Over 30 years ago actually now, I started a journal which is called "Perception". We were quite lucky actually capturing the name, I mean just a simple word like that for the name of a new journal is quite something but anyway we did and I was actually approached, very peculiar this, by two publishers within a month, one very grand publisher and one completely unknown, very, very small publisher, both suggesting that I start a journal on perception. We hadn’t thought of a name but on the subject of perception so I had about two or three weeks thinking about this and I went for the unknown, small man, and he’s called Adam Gelbtuch and I’ve never regretted this choice actually. He’s a small London publisher and it’s been a sort of close relationship with no problems and it’s the one thing I’ve ever done in my life that’s had no major problems and as I’ve got older I have to confess I’ve hived off all the boring bits to other people so I remain editor in chief, according to the front page, actually I sit back and everybody else does all the work. But actually doing this has been really nice because one’s kept in touch with people all over the world, one, you know, has a little bit of a say in what gets a boost. Every now and again we do a special edition to support some particular new way of thinking of some such thing, and it’s been a total pleasure. So I think, in life, a funny decision, when to take on a commitment like that, I mean it is a huge commitment. I write an editorial essay for it every month which is actually quite a lot of work really. I read quite a lot of the papers, not all of them, I have to confess, and when a problem arises, you know, I often have to look into it so it’s a bit of a responsibility and a journal is important and it’s survived for centuries in libraries. I mean it’s going to be there for scholars to look at centuries ahead whereas books are ephemeral, very few books actually continue for any length of time. Journals continue forever. But this is something I’m glad I took on actually. It’s fun, it’s nice, and it’s good when you can pick up a young person, particularly if they make a mess of writing the thing up, instead of somebody rejecting, we often actually rewrite it. If it’s somebody from another language, the Japanese, for example, do excellent work in perception but of course they have linguistic problems many times, instead of simply rejecting the paper because it looks like a muddle, we sometimes take a lot of trouble and really rewrite it, work out exactly what they wanted to say, and then publish it, you know, in what we would call good English sort of thing, so that I’ve enjoyed doing very, very much.
Sunday, 31 December 2017 06:53 PM
I am of the opinion that failure is the biggest friend of your success because it tells how to...
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