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the range of human intelligence and expand the reach of our analytical powers.
    Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider was born in St. Louis in 1915. An only and much-beloved child, he spent his early years nurturing a fascination with model airplanes. He knew he wanted to be a scientist, but he was unfocused through most of his college days at Washington University. He switched concentrations several times, from chemistry to physics to the fine arts and, finally, to psychology. When he graduated in 1937 he held undergraduate degrees in psychology, mathematics, and physics. For a master’s thesis in psychology, he decided to test the popular slogan “Get more sleep, it’s good for you” on a population of rats. As he approached his Ph.D., Licklider’s interests narrowed toward psychoacoustics, the psychophysiology of the auditory system.
    For his doctoral dissertation, Licklider studied the auditory cortex of cats, and when he moved to Swarthmore College, he worked on the puzzle of sound localization, attempting to analyze the brain’s ability to determine a sound’s distance and direction. If you close your eyes and ask someone to snap his fingers, your brain will tell you approximately where the snap is coming from and how far away it is. The puzzle of sound localization is also illustrated by the “cocktail party” phenomenon: In a crowded room where several conversations are taking place within one’s hearing range, it is possible to isolate whatever conversation one chooses by tuning in certain voices and tuning out the rest.
    In 1942 Licklider went to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to work as a research associate in Harvard University’s Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory. During the war years, he studied the effects of high altitude on speech communication and the effects of static and other noise on reception by radio receivers. Licklider conducted experiments in B-17 and B-24 bombers at 35,000 feet. The aircraft weren’t pressurized, and the temperatures on board were often well below freezing. During one field test, Licklider’s colleague and best friend, Karl Kryter, saw Licklider turn white. Kryter panicked. He turned up the oxygen and yelled to his friend, “Lick! Speak to me!” Just as Kryter was about to ask the pilot to descend, the color returned to Licklider’s face. He had been in tremendous pain, he said, but it had passed. After that, he stopped partaking of his favorite breakfast—Coca-Cola—before going on high-altitude missions.
    By this time, Licklider had joined the Harvard faculty and was gaining recognition as one of the world’s leading theorists on the nature of the auditory nervous system, which he once described as “the product of a superb architect and a sloppy workman.”
    Psychology at Harvard in those years was strongly influenced by the behaviorist B. F. Skinner and others who held that all behavior is learned, that animals are born as blank slates to be enscribed by chance, experience, and conditioning. When Skinner went so far as to put his own child in a so-called Skinner box to test behaviorist theories and other faculty members began doing similar experiments (albeit less radical ones), Louise Licklider put her foot down. No child of hers was going into a box, and her husband agreed.
    Louise was usually the first person to hear her husband’s ideas. Nearly every evening after dinner, he returned to work for a few hours, but when he got home at around 11:00 P.M. he usually spent an hour or so telling Louise his latest thoughts. “I grew up on his ideas,” she said, “from when the seeds were first planted, until somehow or other he saw them bear fruit.”
    Everybody adored Licklider and, at his insistence, just about everybody called him “Lick.” His restless, versatile genius gave rise through the years to an eclectic cult of admirers.
    Lick stood just over six feet tall. He had sandy brown hair