Previous | Next
Session: 1234567891011121314151617 Page 12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728293031323334353637383940414243444546 of 755
I guess it just came out of the back of my head, that's all. Some of the brass instruments -- does that word mean anything to you?
Sure.
Okay. Did I understand you did work in psychology?
A little.
Oh, well.
Not experimental, though.
Well, there was a school in Cornell called the Brass Instrument School, where everybody on the faculty up there in Ithaca; everyone apparently was taken by the idea that all things could be done by putting instruments on people. And J. B. Tichener and others developed a lot of technology that I think was a little overblown, but at any rate they were known as the brass instrument people.
One of the things that I did while I was in graduate school was to run a lie detector test for a man who was a quite active in that field and wanted a graduate student to do some of the donkey work. So I did a lot of work on Saturdays, running people through lie detector tests, real professional criminals we got from the state penitentiary, Run them through the test frequently -- not frequently but from time to time with armed guards standing in the lab.
© 2006 Columbia University Libraries | Oral History Research Office | Rights and Permissions | Help