Travels with charlie

Charlie Gross is a maverick of modern neuroscience. Never content to tread the straight and worn path, never bridled by accepted views and traditional approaches, Charlie has often veered off the tracks, mapped much new terrain, and repeatedly opened our eyes to new ways of thinking. His scientific contributions are prodigious, transformative, and sometimes—as in his discovery of “face cells” in the cerebral cortex—the stuff of legend. Charlie is also deeply loved by the generations of students and colleagues with whom he has worked. We love Charlie for his wit and wisdom; for the passionate joie de vivre that fills his personal and professional spheres; for the devotion he extends to his students, their work, and their lives; for a certain (often bizarre) unaffected goofiness and unpredictability; and for those seemingly stray provocative comments that tilt the frame of your world. On May 25 and 26, 2013, a great many of Charlieʼs former and current students, colleagues, and friends assembled in Princeton to honor him, to celebrate his contributions to science and society, and to express our gratitude to a man who has profoundly influenced our careers, our lives, and the way we think. “Charlie Fest” was both scientific symposium and party: We began Saturday with a series of scientific lectures in old Green Hall. This special volume of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience is largely a compendium of those presentations. Saturday evening consisted of a banquet at which Charlie was both praised and gently ridiculed by his students and colleagues. Sunday was appropriately marked by a celebration with traditional pig roast (more about that later) at Charlieʼs home. Much has been written about the age in which Charlie worked—five remarkable decades in which the field of neuroscience not only blossomed but resonated with a public eager to understand why we do the things we do—and about his life and contributions. Charlieʼs autobiography (“Being Charlie Gross”) appears in the Society for Neuroscience-sponsored collection known as The History of Neuroscience (Vol. 6). The engaging story of his Brooklyn youth, his family, and the unique factors that influenced his development as child of Jewish intellectual Communist Party members is told in “Wait: A Memoir of a Red Diaper Baby” (Boulevard, 2009). Charlieʼs historical impact on the field of neuroscience is also covered in his “Genealogy of the Grandmother Cell” (The Neuroscientist, 2002), “Single neuron studies of the inferior temporal cortex” (Neuropsychologia, 2007), and “Processing the Facial Image: A Brief History” (American Psychologist, 2005). The scientific articles in this special issue of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience reveal just a hint of the scientific world that Charlie has spawned. After a brief summary of my connection to Charlie and a sketch of major episodes in his career, to help set the stage, what I aim to do here is convey a sense of the man—that scruffy, shuffling, frenetic, boisterous, seriously intellectual, mischievous, inspired, ardent, radical, bon vivant provocateur. To convey a sense of what he has meant to us through the years and how he has helped make us who we are—not just as neuroscientists but also as people and members of society. At the same time, I canʼt help but note that these character manifestations of Charlie are precisely the reasons he has deeply impacted