It was the grueling qualifying exam for his doctorate in theoretical physics in the 1970's that sparked Terry Sejnowski's interest in neuroscience. The exam "takes a week in which every morning or afternoon is a different topic in physics," he says. "Cramming all of physics into your head for that week is so concentrated that you need to be able to take a break and do something else. That summer I started to read books about the brain."
His light summer reading revealed, among other things, that neuroscientists had a lot to learn. "They didn't know the answers to basic questions, fundamental questions, like how memory is stored," says Sejnowski. His full transformation from a theoretical physicist to an experimental neuroscientist didn't take place until 1978, when Sejnowski, then a postdoc at Princeton, signed up for a summer course in neurobiology at Woods Hole. There he encountered his first set ...
