But two people who were important to me in developing a career –  This is Mike Merzenich – who’s at the University of California at San Francisco, and he was a postdoc at Wisconsin when I was there, and he had worked with Mountcastle and gotten his degree, and a very nice paper with Mountcastle. You have to have a really good personality, a type of personality, if you are going to survive as an undergraduate with Mountcastle, Mike was one of two or three people that ever did that, and Mountcastle liked him at the end, and that was amazing.

He came to Wisconsin for his postdoc and unlike me who worked in auditory and was supposed to work in vision, he was supposed to work in auditory and not somatosensory.  He did a rather comparative study of the cochlear nucleus from that brain collection [Wally Welker brain collection at Wisconsin (WEB SITE here)]. That was his main contribution and it was never published, but nevertheless he got a good job – it was still possible in those days. He went to San Francisco and started to do auditory studies. So he learned enough passively, by talking to other people, and what to do and what would be easy. And he told me, when you take a job you should have ten things that you can do in a few months, that are really easy. So when you go someplace you are really productive right away, and he was. He did auditory mapping. So a lot of the areas in auditory cortex came from him out in San Francisco. I went and did mapping in tree shrews and squirrels with him one summer, and it was a lot of fun to be in San Francisco. Then he came here for a sabbatical and we did somatosensory studies – that’s how the somatosensory studies came about because he knew something about that, and I had learned something passively by Wally Welker being near us all.             Next Page