The mindreader explained that you hold onto their hands, loosely and as you move, you jiggle a little bit. You come to an intersection, where you can go forward, to the left, or to the right. You jiggle a little bit to the left, and if it’s incorrect, you feel a certain amount of resistance, because they don’t expect you to move that way. But when you move in the right direction, because they think you might be able to do it, they give way more easily and there’s no resistance. So you must always be jiggling a little bit, testing out which seems to be the easiest way.

My father told me the story and said he thought it would still take a lot of practice. He never tried it himself.

Later, when I was doing graduate work at Princeton, I decided to try it on a fellow named Bill Woodward. I suddenly announced that I was a mindreader, and could read his mind. I told him to go into the “laboratory”—a big room with rows of tables covered with equipment of various kinds, with electric circuits, tools, and junk all over the place—pick out a certain object, somewhere, and come out. I explained, “Now I’ll read your mind and take you right up to the object.”

He went into the lab, noted a particular object, and came out. I took his hand and started jiggling. We went down this aisle, then that one, right to the object. We tried it three times. One time I got the object right on—and it was in the middle of a whole bunch of stuff. Another time I went to the right place but missed the object by a few inches—wrong object. The third time, something went wrong. But it worked better than I thought. It was very easy.

Some time after that, when I was about twenty-six or so, my father and I went to Atlantic City where they had various carnival things going on outdoors. While my father was doing some business, I went to see a mindreader. He was seated on the stage with his back to the audience, dressed in robes and wearing a great big turban. He had an assistant, a little guy who was running around through the audience, saying things like, “Oh, Great Master, what is the color of this pocketbook?”

“Blue!” says the master.

“And oh, Illustrious Sir, what is the name of this woman?”

“Marie!”

Some guy gets up: “What’s my name?”

“Henry.”

I get up and say, “What’s my name?”

He doesn’t answer. The other guy was obviously a confederate, but I couldn’t figure out how the mindreader did the other tricks, like telling the color of the pocketbook. Did he wear earphones underneath the turban?

When I met up with my father, I told him about it. He said, “They have a code worked out, but I don’t know what it is. Let’s go back and find out.”

We went back to the place, and my father said to me, “Here’s fifty cents. Go get your fortune read in the booth back there, and I’ll see you in half an hour.”

I knew what he was doing. He was going to tell the man a story, and it would go smoother if his son wasn’t there going, “Ooh, ooh!” all the time. He had to get me out of the way.

When he came back he told me the whole code: “Blue is ‘Oh, Great Master,’ Green is ‘Oh, Most Knowledgeable One,’ ” and so forth. He explained, “I went up to him, afterwards, and told him I used to do a show in Patchogue, and we had a code, but it couldn’t do many numbers, and the range of colors was shorter. I asked him, ‘How do you carry so much information?’ ”

The mindreader was so proud of his code that he sat down and explained the whole works to my father. My father was a salesman. He could set up a situation like that. I can’t do stuff like that.

The Amateur Scientist

When I was a kid I had a “lab.” It wasn’t a laboratory in the sense that I would measure, or do important experiments.

Instead, I would play: I’d make a motor, I’d make a gadget that would go off when something passed a photocell. I’d play around with selenium; I was piddling around all the time. I did calculate a little bit for the lamp bank, a series of switches and bulbs I used as resistors to control voltages. But all that was for application. I never did any laboratory kind of experiments.

I also had a microscope and loved to watch things under the microscope. It took patience: I would get something under the microscope and I would watch it interminably. I saw many interesting things, like everybody sees—a diatom slowly making its way across the slide, and so on.

One day I was watching a paramecium and I saw something that was not described in the books I got in school—in college, even. These books always simplify things so the world will be more like they want it to be: When they’re talking about the behavior of animals, they always start out with, “The paramecium is extremely simple; it has a simple behavior. It turns as its slipper shape moves through the water until it hits something, at which time it recoils, turns through an angle, and then starts out again.”

It isn’t really right. First of all, as everybody knows, the paramecia, from time to time, conjugate with each other—they meet and exchange nuclei. How do they decide when it’s time to do that? (Never mind; that’s not my observation.)

I watched these paramecia hit something, recoil, turn through an angle, and go again. The idea that it’s mechanical, like a computer program—it doesn’t look that way. They go different distances, they recoil different distances, they turn through angles that are different in various cases; they don’t always turn to the right; they’re very irregular. It looks random, because you don’t know what they’re hitting; you don’t know all the chemicals they’re smelling, or what.

One of the things I wanted to watch was what happens to the paramecium when the water that it’s in dries up. It was claimed that the paramecium can dry up into a sort of hardened seed. I had a drop of water on the slide under my microscope, and in the drop of water was a paramecium and some “grass”—at the scale of the paramecium, it looked like a network of jackstraws. As the drop of water evaporated, over a time of fifteen or twenty minutes, the paramecium got into a tighter and tighter situation: there was more and more of this back-and-forth until it could hardly move. It was stuck between these “sticks,” almost jammed.

Then I saw something I had never seen or heard of: the paramecium lost its shape. It could flex itself, like an amoeba. It began to push itself against one of the sticks, and began dividing into two prongs until the division was about halfway up the paramecium, at which time it decided that wasn’t a very good idea, and backed away.

So my impression of these animals is that their behavior is much too simplified in the books. It is not so utterly mechanical or one-dimensional as they say. They should describe the behavior of these simple animals correctly. Until we see how many dimensions of behavior even a one-celled animal has, we won’t be able to fully understand the behavior of more complicated animals.

I also enjoyed watching hugs. I had an insect book when I was about thirteen. It said that dragonflies are not harmful; they don’t sting. In our neighborhood it was well known that “darning needles,” as we called them, were very dangerous when they’d sting. So if we were outside somewhere playing baseball, or something, and one of these things would fly around, everybody would run for cover, waving their arms, yelling, “A darning needle! A darning needle!”

So one day I was on the beach, and I’d just read this book that said dragonflies don’t sting. A darning needle came along, and everybody was screaming and running around, and I just sat there. “Don’t worry!” I said. “Darning needles don’t sting!”

The thing landed on my foot. Everybody was yelling and it was a big mess, because this darning needle was sitting on my foot, And there I was, this scientific wonder, saying it wasn’t going to sting me.