ABSTRACT
In the early 1960s, I graduated from Oxford’s cloistered shelter with a degree which included Experimental Psychology, then a fairly new discipline, and soon learnt, when asked at parties what I did for the proverbial crust, to avoid replying with anything containing the BBQ stopper ‘psychology’. Otherwise I would receive queer looks, silence, followed by the statement that ‘I suppose you are psychoanalysing us’, or a hurried account of a supposed relative’s neuroses, which led me instead to claim expertise in neural engineering. That brought the conversation to safer topics such as problems in bridge building. In the 1990s, the newly emerging discipline of behavioural neuroscience was a blessed relief.
