Among Superheroes: memories, maps & McGill with psychologist Lynn Nadel

A biographical look into the lairs of modern neuroscience. Part 1 of a research conversation on the hippocampus. And notes for a tale of how McGill University, the invasion of Prague, and UCL pulled two expats together towards discoveries and writings that have changed a scientific framework.

Lynn Nadel has been doing influential research about memory and the hippocampus for decades. He is the co-author with Nobel Prize winner John O'Keefe of The Hippocampus As a Cognitive Map, one of the first books to open new fields of research relative to a part of the brain called the hippocampus, known for its role in both memory and navigation.

Nadel and O'Keefe met at McGill University at a time when the place was buzzing with the books, papers and people creating what we now study as neuroscience.

McGill University in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s can look a bit like the superhero headquarters of what would develop into modern neuroscience. Once you begin to list all the people who were working there at that time and all the threads that have since influenced the filed, from Wilder Penfield and Brenda Milner to Donald Hebb to John O'Keefe and Lynn Nadel, one begins to see how much of the work being done today was oriented from that starting point.

University of Arizona page

Lynn Nadel

John O'Keefe Nobel Lecture

Henry Moliason (H.M.)

Brenda Milner

Peter Milner, author of Physiological Psychology

Donald Hebb

Wilder Penfield

Ronald Melzac

Suzanne Corkin

Bob Mueller & John Kubie

Jim Ranck

Soviet Invasion of Prague

University College London

The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map

Hippocampus History on Mastadon

Psych Review story on bjks podcast

McGill University Neuro

Transcript

McGill to UCL

Andrea Hiott: [00:00:00] Hey everyone. This is a research conversation with Lynn Nadel. as you know, I'm trying to understand cognition as navigability, towards that, what really got me into that was my study in neuroscience of the hippocampus and this area of the brain. There's many areas associated with navigation that are also associated with memory, a specific kind of memory, but. Um, just in a general way. Let me just say that, you know, this area of the brain. Was really famous in the fifties. For memory from a guy named H M, which I'll just link to some writings about this, if you're interested, but he had this area of his brain removed and he couldn't create new memories. That's a very generalized conception for those of you who haven't heard of him. And then later in the seventies, a man named John O'Keefe. Had this kind of discovery of, uh, cells in the same area of the brain that work almost like a GPS. Again, this is all very generalized, but there are are cells in [00:01:00] our brains. Which fire in very specific patterns relative to how we move through the world. And they are referred to often as the SatNav of the brain or the GPS of the brain. They're called place cells and grid cells and, uh, border cells, head direction cells, and many people were involved in. This process of, discovering these cells or in the case of Lynn writing about them, thinking about them. Theoretically in concern to the hippocampus and he and John O'Keefe wrote a book together. Uh, which, has been a really formative book. The book is called the Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map, And cognitive map, comes from work from another man named Edward Tolman. Tolman conducted these experiments where he started to develop this idea of latent learning is maybe how you've heard it, heard of it. Kind of just how we move through the world is a kind of knowledge gathering. Or just that we move through the world and we don't realize that we're learning certain routes and [00:02:00] paths, but later we can find our way Without thinking about it because we've just learned it. And this is, where this connection is between cognition and, um, navigability. And we can see it in many different landscapes, not only these geographical landscapes, but also. How we move through, landscapes of language, emotional landscapes, and so on. But in this conversation with Lynn, we really talk about this very early time period where the idea of cognitive maps was just starting. 

Um, this is just a research conversation about those early years, and all the names that he mentions here are, famous names in this. Little world of neuroscience. But these names and this little world of neuroscience actually has really big implications across how we're coming to understand what it means to develop knowledge and memory and how this connects us to other. Beings in the world. Maybe you've heard of a place called McGill university in Montreal. Pretty much everyone I've mentioned so far was there. [00:03:00] Around the same time period in the 50 60 seventies. When neuroscience was forming and Penfield and Hebb, Donald Hebb, this idea of neurons that fire together, wire together, Lynn and I talk about it.

He was there. He was also at McGill. So it was John O'Keefe. Um, so it was Brenda Milner, the person who's famous for the studies of H M relative to the hippocampus. Um, I think of this time period. 

And this university as like the superhero headquarters of what became neuroscience so we're going to talk about the super hero world of scientists at McGill in Montreal. And we're going to talk a little bit about the development of this idea of cognitive maps. so thanks for being here. 

I hope you're all doing really well. Let's go. 

Lynn Nadel: yeah, 

Andrea Hiott: let's get started. I guess it's probably best to jump in and start with the McGill years and As as I told you, I'm really looking for ways to connect all of you. Actually, it's not that hard to do because of [00:04:00] this extraordinary time period at McGill and that you and John were actually there and and so on.

But what I'm still struggling with a little bit in the text is the Tolman because his story is so interesting. It's so crucial to your work. And I'm trying to connect the dots a little more between. Maybe even just this kind of academic family tree, how it sort of got from Tolman to you, Hebb, and so on.

So I'm just throwing that out in case anything comes to mind, so we can go ahead and start after you'd gotten into McGill, you were studying chemistry, and Then I guess you could tell me a little bit about how you first sort of discovered psychology department and this, um, superhero world of, of scientists.

Lynn Nadel: To say that I was studying chemistry is to go is, is to put much more on it than existed. I was not a very good student in my first few years, and I was there because I had an interest in [00:05:00] chemistry, which was not. Deep. It was based on the fact that my father had been a chemist. And so, and McGill was a good place to study chemistry, but I wasn't really studying chemistry.

I wasn't really studying anything. 

Andrea Hiott: A few of us are our first year of college. 

Lynn Nadel: So, but, but one thing did become quite clear. From the chemistry labs that I did, which was that I probably shouldn't become a chemist. 

Andrea Hiott: Why was that not so good in the lab 

Lynn Nadel: experiment? I was not sufficiently careful, shall we say.

Andrea Hiott: Did you drop some 

Lynn Nadel: beakers? I might have damaged them. So it became clear that I was not, that was not a course. So I was just looking around for something else to do as an undergrad. You needed to have a major or something. So I switched over to biology. And then I started taking, you know, a variety of courses in biology, including, including psychology, because why not? I was always interested in that kind of stuff, but [00:06:00] not particularly focused on it. And of course this was on the intro to Psych course was taught by Hebb, so. I didn't go to McGill because of Hebb. I didn't sign up for that class. I didn't even know who Hebb 

Andrea Hiott: was. Oh, you didn't even know when you signed up.

Lynn Nadel: Oh, I didn't know how famous he was. I had none of this knowledge to me. I simply signed up for a class in Intro to Psych. Was he already 

Andrea Hiott: really famous then? Oh yeah, he was already famous. Because he was writing his book still or it was already out? 

Lynn Nadel: This was 1960, this was 1961. Okay. He was probably president of APA.

His book came out in 49, 

Andrea Hiott: I mean. Right, the Fire Together, Why Together thing was already 

Lynn Nadel: out. All of that was out there. Although it hadn't been, was not that popular in North America yet. Right, right. That's a part of the story here. Mm hmm. Anyway, he was Very famous in Canada. He was famous around the world, [00:07:00] but you know, that didn't mean people agreed with his approach, but he was very famous.

I didn't know him. I took his class. It was fascinating. And I, so I started to basically just took a lot of psychology classes without majoring in psych and I was on a bit of a pre med track, so to speak, thinking. 

Andrea Hiott: Do you remember what caught you in his class? Just 

Lynn Nadel: how interesting.

Just, and I was, it is the case that I had been interested, even when I was a kid, about, you know, brains, and when they go wrong, and what happens when somebody's crazy, you know, but it was like, I was interested in that, and I was also interested in baseball and hockey, it wasn't like a passion of mine, but it was something I was interested in, and, so it, it matched up with some early interests I had had, vague, inchoate sort of stuff, and just, Tickled it.

So I started taking a lot of psych classes and I was pre med and then I didn't get into medical school because I cussed up my first two years and my grades were pretty poor and So I had a year and by this point I [00:08:00] was married with one kid and another kid. got married young. Yeah, I got married young, foolishly, but did And So I ended up Getting a job working for a year in a psych lab because I thought, let's see what that's like.

I know on campus. Oh, yeah in the psych department. I somehow okay myself with people in the psych department got a job. So, you know, a gap year, so to speak, a unforced gap year. Working in the, doing behavioral psychopharmacology work with Dalbir Bindra, a professor in psychology. Uh, and that really sold me.

I mean, even though it's really pretty boring research, that really sold me on. And I was, because I was there for the whole year in the department, in the animal lab area, I mixed with all the graduate students and so on. I was treated like a graduate student almost. And then, remarkably, they let me into the graduate program, which they didn't used to do, which they tend to, they didn't have a policy of not taking. Right. 

Andrea Hiott: You're not [00:09:00] supposed to get to do both at the same school.

Exactly right. 

Lynn Nadel: That policy was more strictly enforced in those years than it is now, by the way. Anyway, they let me in and, uh, that was the beginning of it, you know, and, and O'Keefe was a, was a first year graduate student the year that I was working in the lab. Before I started as a graduate student. So John, John showed up at the same time that I more or less connected with psychology at that research level.

Do you 

Andrea Hiott: remember the first time you met him? Early time? Any like first impressions he was a little older, nice 

Lynn Nadel: guy, smart. Um, a little different, you know, settled. You know, married to, to a nice, nice woman who's still, he's still married to, Eileen, um, nice, quirky, smart, and a little older, and sort of wiser, and not, not as, uh, not as wild and crazy as some of the rest of us were, a little more, a more self, a more [00:10:00] settled person, and always was, and always has been.

Andrea Hiott: Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah. He'd already had some other life before that too. Yeah, I think so, 

Lynn Nadel: exactly, and, and, . And he was, um, the thing was that at that point, that year, the psychology, the animal psychology thing was split between a couple of different places. We weren't all in one place. And. John was working with, uh, Ron Melzack in a, in a different house, completely separate from the rest of us who were working, you know, with Milner or with some of the other students with Melzack, me with Bindra, or, and if Hebb had any students working with animals.

We were all together in one place near the medical school, and then there was Melzack, who had recently been hired. Uh, and John was one of his first graduate students, and they were doing cat research in an old building, separate from everyone 

Andrea Hiott: else. Oh, okay. It's kind of off to the side now. Off to the side.

Lynn Nadel: Actually, you didn't see a lot of John, uh, that first year, other than in, you know, when he would just happen to be around for seminars or for some, somebody coming to give a [00:11:00] talk and stuff like that, because he was a year ahead of me, so I didn't, I was not in seminars with him, specifically.

So John and I were, friendly during grad school, quite friendly because we shared political interests. We were both, semi socialist kind of politics. But other than that, we didn't have a lot to do with each other research wise, because we were not in the same space. 

Andrea Hiott: I'd like to hear a little bit about that, this, this social thing, because it's a bit different than now,

I mean, during that time, what did it feel like? I 

Lynn Nadel: mean, that was a time during which, if you were a graduate student, even if you were married and had kids like I was, the lab was the center of your life. It was not a nine to five job. There was no balance, you know, life, quality of life, balance, nonsense, nothing like that.

You were in the lab all the time, basically, and as I was, and as my wife would hang out in the lab, and the kid and the little baby thing would be [00:12:00] sitting off to the side while I was doing surgery . It was all mixed together, basically. There was no separation of any of that and it really dominated, you know, one's life.

So I did not have a social life outside the sort of group of people that I was a graduate student with, by and large. Some did, some didn't, but by and large we were all, and we all hung out together all the time. We spent all of our time together. Did 

Andrea Hiott: you have seminars with Brenda 

Lynn Nadel: Milner? Brenda Milner was was on the periphery of what we were, of what we were doing, because Brenda Milner was at the Montreal Neurological Institute, which was You know, away, away away is we didn't there very often unless there was a talk to be heard or something like that Would show up at seminars.

She at that time, of course was married to Peter Milner. Mm hmm 

Andrea Hiott: So he was closer to you probably 

Lynn Nadel: way closer He was the one girl the closest with because Peter was at that point [00:13:00] Peter was writing his 1970 physiological psychology textbook Which is an absolute classic You know, by far the best textbook ever written, you know, it's really stood the 

Andrea Hiott: test of time that one 

Lynn Nadel: hasn't.

Yeah, it's an impressive book, basically. And so he was, he was writing that book when while we were graduate students, and we were reading mimeographed, there's a word you probably haven't heard, or maybe don't even know what that word means. I've heard it. Mimeographed was a yeah. It was a, um, a machine for making copies before that. It's a pre fax thing all I can tell you is it used ink and your hands got messy. 

Andrea Hiott: Okay. That gives me a good image. 

Lynn Nadel: And the, and the, and the ink it used was to tend to be purple. Have you ever seen old reprints? 

Andrea Hiott: That sounds familiar. I mean, I've been in a lot of libraries and archives and I've definitely seen purple ink.

Lynn Nadel: That's what identifies it. Anyway, he's passing around mimeograph. Copies of his chapters of his book that we were [00:14:00] reading in seminar. So Peter was in full bloom and he was the one we all went to for questions and he was the guy who knew everything. I mean, it's remarkable because he's writing a textbook about the whole field. He was the one we all went to. Melzack was new, uh, and a little bit less accessible, but very smart and nice guy. We interacted with him a fair amount because even though he had a lab over in this other building, he had an office. in the place where the rest of the animal researchers were. He had an office there that he was in and out of not all that frequently. Bindra, my, my advisor, Bindra was a, uh, human researcher mostly, and he had just started getting involved with animal research so that he could look at some pharmacology things.

And he didn't know much about animal research. So I I interacted. Almost entirely with Milner and Melzack and him. He did not have his office where the animal researchers were. Okay. We're in this, in another building where the human researchers were. That was the [00:15:00] main hub of the psychology department, an old house. On an old street in, do you know Montreal 

Andrea Hiott: at all? I've been there like twice.

Lynn Nadel: The base of the mountain, there are some old streets, and anyway, he had a lovely old house. The psychology, and psychology there would meet every afternoon for tea.

So it's a very British kind of, you know, thing, which I got used to. And so it would be tea in the afternoon at three or four o'clock in the psychology building where Hebb was. And if you wanted to spend time with Hebb, you just would walk over, stroll over there. It was about a 10 to 15 minute walk from where the animal lab was.

And you do tea in the afternoon. And I did that, you know, fair. So that was how I, so one interacted with Hebb. That way, but one also interacted with Hebb, uh, by virtue of taking his first year seminar, which was famous, you know, for it's, it is 

Andrea Hiott: what were those teas like I have to, I have to stop on that one a little bit.

What did did did [00:16:00] people ask him questions and he would talk about things or it was, 

Lynn Nadel: you know, they, In some ways they were less memorable for me than the teas I subsequently had at UCL with John with people in the anatomy and physiology department where the tea every afternoon there you you sat around the table with three Nobel Prize winners.

That was a little more, that was a more daunting tea sort of episode than having tea with Hebb, which itself was, you know, But Hebb was friendly, and actually the person who was most present during the tease, I'm now remembering, was the head of the department, uh, George Ferguson, who was a statistician, but who was, was a real bon vivant, and a bit of a poet, and wrote kind of doggerel poetry, and gave great Christmas parties, and I sort of, I modeled my behavior as department head a little bit after what I observed in him.

Because he was really the, a bit of a social glue [00:17:00] person in a department. Anyway, so we had tea in the afternoon, we would see Hebb that way, that would be the interaction with Hebb. You know, we'd be in and out, sort of over the time when he was a graduate student, but he was a presence. Then we moved into a new building, in about a year and a half before I Finished up and John finished up and then suddenly we were all together in a new building.

Andrea Hiott: Were you already working on the hippocampus? Because your PhD was on the hippocampus. How did that happen? 

Lynn Nadel: Already working on the hippocampus. Why did I? Okay. 

Andrea Hiott: Was that any connection between Peter and Brenda? 

Lynn Nadel: Oh, absolutely. We'll segue straight. So the big, the big issue there, if you were, if you were in that department, you were probably interested in memory as a graduate student.

Probably, not only, but probably. Because, you know, memory, you have Hebb, you know, I mean. Mm hmm. So, and then there was Brenda Miller, and then there was H. M. Mm hmm. 

Andrea Hiott: Which was already Those papers were already well 

Lynn Nadel: known. The 

Andrea Hiott: Scoville and the Penfield stuff was already, yeah. All right, [00:18:00] 

Lynn Nadel: now, so you know some of the background here. Yeah, but I'm trying to 

Andrea Hiott: get a sense of when it all started to fill. I mean, from my point of view, it feels like it was already kind of huge, but I know it, it took some time. In different parts of the world.

Lynn Nadel: It took some time and it was somewhat, progress was, was delayed, you might say, by the, by the fact that the early attempts to, to kind of create an animal model of HM all failed. So that set the stage for, right off the bat in, after the 57 paper, uh, Brenda Milner and, uh, and a postdoc, Orbach, uh, joined forces with Rasmussen and to do an experiment where they tried to replicate the surgery that was done on HM in a group of monkeys. Oh, okay. Demonstrate that they have a memory defect like HM had a memory defect, right? The hippocampus is 

Andrea Hiott: different though, but I guess you could still, Oh, you know, you have the models.

Yeah, yeah. I 

Lynn Nadel: know. So they prepared the, you know, surgery as close as [00:19:00] possible to the, what Scoville had done in HM. And, uh, lo and behold, these monkeys had no memory deficit whatsoever. virtually no memory deficiet, a little bit, but nothing, nothing. So, and then people then did hippocampal lesions in rats, early hippocampal lesion work in rats in the early 1960s, same thing, no general, nothing at all, like what was seen in HM.

So that was the conundrum in the early sixties. There was this conundrum in the field, like, What's going 

Andrea Hiott: on here? That's fascinating. Was there any spatial, uh, deficiency? 

Lynn Nadel: No, nothing. 

Andrea Hiott: Nobody was even looking at that, I guess. 

Lynn Nadel: Nobody was even looking at any of that stuff. It was the reigning theories of hippocampal function in animals where or not memory, there were things like response, inhibition or, or avoidance behavior or emotional fascinating, the whole range of things not none of which were memory or space. 

Andrea Hiott: So closer to amygdala like, 

Lynn Nadel: exactly right. Those are just sort of amygdala like thinking part of the limbic system.

So yeah, yeah. [00:20:00] And so that was, that was the setting in which I was a firstly an undergrad and then a grad student is in that setting, you know, kind of brewing in in that broth. 

Andrea Hiott: And that 

Lynn Nadel: was the atmosphere in the department, you know, that there's this, you know, we're interested in memory and then Hebb's ideas about synaptic memory, and then these ideas that the hippocampus, you know, based on HM is crucial, but what's the story in animal models?

We were animal researchers, you can't do much work in humans, so we know what do you do, right? Now there's a couple, now a couple of small points. When I was an undergrad, taking that first year intro course in psychology, I think I was my second year as an undergrad, I roomed with two other undergrads, one of whom was, was somebody, Odling Smee.

Andrea Hiott: When you say roomed with, was it like a dorm room kind of thing?

Lynn Nadel: We, we shared an apartment. I shared an apartment with two other, two other people. We each had our own room. Odling Smee was his name. I can't [00:21:00] remember his first name now. And he ended up doing work in, in the UK.

Yeah, doing some interesting behavioral work. And then an American from, from Boston called, uh, Charles Budd Corkin. 

So my second year roommate, you know, got involved with a graduate student in psychology and ultimately married Suzanne Corkin.

And so While I was rooming with him in my second year taking the course from eight

Andrea Hiott: So you had that connection you already had 

Lynn Nadel: HM in your?

also hearing a little bit about this crazy, you know HM person None of it registered with me at that point. Okay. Now you dial forward a few years now. I'm a graduate student 

hM isn't enough and and there's this disjunct between Human and animal stuff. So I had the hypothesis The hypothesis, which was based on some reality, which is that in the, in the work with humans, HM, for example, [00:22:00] the surgery removed most of his anterior hippocampus, because that's the way the surgery came in. And

in the rat work that was not confirming what was seen in HM, everybody was looking at the dorsal hippocampus, which is the posterior hippocampus in humans. So I, I had the idea that, well, you know, maybe the disjunct between animal and human work is that they're looking at different parts of the hippocampus that the human folks are looking at the.

What is the ventral hippocampus in rats, and the rat people are looking at the dorsal hippocampus. So obviously they're different things. So that was my dissertation. 

Andrea Hiott: That's a good hypothesis. I guess it wasn't quite true, but maybe it would have been if you'd had really better information about where HM's lesions really were, because didn't it change a bit?

Lynn Nadel: It changed a little bit, but you know, I think, I mean, this, this was the first, Len Girard, who just like died like four months ago, I think. [00:23:00] also published something on comparing dorsal and ventral hippocampus in the, at, in the same time 1967 68. We were the first ones to even, you know, think about that, and I did it for the reasons I described, and then I dropped it, more or less.

However, I've come 

back 

Andrea Hiott: to that. Didn't you write about that too? Yeah, I 

Lynn Nadel: recently just published another paper, in 21 published a paper on the long act of the hippocampus. Yeah, I remember. I'm thinking about, and I really think there's something very important about, about what's going on, but you know.

There is, probably, yeah. That original intuition was onto something, but it was not what I thought it was. Anyway, so that's why I worked on the hippocampus. I ended up working on it because, because of that. But I did not do my master's thesis on that. I did my master's thesis on, on memory using cortical spreading depression to study, the role of the cortex in memory, in habituation memory.

Andrea Hiott: Is that where you started [00:24:00] looking at the stuff that you would eventually propose for your PhD? I'm wondering how to connect those two 

Lynn Nadel: things. There's no correct, there's no connection. I mean. You just had different interests.

Yeah. Thanks. There wasn't necessarily a connection. In those days, you could do your master's on one thing and your PhD on something else. Nowadays, people don't do that much anymore. Anyway, I did my master's. I didn't want to, there was no way for me to follow on with that research given the technologies I had available to me at that time.

The, the, the kind of world leader in the technique that I used in my master's. thesis, this cortical spreading depression. The world leader was in Czechoslovakia in Prague. That's where I went. Oh, okay. Well, there's a connection. That's the connection. That's why I went to do my postdoc. When I dropped the technique.

temporarily to jump on the hippocampus bandwagon that was everybody else's hobby horse in that psych department at the time. So I was following the crowd, you might [00:25:00] say. 

Andrea Hiott: So you you went back to that in a way. But first, can you just tell me a little bit, do you remember, have any sort of sensory memories of the lab and of being at McGill?

I mean, was it? Oh, a lot of them. Like what do you think of when you think of it? Was it cold? Was it? 

Lynn Nadel: Yes. That's the first thing. Yeah. First thing. Always cold. It was always cold because you, although of course I spent, you know, a number of summers in Montreal and they were, uh, they were very nice, but anyway, cold.

The lab itself was, you know, the two, two completely different eras. The one where we're in this old animal research building next to the medical school off by ourself. It was, you're like, A grungy pre, you know, pre regulation era, you know, animal lab,

I mean, none of the heavy duty stuff that is, is, you know, you go, have you ever been, Trondheim? 

Andrea Hiott: Uh, no, actually, I never went there, 

Lynn Nadel: if you visit the Trondheim lab, if you go to their [00:26:00] animal lab, you can't even get into the lab without putting on like full surgical.

It's all behind barriers. You visitors, I've met you, everybody. Proper shoes, everything is completely, you know, aseptic. But look, that's, that's one extreme. Very sci fi. We were at the other extreme. 

Andrea Hiott: Okay. You're smoking it in the lab and stuff. Everything 

Lynn Nadel: was going on. It was also 1960s, you know.

Andrea Hiott: Right. Yeah, well I want to hear a little bit about that too. I mean you said you and John shared interests. What was the vibe like? It's, what other kind of things were you talking about at the time? Because there was 

Lynn Nadel: a lot going on. We were very politically engaged. Both of us. He a little bit even more than me.

But we were both politically engaged. I know, I know that he, he and me a little bit on the sideline was involved in bringing Chomsky , to the campus back in the 60s to give him talks. I mean, we were, we were [00:27:00] engaged. We were not like, you know, on the front line. We were graduate students, but we were very engaged.

We were both engaged politically. It mattered to you. It mattered to us a lot. We were both very political. Uh, and so we, a lot of what we talked about was politics. 

Andrea Hiott: And you both seem to be very, rather philosophical. I mean, he was already reading a lot 

Lynn Nadel: of philosophy. More than me. He had a background of philosophy a little bit and his wife was a, was a PhD philosopher.

Oh. Eileen is trained in philosophy. Oh, wonderful. He had more, he had much more, you know, background in philosophy than I did. Mine, mine was second acquired. 

Andrea Hiott: Were you interested in that? I mean, were you trying to understand bigger issues then? I 

Lynn Nadel: got interested in, you know, in the space issues of, you know, in philosophy of space and philosophy of science issues.

Andrea Hiott: What about the political things? Did you see that as connected to the work you wanted to do in your life when you were young or did they seem separate or is it like separate compartments? I 

Lynn Nadel: was always interested in politics even from when I was young.

I remember from when I was a kid. Yeah. Yeah. Trying to date it. You know, when Stalin died, I [00:28:00] mean, I was 10, 11, 12. I was, I was, you know, seriously reading political stuff when I was a kid. It was always fascinating, you know, always interested in politics. Very, you don't know, you don't know the New York political scene, uh, I suppose, but in, in in, in New York in the fifties and sixties, you know, the, the Jewish community of which I was nominally apart, but not really. Um. was very progressive, very socialist in its, in its leanings in the 50s. Yeah. Times have changed anyway, the point is back then to be in the, to be in the community I grew up in. Was probably to be, kind of political socialist leaning and political if you have ever thought about those things at all, and I did.

So I read newspapers variations and John was just like that. John grew up in the same environment. Catholic Irish Catholic environment, you know, where it's either the church or politics, one or the other. Right? Yeah. And that's New York. New York was, was three, three, it was [00:29:00] three cities, four, one of which the other three ignored. It was a Jewish city, an Italian city, and an Irish city. And they represented, you might say, almost one third of the population. And then there was the fourth world, which was the Hispanic black part of the city, which the rest of us ignored back in the fifties. I'm being brutally honest, right? Yeah, yeah. Very, very different world, but it was a world in which politics mattered a lot. John and I bonded on that. John and I bonded on the interest in politics.

It 

Andrea Hiott: reminds me of a quote. I guess it's a true quote that you said. I can't remember it perfectly right now. A Jewish boy and a Catholic boy had to go to Canada to meet or something like that. 

Lynn Nadel: Yeah, something like that. It's true. Not very far from each other. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, but I guess that helped that you understood each other in this way.

Lynn Nadel: But probably it did. Yeah, it did. So we didn't have a lot to do each other in graduate school. we were friends, but I would not, we did not interact a lot socially in graduate school. I was hanging out with a different group of graduate students. I wouldn't say we connected the work to the politics. They were separate [00:30:00] lives at that point and they really stayed that way mostly. We weren't working on politically sensitive issues. Uh, no, the work, the work was, I mean, we were all crazy in that, we hung out at the lab all the time because that was all we thinking about, you know, and the Blackboard was always full of, You know, this diagram, that diagram, you know, how do we figure, how do we figure that out?

How do we, how do we test Hebb's, how do we test and disprove Hebb's hypothesis? And I mean, it was, you know, we were all there to kind of figure out how the brain did learning and memory and we were going to do it. It was a pretty intense atmosphere of that, of that kind of intellectual, you know, ferment and and, but we also were fun.

We all played and John was part of this too. We all went out in the afternoons and played soccer on the reservoir, we all had a good time, you know, we weren't doing that, but, but mostly it was, and we had big, big ideas. I don't know, I don't know how that happened, you know, quite honestly.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. But you had [00:31:00] a feeling that you wanted to do something in the world. Like you were, you were trying to change the world 

Lynn Nadel: in a way. You were in a place where people, where the people we were interacting with had already done that. That was the, that was the, the kind of. Soup that we were basically swimming in.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, it was still happening. I mean, 

Lynn Nadel: it was, it was still happening. It was a world of people who were achieving at that level.

Andrea Hiott: I 

Lynn Nadel: didn't know any other world. I didn't go somewhere else in undergrad. So I wasn't like aware that the atmosphere at McGill at that time, in that particular era, the fifties and sixties.

Was unmatchable. It was it was absolutely it was unique. Now there are still 

Andrea Hiott: is really it's kind of without precedent. Maybe 

Lynn Nadel: you see There are other places like that, you know And they were probably and there were other places like that at the time But I did not realize that somebody who only went to that place Mm hmm.

Unique and special it was. 

Andrea Hiott: I'm not sure, are there really other places like that? Because it's hard to trace back so much. I guess at least in this time, 

Lynn Nadel: a few [00:32:00] places that were sort of like that, then maybe this will connect back with Tolman. Berkeley was a little bit like that, so the Tolman, in the Tolman era, and was a little bit like that in the, in the days of Solomon and so on.

Hull, you know, the group that he, you know, there were clusters of places where there was real strength. But the cluster at Montreal and at McGill was unique in the way that it combined brain and 

Andrea Hiott: behavior. Mm hmm It was really starting neuroscience. 

Lynn Nadel: Exactly. We think that was really what was unique about him So that so the people who were attracted to go to graduate school there were already of a mindset You know that they were you know that they wanted to jostle with the really big issues , you know?

Mm-Hmm. . Yeah. 

Andrea Hiott: It's very exciting to think about. It 

Lynn Nadel: was a very exciting place, but you know, again, what was, I was so immersed in it that I didn't understand. How unusual it was. It took me in other places to realize and to talk with other people, you know, and to experience other universities and other settings, [00:33:00] many of which I've experienced, to realize how unique that was.

Were 

Andrea Hiott: you always a lucky person even when 

Lynn Nadel: you were a kid? I can only assume that that's the case. 

Andrea Hiott: Yes. Yeah, you've had pretty good luck, but you also, 

Lynn Nadel: I've been very well, you know, you go with the luck, you go with the luck, you make your luck a little bit. Mm-Hmm. you take advantage of the, of the lucky opportunities that you know, and I've been probably good at that.

But yeah, I've been extremely lucky in that regard. I mean, 

Andrea Hiott: just to being in the right place at the right time. 

Lynn Nadel: Let me hear, let me give, weave another thread for you. So I, so the name you mentioned included Ranck and, and uh, who's fabulous by the way. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, he deserves a lot of credit too. 

Lynn Nadel: Deserves a lot more credit than he gets.

Um, uh, and Bob Muller and, uh, John Kubie. So Bob Muller. So do you, so there's a connection to Bob Muller. This is, this is the small world in which we all navigate. Bob Muller and I went to the same high school. Oh, you're kidding. We not [00:34:00] only went to the same high school in the same exact time frame, but we were in the same official class.

So we were in Stuyvesant. Stuyvesant, which is a test in high school in New York City for supposedly smart kids who want to do science. And we, and 30 or so, you're broken up into groups of 30 and you each have your homeroom that you start the day in, right, before you move off to your separate classes.

And you did it alphabetically. In this class. So Bob Muller sat in front of me and I stared at the back of his head, which was pretty, you know, hairy. So Bob Muller and I were friends in high school. Oh, that's wonderful. And you dial forward and he ends up befriending in graduate school, completely separate.

He ends up befriending in graduate school, Eileen O'Keefe. 

Andrea Hiott: How weird, gosh, makes you think the world is just, really is a small world system. And then separately [00:35:00] all of us converge on the hippocampus. It's crazy, that's crazy. And do the work 

Lynn Nadel: that we, and how it connects up. The story gets, the story gets better in all the years that, that, you know, Bob was working on Hippocampus, you know, he and me and John had a lot of, a lot of good time together. We really knew each other and really liked each other a lot. Bob's dying was a big, it was a big tragedy. Yeah, it must have been. Yes. That was, that was really sad. Um, anyway. Dial forward to 1990. I'm jumping now, but 

Andrea Hiott: it's okay. I'll take you back 

Lynn Nadel: later. The Bob Mueller story Uh, in mid nineties, I'm working on, uh, the beginnings of the multiple trace theory with, uh, with Morris Moskovich.

And, um, I go to give a talk actually in Eastern Europe about it. And in the audience is Bob Mueller for one reason, I invited a bunch of people. I put this conference together in Eastern Europe and invited a bunch of people who are connected to Eastern Europe through the McDonald Pew grant.[00:36:00] 

mechanism they were funding in Europe to try to jumpstart cog neuroscience in Eastern Europe. Anyway, so I put together a conference and Bob was involved with one of those groups. Anyway, so he, Bob was in the audience. I gave this talk about the beginnings of the multiple trace theory. People thought it was a little bit nuts at the time, but anyway, Bob, Bob said, Oh, that's really interesting.

I'm, I'm editing, uh, a special issue of the current, current opinion in neurobiology, which is this journal that does, reviews the field in different, I'm going to do the one in cognitive neurosciences of 1996 for 97. How would you like to write this for that journal? So,, okay, that's great. That's a great opportunity.

So me and Morris, you know, wrote. What became the 97.

So we wrote, we wrote up and submitted it to the, this journal. And then we started to hear back channel of furious attempts by various people in the [00:37:00] field to sabotage this paper so that it will not get. Oh no, why?

Because the paper was a direct attack on.

I will not go into names, you can, you can, whatever you want, but let's probably figure it out. But let's say that behind the scenes, there were some attempts to sort of squelch this stuff, which, you know, is really ugly when you hear about it. But this happens in science and certainly happened a fair amount back in the day.

And we, and a lot of us knew, know and knew the main culprits were, but they were generally people of power. So you, you, there wasn't much one could do. Anyway,

so Bob, so Bob sort of responded to this pressure.

By telling the people who were pressuring him to go fuck themselves. Oh, wow. 

Andrea Hiott: And that was Good friend to have. It's good you knew that. And 

Lynn Nadel: that was Bob mueller in a nutshell. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, I love that. I love that New York [00:38:00] personality. Yeah, 

Lynn Nadel: that's the New York person. And it's partly because he was a friend also.

Yeah, you knew each other. I think he would have done it for anybody, but I think it mattered that he was somebody who knew me, knew John and he was, you know, knew us and he wasn't about the bad guys basically determine what was so he literally said that. I've heard this from multiple sources. So the thing got published and you know it has had a fairly impact.

Andrea Hiott: So that's a Bob trace does like such a word. Yeah, 

Lynn Nadel: that's Bob Muller's. That's Bob Muller's contribution. 

Andrea Hiott: Oh, that's great to hear because I want to put him more into the, yeah, he's a hero. 

Lynn Nadel: He should be one of the heroes of your story, whatever. That's good 

Andrea Hiott: that you say that it's good. You highlight that. Um, but let's, we're already going.

Yeah, I, it's already seven 15. Gosh, I have so much I wanna talk to you about, but I do wanna, um, figure out, uh, I, I wanna go to Prague, but Yep. Had you already been thinking about Tolman at all when you were still in MCG at McGill? I 

Lynn Nadel: mean, so Tolman, [00:39:00] you, and you asked how do we get to Tolman? Well, Hebb was a big fan of Tollman. And Hebb was a big fan of, you know, of cognitive approaches to, and Hebb was a fa we talked about, you know, cell assemblies and phase sequences. Well, what, what were those other than tolman's, you know, internal models and, okay. So we were very sympathetic. So 

Andrea Hiott: was he speaking about that in his intro classes, or was that?

At his 

Lynn Nadel: seminar, we would read, we were reading all about the debates that were going on in the field, and Tolman at that point was central to them. And Hebb was sympathetic. Even though Hebb was very, um, uh, positive about Skinner, and about Hull, and their contribution. and their contributions. He was also very open to Tolman and to the points that Tolman was making and the emphasis that Tolman was putting on, you know, what was going on inside the head.

Because the head was there also, there was stuff going on in between and Tolman was the only one who was saying that, you know, from a point of view. So we were open to Tolman and it was, you know, it was, we were not like [00:40:00] heavily focused on Tolman because we weren't looking for that. John was not looking for space.

No, no, no. John was looking for 

Andrea Hiott: memory. Yeah. He was not. I guess I wonder if Hebb ever mentioned Tolman when he came to speak there at McGill or any of, I mean just to connect back to that political social issue because Tolman had all that going 

Lynn Nadel: on. Tolman was very political and that was another reason why both John and I liked him.

Okay. We were aware of Tolman's political So that, you know, that gave Tolman a leg up, you know, right off the bat for both of us. 

Andrea Hiott: He really did something big for science in kind of opposing that McCarthy stuff. Absolutely. So Tolman 

Lynn Nadel: was a hero for both of us already, you know, even before, even before the cognitive map stuff.

Uh, you know, but, but we didn't know a lot about, you know, his political heroism. We knew about it, but we didn't know a lot about it, but it was enough to him in our head. It was an easy jump to Tolman once the place cells were, it wasn't like, oh, [00:41:00] what could that be? 

Andrea Hiott: You know? Yeah, you couldn't have even imagined it at the time, but once you saw that, so, okay, so why Prague? Was it all this political stuff or, I mean, you could have done a minute 

Lynn Nadel: political for me. It was partly political, but it was, first of all, I applied to three places for postdocs, both John and I applied to NIH for postdoctoral fellowships to go, to go overseas.

That we both got them. That comes a bit later. We, I applied to three places. I applied to. Hernandez Peon, who was a reticular activating system researcher in Mexico City. Oh, cool. You know, so let, so let me point out, I had I had the adventure bug. Yeah, 

Andrea Hiott: I was about to say, you were already looking to get away.

I was 

Lynn Nadel: ready to, I, you know, my family, you know, basically never left New York, but I was ready to, I was ready to go. So you 

Andrea Hiott: hadn't used your passport yet except for Canada? You know, 

Lynn Nadel: I don't even know if I had a passport. I don't have a passport. I don't 

Andrea Hiott: know if you needed it you'd been in the U.

S. and Canada at this point. I had 

Lynn Nadel: been in the, I had never been outside of [00:42:00] the east, eastern part of North America. Okay, okay. It was very, very parochial, but I, but I knew there was a big world out 

Andrea Hiott: there. But New York is sort of international, so it's hard to be parochial when you come 

Lynn Nadel: from there. Fair enough.

I applied to Hernandez Peon. I never heard back from him. He, uh, got killed in a car accident. During that, in that time frame. Oh gosh. So that's why you've never heard of him. Did it 

Andrea Hiott: work then that you had to write directly to the person you wanted to supervise you? And before you got into the school? Yes, 

Lynn Nadel: and these days you wrote and said, yeah, you gotta, you gotta, you have a postdoc opportunity for me.

You know, could I go there and work and so on. I wrote to a, I wrote to somebody in, in California. In um, It's Stanford, who did work with, uh, monkeys. And, uh, I wrote, you know, signed my name, et cetera, and, you know, I, You got any room? No, you're allowed. And I got back a letter saying, Dear Miss Miss or Mrs.

Why 

are you, why are you interested in coming to the Bay Area? You know, does your husband have a job here? [00:43:00] 

Andrea Hiott: Oh, Lynn, I see. Oh, gosh, that's funny.

Lynn Nadel: I asked you my first name. I've had this, this, this mistake has been made multiple times, actually. 

Andrea Hiott: Oh, what an insight you must have gotten into. 

Lynn Nadel: Oh, you betcha.

The way things work. Oh, you betcha. This was, I tell this story frequently, by the way. To my two, you know, every grad class I've ever run, I tell this story about what it was, about how I got a little bit of insight into what it's like to be a woman in this field. And that was a wake up call. So I know, so I didn't write back to him.

That was it. I just dropped it. Good for you. Yeah. I'll, you know, I can tell you who it was because he's dead now, but it doesn't matter. But, but subsequently I met him. It's a, it's a him, of course, something I met him and he, and told him about this. He didn't remember it at all and he apologized profusely and became my champion forever.

Basically, it's true. He became my champion after that. And he was a man of considerable, I guess he was embarrassed, but considerable power. So I, I, you're not going to 

Andrea Hiott: tell me who it is. [00:44:00] Okay. Should I try it again? It was Karl 

Lynn Nadel: Prebram. 

Andrea Hiott: Oh, that's huge. That's quite a name to Yeah, but he just laid out So you just turned that one down, and the third one, I guess I 

Lynn Nadel: just turned it down. Alright, now I'm down to my third choice. And my third choice was the guy in Prague who Basically brought spreading depression to the world.

Jan Burisch. And I had, so I wrote to him and said, Oh, that goes back 

Andrea Hiott: to your master's, yeah. 

Lynn Nadel: Okay. That goes back to my master's. I said, can I come to Prague to, to work on, you know, when I have some ideas about using spreading depression to study learning? And he said, yeah, I'd love to have you.

You know, I'm just, he was just beginning to have some Westerners come to the lab. Uh, I'd love to have you, but you know, you, I can't pay you. So if you can get money, you can come. . So then I applied for the NIH postdoc. John applied for one as well to go to London. We, we both 

Andrea Hiott: got Wow. And you both got it.

Was that hard to get at the time? And that sounds like winning the lottery these 

Lynn Nadel: days, but it was winning the lottery, but, but amongst the reasons I was interested in going to Prague Styles back again was the previous year, maybe a year and a [00:45:00] half before I was ready to go leave another graduate student whose name is Phil Philip Liss is not a name you would know.

His story did not end well, but Philip Lewis, who we all acknowledge was brilliant, crazy, but brilliant. 

Andrea Hiott: He was part of your crew there at 

Lynn Nadel: McGill, is that what you said? He was part of McGill. He was one of the, he was one of the absolute brilliant ones we all knew. He took a postdoc working in Poland, in the Nesky, in the Nesky Institute for Phenomenology with uh, with Konorski.

In Warsaw. Oh, why do I know that name? Well Konorski is very famous. Konorski was the most famous Polish neuropsychologist. He was already famous in the West. He published a book in 1967 where Philipp Liszt is acknowledged in the front of that book. Konorski had come to visit McGill because of course if you ever got out to the West, if you were in Eastern Europe and you got out to the West.

That's where you went. You came to McGill because you wanted to visit with Hebb. We got to meet everybody. So Konorski, not only did we have access, [00:46:00] but it was a crossroads like UCL very much. So we met Konorski, Konorski stood in front of that blackboard that we all, that room that I was telling you, the lunches and he, Konorski was in that room at that blackboard talking to us about synaptic, this and that.

It was spectacular. He was a dynamo. He was like. You know, I now think of him as just this short guy, except that he was probably the same height I am. He was the short guy who looked a bit like me with no hair at this point. I'm thinking, you know, not a bad comparison. Anyway, he was really something.

Uh, and Phil got, Phil got taken with him and applied to do a post op with him. And got a fellowship and went with him. And so Phil, who I was quite close with, uh, and stayed with afterwards, wrote me from Warsaw and said, this is great. You really ought to try something like this. Why don't you think about going to, coming to Eastern, go to Eastern Europe and,

I 

got some curiosity going. It was that, got me, sort [00:47:00] of said, it's doable, right? And he had a wife and a kid. He was there with a wife and a kid. Okay. You 

Andrea Hiott: had two kids by 

Lynn Nadel: now? I had two kids by this point. Two little kids. A, it was doable, and B, you know, it was fun, and, you know, you could get a grant, and, and I was interested in politics, too.

Phil wasn't. Phil couldn't have cared about the politics at all. I thought, wow, I could go there and see what it's like to live in a socialist country, you know, see what it's really like to 

Andrea Hiott: live under socialism. Had you read anything about 

Lynn Nadel: Prague by it before? Well, I had read something about Prague. I didn't know a lot about it.

Luckily in 1967 was the World's Fair, the World's Expo in Montreal. Oh, that's great. And so, there was a Czech pavilion. Which was, it was innovative. It showed off, you know, Czech, uh, culture in a very positive way. So that was what we knew about Czechoslovakia or the Czech pavilion in Montreal at the expo.

We went there on scene basically, [00:48:00] and just showed up, you 

Andrea Hiott: know, that must've been spectacular because Prague, I remember the first time I went and how spectacular it was. And by then it was already very well known to the West. Showed up at the 

Lynn Nadel: train station. And you walk out you come out the train station, the train station's been modernized, so you, what you're seeing when you come out the train station is not the train station that I arrived 

Andrea Hiott: at, the train station I, Okay, but you mean the one near the monument there, the main one? 

Lynn Nadel: Yeah, the train station, Kalavni Nagraj. Okay, okay. It's right there, just, just off to the side of the, the top of, Of the square. Yeah. Yeah, way, yeah, all right. And you walk out and then almost immediately, a little bit to the right, I know Prague extremely well, a little bit to the right is the Powder Tower.

So you step out of this train station, you're a kid from New York. You have never seen First time in Europe. First time in Europe. Well, actually, we'd been in Paris and Amsterdam for a few days, but first time in medieval Europe. Yeah. 

Andrea Hiott: And you [00:49:00] step into nothing like that. Yeah. 

Lynn Nadel: And on mind blowing, it was absolutely mind blowing.

Prague was, you know, dirty, but, but gorgeous in those years. It was just spectacular. Prague to me is The top. It's, it is.

I 

Andrea Hiott: love Prague. It's something very 

Lynn Nadel: special. I went, I loved it. And go back to Philip Liss, the guy who started it all. On the evening, on the day before the Russian invasion of Prague, I got a telegram from Phil Liss, who was visiting in Warsaw, telling me, I'll, I'm on the flight to, I'll be in Prague tomorrow.

Oh, on the day of the invasion. On the day of the invasion, he was about to visit me in Prague. He had been, he had been in Warsaw. And then of course the Russians came instead of Phil. 

Andrea Hiott: So you arrived in Prague at the train station with your two little kids and your wife and some suitcases? Two little kids and 

Lynn Nadel: my wife, and was greeted there by our, by my mentor, uh, Jan Burisch. He had a wife who was [00:50:00] famous.

He had very famous Olga Burishova. She was not with. 

Andrea Hiott: He picked you up in a car? 

Lynn Nadel: He picked us up. I guess he had a car. Yeah. He did have a car. That's right. And he drove us north. We didn't know this. He drove us north to an apartment that we were meant to share. We were going to live in one bedroom of a shared apartment about 45 minutes from the Institute.

This was the arrangement. Goodness. And in a day or two, my then wife rightly said, this is not going to work. This ain't working. Uh, and I went to him and said, this can't work. I mean, this will not work. And he then found, within a 10 minute bike ride of the Institute, in a little town adjacent, you know, suburb of Prague, it was like a village at this point, across from a pond, a lake, the upstairs of a house that we could rent.

You know, that was like perfect. He found the [00:51:00] perfect place. Having, you know, found this place that was totally unacceptable. I have no idea what what they imagined we could, how we could function in that setting. But the first few days were funny. Because of course, we had no language whatsoever, you know, and then just go out trying to find some food and trying to explain to people what it is you want.

Was 

Andrea Hiott: it stressful or was it kind of exciting? It was 

Lynn Nadel: amusing. It was stressful in the sense I couldn't find anything because everything then, this was not the Prague of now again. This was Prague in 1967. That means the grocery stores didn't have like fancy packages. Everything was in brown paper bags. Oh my gosh.

Andrea Hiott: So how could you tell what you were buying? 

Lynn Nadel: I just wanted to buy some cereal for my kids and I walked out with a bit, with a pound of rice.

Andrea Hiott: That's wonderful. Yeah, no, no translation devices to help. Yeah, no 

Lynn Nadel: translation device, nothing. We were just completely on our own for the first few days. It was pretty fun. But we adapted pretty [00:52:00] quickly. The place we moved into in the countryside was incredible. The neighbors across the street were an older couple with some kids of their own, young married couple included, and the older couple kind of adopted us like grandparents.

I mean, it turned out to be absolutely wonderful. And did you learn, 

Andrea Hiott: did you pick up the language? Did the kids pick up the language? 

Lynn Nadel: The language part, because I had to. I mean, I'm looking to find out what was about out of it. You know, when the invasion came, I went, I left. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, I want to hear about that.

But somehow you had gotten a VW bus by then too, I know, because I Oh yeah, we had a VW bus and we toured around Did you go get that in Germany? Because you couldn't have gotten that in Prague. We 

Lynn Nadel: got that early on, basically, and I did not drive. My wife was the driver. I was Oh, okay. I did not drive. It was a little unusual, but she was, the driver drove,

it's not like that anymore. I, I learned how to drive fine. . We walk in New York, you don't need a car.

Go to Montreal. You don't need a car. Mm-Hmm. . You go, you immediate It turned out I [00:53:00] didn't need a car. Mostly places I lived, but yeah. Pro it was used. It was good that my wife drove.

Anyway, we, we left because the burish said I can't guarantee the safety of your children. You should probably leave. And I called up John, who was the only other person I knew in Europe. The only other person, yeah. And we said, we're leaving. Can we come and camp out with you in London for a little while?

And he said, of course. So we packed everything up. We drove out. There's a lot of stories there, which I won't go into now. And we, we decamped in London, uh, on in John's apartment for a couple of weeks. But by then it was clear that that marriage that I was in was not. Preserving anymore. So we split up. We in the midst of all of this turmoil.

It sounds very 

Andrea Hiott: chaotic. 

Lynn Nadel: It's very chaotic. But under conditions of chaos, sometimes you take decisions that you are not otherwise things become clear. You're bumped out of your local meet your local minimum and you're and you can, you know, do things you might not otherwise do. [00:54:00] That's true. Did that 

Andrea Hiott: a certain sense of clarity?

Lynn Nadel: The right thing to do. 

Andrea Hiott: It wasn't I need to hear about this trip. So you drove in the VW bus. To London. Yeah, we drove 

Lynn Nadel: out. We drove down with the kids. We drove down to Austria. Yeah. Out way to the south and then from Austria all the way across Europe, onto the ferry and over to London with the kids.

Stayed there for a little while. Then we decided enough and she took the kids and went to Spain in the, in the van and left me behind and I stayed for eight months. Transferred my grant to London and did some work there. found a place to live, all of that kind of stuff. Uh, and then went and took the kids back because they didn't want to be with her and she didn't want them.

And I took the kids and went back. And I took the kids and went back. Sounds really challenging. And went back to Prague with the kids as a single father, which in Prague turned out to be a lot easier than you would think it would be in most places. Because you 

Andrea Hiott: had so much 

Lynn Nadel: community maybe. [00:55:00] They had, well, it was partly the community, the people that had crossed the street, I lived in the same place again, uh, but it was partly that, you know, it was the free daycare, the free healthcare, the free everything.

It was all laid on because all the women had to work there. Everything had to be set up so that women 

Andrea Hiott: could work. That's true, right. That's, my friends tell me that too. There was a lot of room. So for 

Lynn Nadel: a single father, it was actually, it was actually very sustainable. You know, I mean, I had, it was on my own, I wasn't, but that, and I'm getting back to why I had to learn Czech.

If I wanted to, Yeah. Have any kind of a social life. I had to learn some Czech. 

Andrea Hiott: Oh, okay. So that's a good motivating force. 

Lynn Nadel: That was partly what drove 

Andrea Hiott: me to learn some Czech. Also lots of lovely people around. I imagine 

Lynn Nadel: there were a lot of people around that I wanted to 

Andrea Hiott: interact with. Yeah. So I have to go back to this one moment though, when you arrive in London, because I have kind of written about this a little, I'm trying to kind of visualize it.

So you arrived there first with everyone, right? In the bus or did you arrive alone? . I was joined by everybody in the bus. What was the weather [00:56:00] like? Were you exhausted? Did you, did John come out and meet you? You 

Lynn Nadel: know, I, I, you know, probably, you know, although they live up on the sixth floor of, I think then it might not have even had an elevator or had an elevator.

So, yeah, I think John must have come out, but, but I can't honestly say any of the details, uh, 

Andrea Hiott: persist.

Lynn Nadel: I don't remember the actual moment of arrival. I do remember that the weather was crappy. This was August. The weather was pretty lousy.

I remember that. I remember that the trip over on the ferry was, you know, not so pleasant. But other than that, I don't remember very much because it all got jumbled up together. 

Andrea Hiott: Did he have a guest room that you all slept in? Did you sleep on the couch? Yeah, he had a big 

Lynn Nadel: apartment. He still has the same apartment that he's been living in since forever. It's a big apartment. And we, um, we were, yeah, in one of the rooms of this big apartment. But after about 10 days, it was like, well, what are you going to do 

Andrea Hiott: [00:57:00] Lynn? Maybe you should find something. They had a 

Lynn Nadel: baby as well at that point.

So they were not without their own responsibilities and, you know, they've got, and I realize it.

So 

Andrea Hiott: we moved on. Sounds like a time of very big changes because you went back to Prague, but then by then, did you know that you wanted to go to London to work with? 

Lynn Nadel: Yes. Yeah. And during the time that I was in London, John and I figured, it would be nice if we were in the same lab. Not that we would work together.

That wasn't the idea. Okay. Just to be nearby. We were very simpatico. We thought a bit, we had a, you know, we had a very similar background training wise. That would, and then we actually cooked up a job for me. We arranged a job, a lectureship in the anatomy department. It was all set up. I went back to Prague with this already clear.

I was going to go back to spend a year and a half there, you know, deal with them in a, in a setting where I could, and then I would come back and I would have this [00:58:00] job in the anatomy department. And that's exactly what happened. A lot of other things happened in between, but that, but that happened work wise.

That's exactly how it played out. I went to Prague. I got a lot done. I published a bunch of papers. I had a really good time there. It was really a fabulous 

Andrea Hiott: sounds like it was very productive for you, even though you had so much personal stuff going on. It was 

Lynn Nadel: quite productive in the midst of all of that personal stuff.

That's true. But I think I've always been sort of good at compartmentalizing. And then, and then I went back to London and then, you know, that's the whole other chapter started there. Because fairly quickly the place cell thing happened and then I Abandoned what I was thinking. So the, I mean, when John discovered the play cells, I abandoned the visual system, which I had been thinking I was going to go back to, uh, for, you know, that's a whole, that's connected to the Prague work that I did.

I, and I thought this is just too interesting. And, uh, we, uh, we started to think about what would be the [00:59:00] implications. Of there being a cognitive, a Tolman like cognitive map, what would, what would that mean, you know, for how we think about the hippocampus, how we think about its role in memory, how it relates to other structures in the brain, how to interpret all the data that's out there already, what would it mean for all of us, and, uh, and we sort of, Then, you know, there's a kind of an interesting theoretical framework here.

Andrea Hiott: So, but you were, you were working in the same hallway or how was it like, how were you in the same office building? We 

Lynn Nadel: were in the same hall, we were like two doors from each other. We were in and out of each other's all 

Andrea Hiott: the time. But neither of you were really working on Hippocampus yet, or you were starting to at the end of the 60s.

You were, of course, 

Lynn Nadel: okay, I had done before. I was not at that point. I started, when I showed up there, I started with the intention of physiology of vision lab, where I was going to trace down visual memory traces from one hemisphere to the other. Oh, 

Andrea Hiott: okay. 

But I have this, I have this [01:00:00] image, tell me if it's correct or not, that he sort of came to you because hippocampus already. And when, when he found these. At 

Lynn Nadel: the very beginning, he had seen the cells. He had had his ideas already a little bit, but yeah, he came to me because, you know, literally, it was early in the, in the, in the discovery, look at what I'm seeing in the hippocampus, you know, you know something about the hippocampus, you did your dissertation on it, what do you think, what do you make of this.

It was, you know, just 

Andrea Hiott: like that. And was it just immediately like, oh, it's definitely something with space? It was immediate to him. 

Lynn Nadel: He didn't need me to tell him what he'd already seen. He just wanted to, you know, 

Andrea Hiott: confirm. But confirmations. Yeah. 

Lynn Nadel: And then like, okay, what, you know, what now? I jumped on it. I thought this is fabulous.

And then, and then we very quickly saw that this would have big ramifications. In the hippocampal world, that this, this might offer a way of understanding, you know, the disjunct between animal and human stuff, it opened up lots of [01:01:00] possibilities if one explored it and we started to explore it. I don't think we at that point understood how it could also open up sort of possibilities for thinking about the brain more, more generally, more broadly, a way of thinking about the brain and behavior, you know, that, you know, in other words, we were kind of making up, you might say.

You know, a framework for cognitive neuroscience without actually thinking that's what we were doing. We just imagine. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. We have to talk about that later because there's so much there, especially like you really blew my mind a little bit when you brought up the predictive processing cause I've studied that and I just hadn't really quite connected it that mental models basically are cognitive maps and a lot of the stuff in that book.

It actually is already presaging a lot of what's coming up 

Lynn Nadel: without realizing it. I don't think we understood just how but it's, but it is all there. The whole notion of that's what the system is doing is constantly predicting. And then the misplaced [01:02:00] tells are the kind of prediction error detectors.

I mean, it's all. All there, although I don't think that was our intention, so I don't want to take credit for it. No, 

Andrea Hiott: of course not, and it's coming from different lineages, because I don't think you mentioned Helmholtz and all this. 

Lynn Nadel: Yeah. It was part of the framework, certainly, that we, , that emerged.

Because shortly after, and I've told this story, in a couple of venues where I insulted, I insulted the editor of Psych Review. We had, we had initially been intending to publish in Psych Review.

So, so having insulted the pompous editor of Psych Review.

Andrea Hiott: I love that. I love it that John went along with you too and just left. 

Lynn Nadel: What else was he going to do?

Andrea Hiott: It's good that happened because otherwise you would have had a paper maybe instead of all these years working on it. Who knows, 

Lynn Nadel: we might have ended up with a psych review paper and, you know, and 35 citations and that would have been the end of it. Yeah. But having closed.[01:03:00] 

We then decided, all right, well, we'll write a monograph, you know, now in those days you could publish thin little monographs, we'll write a monograph and we'll publish it as a 

Andrea Hiott: little monograph. 

Lynn Nadel: That was how it started. It started as a thin 70 page monograph and it just kept on building. It just kept building because we kept on, we kept on seeing that this story.

had more tentacles than we, we were aware of. And each tentacle tapped into a literature that if we could connect to it, would strengthen the overall story because it would be one more bit of converging. Evidence, so to speak. So we kind of invented and didn't invent because again, other people were kind of the notion of converging operations and bringing multiple level analysis.

I mean, we built that in right from the start. 

Andrea Hiott: Even the idea of being interdisciplinary, 

Lynn Nadel: the more we saw that, the more it looked appealing, but then the more it meant we were going to have to, at [01:04:00] some level, master the literature in five or six different areas.

Which is 

Andrea Hiott: crazy. I'm still blown away that, you know all this about Kant and so on and so forth. It's really hard 

Lynn Nadel: to imagine. You know, in those days you could. In those days you could. I'd like to tell the story. I'm looking at my, at my bookshelf over here. Because I have re bought pretty much all of the books from the 1950s and 60s, from the great conferences that were held.

Those are, there's, in the space of two sections of books, maybe 40 books, that was all you had. If you read those 40 books when you were a graduate student, you'd know everything that we had needed to know in the whole world. 

Andrea Hiott: That's crazy. Now it's like that many papers in an hour. Now it's 

Lynn Nadel: that many papers every week, right?

So it's a totally different world. It was possible to somehow master, even then we missed a bunch of stuff. It was possible then to get a grip on everything, or at least wrestle with it. Now it would [01:05:00] be absolutely impossible. So once we realized that, then the next thing we knew we were in the middle of a six year project to write a book.

We didn't think it would take that long. We didn't anticipate, we didn't anticipate, all the ups and downs, personal and otherwise, that would get in the way. Uh, we didn't, um, we wrote a first draft. We wrote many drafts. Typed out by hand in those days. Oh, do you have any of those still? A little Olivetti typewriter, if you know that name.

Yeah, I know that. I like that word. It was very famous back in the 1960s. College kids, they were cheap and available, Olivetti. Do you 

Andrea Hiott: still have any of them? You better put them in an archive or something. John 

Lynn Nadel: has them. He, he, John has file cabinets full of them, because we put them on different colored paper.

They're all going to, we think they're all going to end up at the Welcome, at the Welcome Institute for the History of Science in London. Oh gosh, I would love to see that again. He's negotiating [01:06:00] for what's happening with those. They're the, you know, I have one, he gave me, One chapter, the chapter on anatomy, so I can track a little bit.

And you know, we, he and I have been going back and forth. Yeah. But anyway, it's, it doesn't matter as long as they end up 

Andrea Hiott: somewhere. Yeah. As long as somebody, as long as they're there. We sent, 

Lynn Nadel: we, we ended up with a draft that we thought might be worth getting some feedback on.

It was about 300 typewritten pages. We paid for 40 copies of that 300 pages. And we sent them, we sent it around. unbidden to a bunch of experts in the various fields that we had to philosophers, to psycholinguists, to hippocampal people who knew about it a little bit. We just sent it out for commentary.

And we got comments back from a lot of people, a lot of useful feedback, and then it took another four or five years to To finish it, to finish the job. Sending it out. 

Andrea Hiott: On the [01:07:00] manuscript? Some 

Lynn Nadel: did, some didn't. Some took some of what we said and plagiarized it. I mean, who knows? We took a big chance.

You had to hold that out. It was a, yeah, I don't know that one could get away with doing anything like that now. Yeah, 

Andrea Hiott: probably not. But yeah. And during 

Lynn Nadel: this time, we also didn't publish. We also didn't publish very much. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, I guess not. How could you? But I guess you were taken care of in a way that you didn't have to so much at 

Lynn Nadel: that point.

We're sort of protected. So that's the story behind the book. There's a lot 

Andrea Hiott: more. Yeah, we'll get into that later. I think we'll let 

Lynn Nadel: you go for now. I'm out of the country now for For three weeks. Well, you know, I'll be in Amsterdam for a few days over there and 

Andrea Hiott: then I'll be if you all need anything, but I'm going to the States.

To present some papers, switching places. 

Lynn Nadel: We'll only be, um, we'll only be there for three days. It's really just to see the Vermeer 

Andrea Hiott: okay. I'll connect with you again in a month or so. Right. How's that? Glad to talk. Thanks so [01:08:00] much. I really appreciate it. Have a good trip. Have fun.

Lynn Nadel: Bye. Bye.