Perhaps I was always intensely curious, but my Columbia education gave me a framework and a perspective to investigate new things - things that could be put into a historical and philosophical lineage.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I became really interested in the study of consciousness.
I had always had a deep interest in social science, history. So even when I was in high school, I was debating, and in college debating, and interested in contemporary events.
I think it was this curiosity about the natural world which awoke my early interest in science.
What I found was when I started my first study, and then in subsequent studies, is here you have people under some kind of duress, or I chose to study them because they represented some kind of historical event, as it impacted on them or as they helped to create it.
When I was a graduate student, the leading spirits at Harvard were interested in the history of ideas.
I wanted to get the most broad foundation for a lifelong education that I could find, and that was studying Latin and the classics. Meaning Roman and Greek history and philosophy and ancient civilizations.
I have this extraordinary curiosity about all subjects of the natural and human world and the interaction between the physical sciences and the social sciences.
The thing I'm particularly interested in is natural history. In its heyday, the mid- and late-nineteenth century, when people were going out and gathering the first huge caches of data and trying to understand what was living and growing everywhere, there was such a sense of freshness to that pursuit. It's very exciting.
My whole life, I had been taught to read and study, to seek understanding in knowledge of history, of cultures.
I arrived from Harvard, where I had studied philosophy and the history of ideas, with a bias toward literature and formal thought.