I’d learned from Paul MacLean how to [remove] the cerebral cortex, so that I could expose the hippocampus [lying below it]. It’s a beautiful dissection. You look into the ventricle, and you see that the white matter is on top rather than being at the bottom. So you see the alveus which are the myelinated axons shining like a jewel in the ventricle. And I had just learned the dissection I was getting going, I really was not off the ground, when a third guy comes into the lab, Alden Spencer. And we’re terribly afraid he’s going to ask for equal time and we’d have no time to do anything. So each of us tried to convince him to join our project. So I show Alden the dissection, thinking that would win him over, and he loved it. And he decided he wanted to work on this, and we worked together. It turned out that Alden was very psychosomatic, and radioactive potassium was not something that attracted him at all. And this was the beginning, not only of a wonderful collaboration, but of a wonderful friendship.

While he was alive, there was no other scientist around who influenced me more than he did. And he and I decided together to attempt intracellular recordings from hippocampal neurons. We developed a very nice technique for reducing pulsations in the hippocampus, and within a few weeks we had our first intracellular recordings. It was unbelievable. The boom, boom, boom of the action potentials. Here we were recording single cells in the area concerned with memory. We were thrilled. We got several more recordings, people around us were ecstatic. Marshall… There was a guy called K Frank, I didn’t mention him. K Frank was an extraordinarily gifted electrophysiologist working on the spinal cord doing intracellular recordings. [John] Eccles was the guy who pioneered this, but Frank was right next to him. And so I knew I could learn a lot from him as a fall back. Frank thought this was a little bit chancy, hippocampus, but he didn’t discourage me from doing it. And I knew that if there were technical problems, he could bail us out. He was ecstatic. Walter Freygang was ecstatic. I was asked to give a seminar, filled the room. People thought this was great. Typical NIH experience. Two incompetent guys who don’t know a goddamned thing, the environment brings them up, and look what they accomplish.