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About the Author
you can always reach me :
laura@laurafreberg.com
If you have not had the opportunity to write a text yourself, you may
find it baffling
that others of us engage in such behavior. My route to this project
was neither short nor
direct. The fact that I ride a 1994 Harley Davidson Fat Boy, listen to
vintage Rolling
Stones, obsess about college football, and have a weakness for playing
Legend of
Zelda on
the Wii may not directly affect the way I describe classical conditioning in
sea slugs, but these are important parts of who I am.
I had the very real privilege to study psychology with
some of the most gifted faculty in the
United States. During the 1970s, the psychology faculty
at UCLA read like a who’s who in
the discipline. My thinking about psychology was shaped
by
Eric Holman,
John Garcia,
Ivar Lovaas,
Jackson Beatty,
John Libeskind,
Donald Novin,
Frank Krasne, and
F. Nowell
Jones, to name a few. As a graduate
student, I sat in awe as
Arnold Scheibel lectured
on neuroanatomy for three hours straight without
pause,and without ever referring to any
notes. Many happy hours were spent in
Murray Jarvik’s and Ron Siegel’s lab,
where
we watched monkeys apparently hallucinating and
discovered that it is virtually
impossible to make elephants drunk. As a capstone, I had the very
real pleasure to
complete my dissertation research under the direction of
Robert Rescorla, then at Yale.
Bob has
a mastery of experimental design that I’ve neverseen
equaled by anyone else,
and he tolerated my many questions with patience and grace.
With this background, I might have been expected to
pursue a career at a research
university, but other factors intervened. My youngest daughter,
Karla, has autism, and
in the interests of finding a reasonable mix between career and family, I opted for
amore teaching-oriented career. Beginning with my first class at Pasadena City
College,when I was
23, I have spent more than 30 years in front of the classroom.
Currently, I serve as a professor of
psychology at California Polytechnic State
University, located in the beautiful seaside town of
San Luis Obispo.
I didn’t
just sit down to write a textbook. Instead, I found myself getting
gradually
more involved with the publishing business. Reviewing others’ work led to
production
of test banks, study guides, and instructors’ manuals, coauthoring revised editions,and
editing collections of readings for psychology. Eventually, curiosity took over, and
I
wondered what the material would look like if I could write it my way. The text you
have in
your hands is the end result not only of my personal experience but the sum
of many
collaborative, thought-provoking discussions with students and faculty
colleagues, to
whom I am immensely grateful.
It is a
privilege to be able to communicate the work of so many gifted
scientists to the next
generation of students. In 1904, William James
predicted that our knowledge and
understanding of psychology would achieve meaningful
progress only when we
possessed the science and technology we needed to
understand the underlying
biological processes of thought and behavior. James
observed that,
“Something definite
happens when to a certain brain-state a certain ‘sciousness’
corresponds. A genuine glimpse into what it is would be
the
scientific achievement,
before which all past achievements would pale.”
-- William James
Who could wish for a
better subject about which to write?
_________________________________
By the way, always feel free to contact me with any
requests , comments, suggestions
and I'll do what I can to help!
Laura
laura@laurafreberg.com
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