I met Jon shortly after he arrived in the States to work with Mike Posner and Steve Keele as Oregon’s first McDonnell-Pew Scholar. I was in my first year at UC Santa Barbara and Jon and Gordon Baylis came up from San Diego to visit my lab. I don’t remember much of our conversation that day, nor of the dinner that evening. But what does stand out is what happened after dinner. Jon and Gordon looked a bit impish and asked if they might borrow the keys to my lab. Seems that they had been kicking around an idea and wanted to go back to the lab and see if they could program something up (in our pre-laptop days). Off they went, me regretfully, feeling obliged to stay at home with my wife and our young son.
Jon and Gordon never made it back to the house. They ended up working all night, playing with one display after another, and had the experiment sorted out by morning. Jon laid out the experimental plan when I came in the next day and, in a pattern to be repeated over the years, I struggled to follow, either because I couldn’t quite match the Mach 3 speed of his mind or make heads or tails of the mumbled British accent. With patience, Jon made the elegance of the study clear. If memory serves me right, the manuscript—with 8 experiments—was ready just a few months later (Perception & Psychophysics, 1992), with the patient variant for Nature close on its heels.
Lesson learned then—always pay attention when Jon speaks. The rewards have been great.
