ADVENTURES OF A PSYCHOLOGIST

In this enlightening biography, award-winning academic psychologist Michael Corballis tells the story of how the field of cognitive psychology evolved and the controversies and anecdotes that occurred along the way.
Since the Second World War, psychology has undergone several scientific movements, from behaviourism to cognitive psychology and finally to neuroscience. In this fascinating biography, Corballis recounts his career as a researcher who played a part in these monumental changes in psychology. Beginning with his boarding-school education in New Zealand, Corballis goes on to recount his meanders through university education, his behavioural research into mirrorimage discriminations in pigeons, the uprising of the “cognitive revolution” amidst 1960s counterculture and his switch to become a cognitive psychologist, his research into brain asymmetry and the evolution of language and its origin of manual gestures, and the development of mental time travel in animals.
Featuring stories of prominent scientists who were integral in psychology’s biggest discoveries and insight into the heated debates and controversies in psychology during a time of great scientific and sociocultural change, this biography is a must-read for those interested in how psychology became established as a science.

Michael Corballis was Professor of Psychology at McGill University and the University of Auckland. He has published widely in experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience. In 2003 he was appointed Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit, and in 2016 he received the Rutherford Medal, New Zealand’s top scientific award.

ADVENTURES OF A PSYCHOLOGIST

Reflections on What Made Up the Mind

Michael Corballis

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2021 Michael Corballis The right of Michael Corballis to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-42053-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-42054-3 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-82150-0 (ebk)

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CONTENTS

• Preface
• vii

• 1 Growing up
• 1

10 16 26 35 42 51 60 68 75 83 92
2 Floundering at university 3 Hello psychology 4 O God! O Montreal! 5 Rats and pigeons 6 Revolutions 7 The lopsided brain 8 Doing the splits 9 Mirrors
10 Gestures, gestures 11 On time 12 Chomsky, God, and language

vi Contents

13 Professional psychology and its discontents 14 Anti-science
101 111

• 119
• 15 A brief reckoning

• Index
• 125

PREFACE

There comes a time when you realise you are actually part of history, a living fossil. I was also, I suppose, something of an interloper. My background and early career path had pointed me in quite different directions, and I stumbled across psychology more or less by chance, but somehow it stuck. And here I am still, an octogenarian, and a kind of de facto historian.
Psychology as an autonomous academic discipline emerged in New Zealand after World War II, and I was part of it for much of that time – student, junior lecturer, lecturer, professor, emeritus professor, and researcher. Although scientific psychology had been well established elsewhere since the late 19th century, notably in the United States and Germany, it developed rapidly after World War II, spurred partly by advances in the biological sciences and partly as a response to the psychological trauma induced by the war itself. It also underwent quite dramatic changes in approach. Indeed, I scarcely recognise the psychology I was taught in the 1950s – for that matter, I scarcely recognise myself from that grey decade.
Although my roots are in New Zealand, I have been witness to much that is international. I taught for some years at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, where Donald Hebb, Canada’s most illustrious psychologist, introduced the brain to psychology. I studied split-brained patients in the laboratory of Nobel Prize winner Roger Sperry in California, as well as in New Hampshire, Ohio, and Italy. I jostled with Noam Chomsky over the nature and evolution of language. I dabbled in brain imaging to try to understand how the two sides of the brain differ. I wrote about memory, brain asymmetry, vision, language, statistics – volumes of stuff, much of it swallowed in the catacombs of science and largely forgotten. Of course I met interesting people, some of whom surface in this book.
I have set this account in an autobiographical frame, because my perception of psychology’s tortuous advance toward becoming a science is coloured by

viii Preface

my own background and experience. I have more or less lived through Shakespeare’s seven ages of man, as recounted by Jaques in As You Like It, although I don’t remember the mewling of infancy, and puking persisted a bit longer, even into my student days. I still have teeth. Bubble reputation? Probably. Looking back, though, I can scarcely recognise any of my former selves, some of whom I wouldn’t wish to know. More important, though, were the cultural changes I witnessed – the early days of dull complacency followed by political and sexual revolutions, then an age of repressive political correctness, with signs now of a populist blowout. These have not only influenced my own demeanour and understanding but also psychology itself. Psychological science went through very different phases since I first encountered it. That is the real story I want to tell.
Then there’s the problem of memory, which is fickle, to the point that one’s own account of past events can be very different from those of others. It is full of holes. Looking back through a photo album reveals images and people that seem utterly unfamiliar, as though from a different life. School reunions have much the same disorienting effect, and I now avoid them. A lot of memory is indeed fabricated, often seemingly designed to create you as a person rather than tell what you actually did, or were. Ronald Reagan is said to have based his recollections of past heroics on war movies – this book may well suffer the same defect, although I have no claim to heroism.
I make no claim to be inclusive, either, and should warn that I have always been an academic and researcher but never a clinician. There are no suggested remedies or diagnostic hints in this book for errant children, difficult in-laws, or mad dogs. My interest is fundamentally in how the mind works, to borrow a phrase from Steven Pinker, who tells me he once attended my classes. And I will drop other names. I apologise to any who may feel left out. I could probably write another version with entirely different characters; stirring the pot of memory can throw up all sorts of things I have overlooked this time round. By the same token, though, I cannot list all the names of people who have profoundly influenced me – to attempt to do so might just make omissions even more stark. But thank you all anyway, so much.
I must nevertheless specifically thank my own family. Barbara has been endlessly patient and helpful. My son Paul is in the same game as a colleague at the University of Auckland and likes to claim that he taught me everything I know. He’s probably right. My other son Tim is a novelist and now also an academic involved with scientific communication. His wisdom is also appreciated. My three 11-year-old granddaughters, Simone, Lena, and Natasha, have also contributed hugely to my late life, mainly through their expertise with electronic devices and their sense of fun.

1

GrowinG up

It is customary to begin with premonitions – the events, thoughts, and ambitions that led to one’s ultimate calling. Alas, my own upbringing and early education gave little hint. Even so, it is probably worth relating something of the environment in which I grew up, if only because it seems utterly unrelated to what happened later on. Others more insightful than I may see clues as to my eventual turn to academia, but I can scarcely recognise myself in that long-ago place, and the memories that do come back seem astonishing and unreal. Was it really like that? So I offer my early years more as matters of historical and sociological interest than as casting any serious light on a future life as an academic psychologist, or on the field itself. And of course my memories are incomplete and fallible, if not downright false.
One thing, though, is clear: I was born in 1936. Such is the paucity of human memory that I have no recollection of that particular event. Much later on, as a lecturer in psychology, I asked large introductory classes to date their earliest memories. There were always one or two who claimed to remember actually being born, although they were probably just being deliberately mischievous. For most of us, memories begin at about three or four. As I discovered later, 1936 was an eventful year: A king died and another abdicated; the English rugby team beat the New Zealand All Blacks for the first time; Amy Johnson flew solo from England to Australia; Nazi Germany occupied the Rhineland and Stalin started his Great Purge; at the Olympic Games in Berlin Jesse Owens won the 100-metre dash and the New Zealander Jack Lovelock won the 1500 metres.
Oblivious to all of this, I was born in the small farming town of Marton, and grew up on a nearby sheep farm, at least until incarcerated in boarding schools. The town and neighbourhood were in many respects slices of England. The landed gentry still spoke of England as “home,” in spite of the fact that most were several generations removed from the Old Country. Marton itself always seemed

2

Growing up

to me eccentric, populated by what appeared to be remittance men or pretentious toffs, either from Britain or affecting to be so, although the solid farming community was a leavening influence. There were dowager ladies demanding correct pronunciation and manners, and my mother insisted that I phone one of them every year on her birthday, which was on the same day as mine. She referred to the lavatory as “the unsavoury appurtenance,” a phrase I still treasure. Marton also included a coterie of small private schools, one for girls, one for small boys, and one for Maori girls, established in the English tradition. They were all Anglican.
Perhaps the lens of time has forced all this into caricature. My mother had grown up in this environment, but my father was something of an outsider. He was the sixth of seven offspring who grew up in County Meath in Ireland. He and the next oldest had worked as farm boys on the estate of the Marquess of Bute in West Scotland before emigrating together in the early 1920s to New Zealand, where they found work on farms in several parts of the country. They were both eventually able to secure wives and farms of their own. They had evidently timed it well in economic terms, although Irish charm probably helped them gain financial support from their newly acquired in-laws. Farming life turned out to be fairly prosperous, in spite of the 1930s depression and the rigours of World War II.
My maternal grandfather was a lawyer in Marton, and well esteemed. He was a bookish man who also liked to paint, and he had managed to send his son, my mother’s older brother, to Oxford, where he gained a degree in law. My mother had been a good scholar at her boarding school, but did not go to university. In those days university was mainly for men, and I think my mother faintly disapproved of university for women, thinking it might give them dangerous ideas. She was not alone in this view, but now the proportions have reversed, with women outnumbering men. So now we all have dangerous ideas. Universities should create dangerous ideas – that’s what they’re for.
My father’s family was Anglo-Irish, and although Catholic, they did have social pretensions, which may well have helped my father gain acceptance into the landed gentry of the Rangitikei. The family claimed descent from Barbara Villiers, the most ostentatious and scandalous of the many mistresses of Charles II of England.¹ Among her many other descendants were Diana, Princess of Wales, the Mitford sisters, Bertrand Russell, and Anthony Eden. Many others, too, of course – it is a pretentious but fairly meaningless claim, almost on a par with claiming descent from William the Conqueror, or perhaps St Patrick of Ireland. Barbara Villiers’ portrait hangs in the Glin Castle² in Limerick, Ireland, but on the day that my wife and I visited it had been removed for cleaning. They may have known I was coming.
I did find out, though, that I am the seventh cousin once removed of Sir Laurence Olivier, although I don’t believe he knew he was related to me.³
I and my three younger brothers were all baptised as Catholics, but my mother had promised the priest that she would raise us as Christians, which he perhaps

Growing up

3

understood to mean Catholic but she interpreted as Anglican, or perhaps simply catholic with a small c. It was, I think, a sly arrangement. My mother was solidly Anglican in spirit but went to church only at Christmas, and at weddings and funerals, which periodically and decorously punctuated our serene lives. The local Catholic priest would occasionally visit the farm, drink whiskey with my father, and reminisce about Ireland, but I don’t remember even a tincture of religion. Perhaps they waited until I had gone to bed. My father seemed to have nothing to do with religion, although he always refused to enter a Catholic church for fear that he would be struck by a bolt of lightning from above. When he died, he was buried in a defunct Presbyterian churchyard overlooking the farm, in a service delivered by a Catholic priest who at first declined to give him a eulogy, but then relented. Comedy always seemed more important than religion.
Part of my childhood was spent during the years of World War II. My father was not sent to the front but joined the Home Guard and was stationed for a time in the small Manawatu town of Feilding, which I was sure he stoutly defended. Apart from that, the war did not seem to impinge materially on our lives, at least from my youthful perspective. As a child, though, I was fascinated by the Battle of Britain and learned to recognise silhouettes of Spitfires, Hurricanes, and Messerschmitts – the airborne combatants of the battle – and can probably still do so. The first movie I ever saw was The First of the Few, a 1942 production about the development of the Spitfire fighter, featuring Leslie Howard as R.J. Mitchell, who designed the plane. David Niven also starred as the pilot who flew it. I remember snatches of the movie, including the scene in which Mitchell/ Howard watched seagulls for inspiration. The legendary Howard was killed the following year when the civilian plane he was travelling in was shot down by the Luftwaffe.
Although we lived in just one place, I went to no fewer than five schools, and later to four universities. My first school was a small establishment about a mile up a country road, and I walked there in the company of some older boys who lived down the road. They were entrusted to look after me, but my memory is that they teased me mercilessly, partly because I wore glasses. The school closed shortly afterwards, and when I look for it now there is no trace at all. I then took the train into Marton to the district high school, and was met by my grandfather. I remember him asking me whether I was a forward or a back – a reference to rugby – and I replied that I was a backward. This became a standing joke. This arrangement was clumsy, and eventually a rural bus route was set up to send me and my brothers, along with other scattered farm children, to South Makirikiri School some five miles away. The bus driver was a friend of my mother, and I remember that she once ran the bus into the ditch. Or perhaps this was a false memory, based on hearsay about another trip.
At age 11 I was sent as a boarder to Huntley School, one of the private schools in Marton. It offered primary education up to standard six (now year eight), but was known as a preparatory school, presumably referring to preparation for

4

Growing up

education in a secondary school with similar Christian values. The school was my first rite of passage, and I still shudder at the memory of my first few days – the cold building, the smell of furniture polish, the regime of bells, the overcooked cabbage and grey meat, and corporal punishment applied, bizarrely, with a wooden spoon. And tripe and onions every Tuesday, a dish I have since been unable to contemplate, let alone eat. It was all in stark contrast to the comfort of the farmhouse and my parents’ benevolence. Of course I adapted to all this, as did a great many other small boys raised in the same culture, but the memory of the initial shock still lingers. I occasionally dream about it.
Huntley School gave me my first real exposure to religion, with regular chapel services and prayers, which I did not understand. In the evenings before getting into bed we were all obliged to kneel at the bedside with our eyes closed and pray, and I was once punished when a prefect saw me with my eyes open. Only later did it occur to me that the little Fauntleroy who caught me must also have had his eyes open. Religion was in fact a total mystery to me. It seemed to be about ancient people, one or two apparently able to live for many hundreds of years, and presented in obscure language. It seemed to imply that we would live on after death – although at the age of 11 I considered that news of little consequence and not helpful, because a dead body couldn’t do much anyway. I failed to understand how a God could be everywhere at once, and apparently invisible. My incomprehension was such that I thought I was probably simply stupid. Perhaps religion came too late; things might have been different if religious instruction had been delivered at an earlier age. A Catholic education might have done the trick, according to the Jesuit promise: “Give me the child for the first seven years and I will give you the man.”
My doubt about religion was perhaps the only premonition that psychology might eventually take over my life.
We were also taught a smattering of French, Latin, algebra, and Euclid, along with the more serious matters of cricket and rugby. We were encouraged to speak nicely, like little English boys, and an end-of-year prize was awarded to the boy who most upheld the “traditions of an English public schoolboy.” It was not I. The school had a rather murky swimming pool, but I remember that we had swimming lessons on the cricket field, practising swimming movements while lying on the ground. I already knew how to swim from the more rough-andtumble ways of my earlier life, and won swimming races when we were eventually immersed in the pool itself.
The next rite of passage was secondary school. Whanganui Collegiate School was established in 1854 as an Anglican school for the education of native children, but had developed into the equivalent of a minor English public school. There were a few token Maori and Pacific Island boys there on special scholarships, but there was otherwise very little to distinguish the school from its counterparts in England, or in other Commonwealth countries such as Australia, Canada, and South Africa. Many of the traditions observed at Huntley continued – Huntley was after all a preparatory school. Within the first few

Growing up

5

days new entrants were given an IQ test to determine which form they should be placed in. My IQ turned out to be about 60, which clearly marked me as a mental defective, and perhaps explained my failure to understand religion. It turned out, though, that the test came in the form of a folded sheet, and I had neglected to unfold it, answering only the questions on the first and last pages – clearly a verification of stupidity anyway. I was then asked to take the test again and given the full allotted time, and since I had already completed half of it my IQ increased to well above what it should have been. I was duly, and fortuitously, placed in the top form.
At Collegiate, the cane replaced the wooden spoon, although prefects could administer punishment after lights-out with a strangely reinforced slipper. You were called out of the dormitory and whacked on the behind in the bathroom, while the rest of the dormitory listened in fear – or perhaps schadenfreude. In the morning, we had two minutes in which to get out of bed and take a five-second cold shower, a procedure sometimes monitored and timed by a prefect languishing in a hot bath. We then had to run about 400 yards up to the end of a road and back, occasionally under the surveillance of a prefect or master.
In class, we were taught English history, and we knew little of the history of
New Zealand. We went to chapel every day of the week and twice on Sundays, and our main unspoken challenge was to sing hymns so loudly they could be heard on the other side of the Whanganui River, at least a mile away. Perhaps the more fervent also thought the sound might get through to God.
The most prominent activity again, though, was sport. Rugby and cricket were compulsory at least until the third or fourth year, when you could substitute field hockey or rowing, respectively. Individual sports, such as tennis and golf, were less encouraged, although available. I did have a brief crack at golf, but on the first swing of the club the ball simply disappeared, and I never saw it again. Team sports were held to encourage manliness and leadership, and more importantly, perhaps, conformity. Only later in life did it occur to me that sport, rather than religion itself, formed the background of the English public-school system, as well as its colonial outposts, creating loyalty and brotherhood and stifling dissent. Even so, I retain a fondness for both rugby and cricket, in spite of having largely discarded the ethos of the system – although I had actually switched from rugby to hockey because I wore glasses and couldn’t see much on the rugby field without them.
Along with corporal punishment, the rugged sporting environment seemed to create a survival bond that encouraged Old Boys to send their sons there, sometimes no doubt against the protests of mothers, heartbroken that their sons were swept away. But many of the mothers, too, went to private girls’ schools with similar ideals, and were hardened to the system. It taught a stoicism and obedience to authority that helps explain why men had earlier gone to war, and perhaps why women, too, learned to suffer indignities without protest. My own mother was a warm person, but I can remember an occasion back on the farm when our own children and their cousins were fooling around, and she exclaimed “They should be sent to boarding school. That would teach them