High Price

observation and measurement in experiments.
    And as the semester progressed, I similarly began to discover the order and purpose that underlay much of what at first had seemed pointless to me in psychology. There was a beauty to the structure of this science and there were formulas for understanding behavior. What had seemed like arcane requirements for research and petty concerns were revealed as important ways to avoid bias. They were necessary to control the conditions so that you could ensure that the variables you were studying were indeed linked to the outcome of interest and not just incidental, but causal. This was a way to look under the hood of human nature by stripping away some of the confusing complexities. And it was quantitative, mathematical, solid.
    Most important, I was learning how to think and communicate like a scientist; discovering for myself the profound truth of Einstein’s quip that “everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” For Rob’s class, we wrote up a new experiment every week. That meant loads of practice, just as I’d needed to succeed in basketball. And as in basketball, practice helped me understand and learn how to work within the rules. As I learned them, I got better and more confident. All the while, my behavior was constantly being reinforced with “attaboys” from Rob and on tests and papers, good grades.
    While I was having this awakening, Rob saw that I was increasingly serious and encouraged my questions. He wasn’t one of those dazzling or charismatic professors who wow students with their outsize personalities and intellect; instead, he was quiet and soft-spoken. But he was young and attractive and his creative and challenging exercises and enthusiasm about his subject made him appealing. He stood about six foot four, with sandy brown hair.
    I started hanging out after class to talk with him, then playing basketball with him on the psych department’s intramural team. He turned me on to musicians I’d never heard such as Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan. It seems strange now to think that I hadn’t heard the music of these icons before meeting Rob at age twenty-three. But in my narrow world there didn’t seem to be space or need for white folk singers. Rob also introduced me to books like Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf , which helped me feel a real connection to academia. I well understood the feeling of wolfishness and the sense that one doesn’t belong in polite society described in the book. Like the main character, who sees himself as a “wolf of the steppes,” as well as a man, I felt I had a dual nature, too.
    At the time, I was living with a woman named Terri Howard, a slender, light-skinned sister with huge brown eyes that made her look as though she might be the female twin of the musician Prince. She was a business major and we would be together for four years. While I tried to look respectable and behave respectfully toward her pretentious Republican mom and her mom’s new husband, they seemed to think that a man like me with three gold teeth and whose speech was still filled with heavy street vernacular was too rough around the edges for their Terri. I took considerable comfort in learning that a leading German intellectual who lived more than a century earlier than I did had struggled with many of these same issues.
    Further, Rob made it clear that there was room in research for people like me, those who had not followed the traditional middle- and upper-class route to academia. Indeed, his lab team at the time was a collection of seeming misfits—all of whom went on to later success in medicine and research. One guy was a bona fide Deadhead, complete with long hair, beard, and hippie paraphernalia. Another started as a skinny, highly distracted dude who had so much energy that he smoked pot to calm down. His intensity made people nervous. There was also a highly driven married couple whom we called “the spouses” (their last name was Strauss), whose visible competitiveness stood out at laid-back UNC-Wilmington.
    After I got one of the highest grades in his class, Rob encouraged me to enroll in an advanced independent study course that he would supervise. It was then called advanced physiological psychology, but it would now be labeled as behavioral neuroscience. In order to complete the coursework, however, I had to learn some new skills. The first thing Rob wanted me to do was to learn to operate on the brains of