Tom Gilovich’s 1991 book, How we know what isn’t so: The fallibility of human reason in everyday life. (Amazon, Bookshop). When I was a senior in college, my undergraduate advisor, Chuck Huff, reach up to his bookshelf and handed me Tom’s book. “I think you might find this to be interesting,” he said. That turned out to be a massive understatement. I devoured Tom’s book in a couple of days. At the end of it, I decided that that doing research like this is what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. Tom’s book descriptions how the psychological processes that guide our thought, beliefs, and attitudes can be disconnected in meaningful ways from reality, leading to systematic misperceptions and misunderstanding. I found the insights Tom was describing from psychological research to be mind altering. Later in my senior year, I applied to work with Tom in the Ph.D. program at Cornell University’s Department of Psychology. I was very fortunate to be admitted to the program off of the waitlist at the last minute and ended up having Tom as my Ph.D. advisor. Tom turned out to be every bit as wonderful a Ph.D. advisor as he is a researcher and writer. My career, and so many of the good things that have come from it, can be traced straight back to that fall of 1995 when I listened to Chuck’s suggestion: “I think you might find this to be interesting.”

Thankfully, at the age of fourteen or so, I realised that literature could provide me with much of what I’d previously been looking for in science – not least a hotline to the profound mystery of being human in a world of breathtaking complexity. Better still, there were some books which contained moments of revelation on almost every page.

There were specific books which started this journey – The Collected Poems of R S Thomas and the novels of Patrick White played a pivotal role – but it was the possibilities of literature in general which opened my eyes and altered my course.