with his usual entourage of sycophants. He always entered every room like this with his arms raised and mouth agape in mock surprise as if to say, “I am here! I am Eric Kandel! Let the party begin!” It was an insufferable routine, but Kuffler loved him, so we had to kiss his ass.

“Bob! How the hell are you?”

“I’m good, Eric. Thanks. Is work going well?” I knew better than to ask that.

“Oh nothing much, just… you know… unlocking the secrets of the essence of humanity.”

I threw up in my mouth a little at the prospect of yet another monologue tracing threads from synaptic facilitation in sea slugs to Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past” and back again. I excused myself.

I headed home at an early 1:30 am since I was scheduled to present a journal club paper at the regular 7am Saturday Kuffler lab meeting the next day. As I did, I pondered my encounter with Eric and resolved to dedicate my life to outdoing him. No matter how long it would take, I was going to solve #cortex.

BGB out.