I got interested in psychology while studying business administration in the late 1960s and early 1970s at Louisiana State University. I was particularly taken with the rigors of behaviorism and wrote to B. F. Skinner asking him to help me create a behaviorist model of consumer behavior. He wrote back and declined my offer on ethical grounds. I was actually pursuing this work for the purpose of consumer protection, not exploitation, but I was so moved by his letter that I abandoned my weak commitment to business and turned more and more toward psychology. I ended up working with a professor who was studying the neural basis of learning and motivation, and decided to pursue graduate work in biological psychology. I ended up doing my PhD at SUNY Stony Brook with Mike Gazzaniga.

In the mid-1970s, it was clear that cognitive science was dethroning behaviorism and bringing the mind back to psychology. But the mind being brought back was not the mind the behaviorists got rid of. The cognitive mind was an information-processing system that basically worked non-consciously, with only the late stages giving rise to reportable subjective experience. Early cognitive science was behavioristic in terms of its methods and rigors, but more ecumenical psychologically in that it made room for internal processes in the control of behavior. But subjective experience was not the focus.

For my PhD studies with Gazzaniga, I explored how the left hemisphere dealt with behaviors produced by the right hemisphere. From the point of view of the left, anything done by the right was done non-consciously. We were fascinated with how the left hemisphere, when observing the responses of the right, confabulated an explanation of why those responses occurred. If the right caused the person to laugh or stand up, the left explained the response as being due to the humor of the situation (for the laugh) or the need to stretch (in the case of standing up). We drew upon the emerging field of cognitive social science, explaining the left hemisphere's confabulations as efforts to reduce cognitive conflict by attributing cause to non-consciously controlled processes.