By representing inputs and outputs as circular diagrams, I bring out the complexity of how our minds are shaped. There are dozens of biographies of scientists and it will be an interesting project to do a comparative study of inputs and outputs. They may reveal some common features and the time in which shared components emerged in these lives. I believe molecular and genetic insights into creativity and mental development will eventually be revealed in detail. I also believe that studies of inputs and outputs have much to offer scholars in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science.
12List of Inputs into My Life
1.My father and his passion to read: My junior high school mentor, Hugh F. Browne, once responded to a get-well card I sent to him with a quotation I was told to show to my father. It was in Latin “Exegi monumentum aere perennius.” (I have built a monument that is more enduring than brass). I learned it was an ode written by Horace. He was thanking my father for his contributions to my talents.
2.My mother’s paranoia and protective love: I learned many psychotic people are not psychotic all the time. When my mother was in her sane moments, she was generous, loving, and protective and encouraged my brother and me to enjoy the arts and humanities.
3.My siblings: I had virtually no contact with my half-sister, Sadie, but did look forward to trips to Manhattan to visit my half-brother, Benny. I learned not all communists were terrorists with bombs, but many were good people who sought justice and equal opportunity in an era that tolerated racism, sexism, and exploitation.
4.The Great Depression: Growing up poor taught me that a pencil and paper or a dime store box of watercolors could be used to generate art and that NY City’s policy of free museums was one of the great gifts of government to people of all social standing, even the homeless and impoverished.
5.Poverty: I share with most of my classmates the poverty of the Depression. Many were less fortunate and were from homes where fathers were out of work and they depended on “relief” as it was called then and “welfare” as it is called today.
6.K-12 education: I bless the Board of Education of New York City for its wonderful teachers who cared for their students and went out of their way to help students learn. One teacher even gave me the class Christmas tree to take home.
7.Morris Cohen: I owe so much to Mr. Cohen. What a gift he gave me to read aloud the major works of Western Civilization.
8.American Museum of Natural History: My favorite museum. I devoured the legends of the display cases as I went dozens of times each year on weekends or during the summers to enjoy its displays of the artifacts of the universe.
9.Metropolitan Museum of Art: I was captivated by the art of all ages. Looking at bas-reliefs carved in the wooden backing of an Egyptian chair from a tomb was stunning in its detail. I realized these people living some 4000 years ago were as talented as we are today, and I felt a communion with them just enjoying their skills.
10.Museum of Modern Art: I was amazed at the limitless ways human imagination could transform the familiar. Reality was constantly transformed, especially in human portraiture.
11.World War 2: I was grateful the allies defeated the Axis powers as we called them. But I felt sad that everything Japanese was rejected. Before the war I looked lovingly at the Bonsai miniature trees in the Encyclopedia Britannica and appreciated the sensitivity of the Japanese artists and architects with a set of photo postcards of Kyoto I got from my mother when I admired them in an antique shop.
12.Thomas Jefferson High School: I loved being in high school with wonderful teachers in English (Mr. Felix Sper), French (Mr. Max Cantor), earth science (Mr. Benjamin Schupack), mathematics (Ms. Edna Kramer), and art (Mr. Bernard Green). Mr. Cohen’s outreach to my education was a gift that would be hard to duplicate even for a millionaire’s child.
13.Elevator operators: I learned what hard work is for most people and I appreciated the banter with my fellow elevator operators during my summer jobs.
14.Pepys and keeping a diary: Reading Pepys told me how to learn history from the eyewitnesses of those experiencing it. He also taught me the discipline of doing so every day. I wish I had had the time to do since 1949 to the present, but at least 80 percent of my life is represented in over 100 volumes of a diary.
15.Montaigne and writing personal essays: His essays talked to me about the pain he suffered from kidney stones (something I learned to experience with my own calcium oxalate stones). I felt like he was talking to me. Personal essays are a way to experience a life after death not based on faith but on the reality of pen and ink.
16.Freud and sublimating discontents into works of civilization: Despite the Freud bashing since the 1960s, I learned from reading his Civilization and its Discontents how to convert (“sublimate”) frustration, failure, or melancholy into works of art, science and scholarship. I wish every student would read that book in high school or in the frosh year at college.
17.Job and the inscrutability of fate (or God): I never believed in a God because the trips to museums revealed so many dead religions and changing views of God and gods. But I admired the author of the Book of Job for creating a character who had the courage to challenge God, punishing Job for a lousy bet with Satan and bullying Job into groveling submission by telling him, “Who the hell are you to question my judgment?” If I had been raised religious, that alone would turn me away from it.
18.Epictetus and the election of a worthwhile life: I learned that if a slave can become an author of a work that has lasted some two thousand years, that most of humanity has the capacity to surmount the setbacks or circumstances of their birth and be creative.
19.NYU: I experienced wonderful teachers — Charles Davis in English, Wallace K. Ferguson in history, Thomas J. King in biology.
20.Apprentice (NYU literary magazine): I learned how to proofread articles and put a magazine together. I had great friendships and spirited rivalries with poets and writers who enjoyed the rivalry and encouragement we provided each other.
21.Marriage to Helen: I learned from Helen her commitment to poetry and I failed to be her muse. But I appreciated being demoted to a friend rather than being written off as a failure.
22.Fatherhood: I had the joy of Claudia with Helen and the joys of Christina, Erica, John, and Anders from Nedra. I believe my personality, my joy in their presence and the love and tolerance I showered on them, was appreciated.
23.Indiana University: It was like experiencing a second life. I was on my own. Every graduate course was an input of new knowledge by committed teachers and an atmosphere that sustained intellectual growth.
24.Muller as mentor: working for a Nobel laureate inspired me to emulate his habits of learning and scholarship. I admired his belief that science is not only a joy to understand and participate in but also had its moral obligations to society.
25.Dissertation and my PhD experiences: Spending two years of research to interpret the structure of a gene by designing genetic stocks, inducing mutations of that gene with X-rays, and reading every paper ever published on that gene (dumpy or truncate) in Drosophila