“You can start Monday”

Turning Points -- Some Abilities Are Almost Never Recognized

However, what can we learn from lives that were forever changed?

The following is quoted from someone whose work led eventually to a Nobel Prize.

DREYER: No one had told me that Reed was supposed to be for very smart kids and that it was hard to get into. So I went out there the next day, slightly hungover. This would have been ’48, probably. And I said to the director of admissions, whose name was Bob Cannon, “I heard about Reed last night, and I’d like to come here.”

COHEN: Do you mean that you just took yourself from Eugene up to Portland the next day?

DREYER: “No. Sorry. I was at home in Portland. That’s where my mother lived. I was due to go back to Eugene the next Sunday. So he said, ‘Well, how are your grades?” And I told him what I just told you. And he said, “Oh. And you want to come here?’ And I said, “Well, I heard about it last night, and it sounds great.” 

And he said, “Well, how would you like to take some ability exams?” I said, “Fine.” And these were tough. They were basically ability [tests], but included so-called verbal [tests], which I hadn’t viewed myself as being good at. But [there were] logical questions and whatnot. And because the tests were tough, they gave me a long time, [and a lack of time] is always my downfall on the simpler tests. 

COHEN: I find this very interesting. You went over there and they didn’t say, “I want to see your record; I want to see all this stuff,” and then dismiss you? 

DREYER: Well, but wait. So I took the test and took it back to him. And he said, “Well, here are the grade sheets. Grade it.” Well, I kept them for about thirty seconds and then handed them back to him. He said, “What’s the matter? Don’t you want to grade your own test?” I said, “I did. I just counted the wrong ones.” And there weren’t very many; there were only a few. I had gotten most of them right. He said, “My God. You’ve done better than anyone I’ve ever seen. You have applied. You can start Monday.” 

Source: William J. Dreyer, Interview Excerpts – Edited by Thomas G. West – May 10-12, 2024. Edited for background to show the “turning point” in his own story.

 

CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY ORAL HISTORY PROJECT 

Interview with William J. Dreyer, Pasadena, California 

Five sessions with Shirley K. Cohen 

February 18, 19, 23, 26, March 2, 1999.

Begin Tape 1, Side 1 [With quotation style as provided.]

 

COHEN: Thank you for coming, Professor Dreyer. You expressed some interest in giving us an introduction before we start the interview, so why don’t you go ahead and do that. 

 

DREYER: OK. Well, the introduction has to do with [the fact that] I’ve come to realize that scientists—and people in general—have very different ways of thinking. I was just at UCLA two days ago with people studying brain imaging, and only one or two of them understand this now—it’s so new. They tended to want a uniform brain, with everyone having the same anatomy and thinking the same way. That isn’t at all true; it’s amazing how different people can be. And in particular, the book that I loaned you—In the Mind’s Eye, by Thomas G. West [In the Mind’s Eye: Visual Thinkers, Gifted People with Dyslexia and Other Learning Difficulties, Computer Images and the Ironies of Creativity, Amherst NY: Prometheus (1997)]—is about the only one I’ve ever seen that deals with the subject of people who have extreme visual imagery in the way they think. I wanted to preface all of this with this little story, because when you start asking me about schools and whatnot, it has a profound implication. 

 

COHEN: But of course you didn’t realize this when [your schooling] was going on. 

 

DREYER: I knew I was different in the way that I thought, but I didn’t realize why I was so dumb at spelling. . . .  And rote memory and arithmetic and so forth. The first time I realized how different . . . brains could be . . . . was when I bumped into Jim Olds at a dinner party back in the late sixties. Jim Olds was a professor here [Bing Professor of Behavioral Biology, 1969 – d. 1976]. He’s famous for his pleasure center work. He was a professor here and so was I. 

 

A speaker talked about the way we think and compared it to holography. Jim was across the table from me. I said, “Oh, yes. When I’m inventing an instrument or whatever, I see it in my head and I rotate it and try it out and move the gears. If it doesn’t work, I rebuild it in my head.” And he looked at me and said, “I don’t see a thing in my head with my eyes closed.” We spent the rest of the evening, over wine and so forth, trying to figure out how two professors—both obviously gifted people at Caltech in the Biology Division—could possibly think at all, because we were so different. So then I took this up with Roger Sperry [Hixon Professor of Psychobiology 1954-1984, emeritus, d. 1994], and I realized that I had some amazing shortcomings as well as some amazing gifts. 

I took it up with some of the students, one of whom was Mike [Michael S.] Gazzaniga [Director, Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Dartmouth], who is still around writing, and a few others that came out of Sperry’s group of postdocs and grad students. And they typically said, “Oh, no. There’s no difference. Everyone does this imaging. We’re all the same.” So I never could document this, and my wife [Janet Roman Dreyer] is the same way. 

 

It’s called dyslexia, typically, because you have a strange inability to do stuff. If you are thinking in images, then a spreadsheet doesn’t work; your brain doesn’t compute well. If you’re smart, you can do all kinds of things if you work hard on it. I can learn how to spell if I work hard at it, but it doesn’t come naturally. The reason [is because] there’s no image to it. Let me mention that [there were] other people at Caltech who never realized this about themselves. Dick Feynman [Richard Chace Tolman Professor of Theoretical Physics, d. 1988] was one. And Murray Gell-Mann [Robert Andrews Millikan Professor of Theoretical Physics, emeritus] doesn’t realize that he’s totally different from what Dick Feynman was, in the way he thinks algebraically. 

 

This is why I think it’s interesting for Caltech to be aware of these differences that Tom West documents. Einstein thought in images, and Feynman did his work in physics in diagrams, as you well know. But other physicists just couldn’t understand it. So I have some of those problems—with other biologists not being able to understand me—and I’ve come to understand a little bit more why. That’s the preamble.