A posting by Mark Liberman at LanguageLog about the Psychoacoustics Lab at Harvard nudged the memory cells and set off a train of associations. The PAL was located in the basement of Memorial Hall (arguably Harvard’s ghastliest building, though there are many claimants to that title), right across Quincy Street from the house where I spent the first 10 years of my life. A bit of googling produced Harvard Crimson stories from 1946 and 1947, and photographs of the PAL faculty and staff, replete with the lab’s cat…
Well, so what? An engaging biographical memoir by George A. Miller [he of “The Magical Number Seven Plus or Minus Two“] sketches the career and character of the lab’s director Stanley Smith Stevens. I went to the first meeting of a George Miller class in the Memorial Hall basement when I was an undergraduate, but it was primarily for graduate students and I realized that I’d never survive it. Other bits of co-incidence with my own experiences include my brother David’s discovery of the psychoacoustical work of Georg von Békésy (done in that very basement) and a link to precursors of the Internet via Licklider and Beranek. And the list of NAS memoirs led me to Eugene Hammel’s for my own mentor G. William Skinner, and to Richard Shweder’s for Clifford Geertz. And the Geertz memoir led me to his 1967 NYRB review of Malinowski’s A Diary in the Strictest Sense of the Term, which provoked me to lay out $20 for a year’s access to full text of the NYRB…
Quite a lot for a snowy morning, which also included a couple of hours of shoveling.
