Why did I choose to study at McGill? To be perfectly honest, it wasn’t much of a choice. McGill was in my blood: my mother was pregnant with me when she walked on stage to accept her BA from McGill, and my father and uncles got degrees from McGill as well, as have my sister, cousins, niece, and nephew. And unlike the frenzy of college shopping that consumes my American friends, the choice for most Montrealers when I was in high school and CEGEP was simple: McGill or Sir George (now Concordia).
I profited from being an active member of the superb Psychology Department, which absorbed undergraduate students into its culture.”
Long before “diversity” became a buzzword, I appreciated the national, ethnic, and socioeconomic diversity of my fellow students. I enjoyed being part of a vibrant urban landscape, with its repertory theaters, coffee houses, and cheap Eastern European restaurants, rather than being sequestered in a student bubble. And I profited from being an active member of the superb Psychology Department, which absorbed undergraduate students into its culture.
It was there that I became immersed in what was to be my life calling, cognitive psychology.
My interest in becoming an experimental cognitive psychologist originated in the great questions about human nature that were raised in the 1960s. Are humans innately cooperative and peaceful, so they don’t need money, private property, or governments? Or do they harbor aggressive and self-centered sentiments, requiring a social contract to allow them to flourish? I was too young to have participated in the student upheavals of the 1960s, but as a McGill undergrad I was so embedded in the city and community that I was exposed to these issues, which were on everyone’s minds and lips.
I studied human nature through a variety of disciplines – anthropology, philosophy, literature, neuroscience – but psychology for me hit the sweet spot of raising profound questions but also engaging in practicable research activities that could answer, or at least shed light, on them. And language is the most accessible window into the workings of the human mind.