By senior year, he was performing minor surgery on pigeons' skulls so he could monitor their stages of activity and sleep via EEG.

He constructed an experimental apparatus that used sensors to track their eye movements. To do this, he had to anesthetize the pigeons and implant electrodes on their skulls.

Wires ran out of their heads into tiny pigeon "backpacks," and from there into his measuring apparatus.

But Fineberg had a small problem. Pigeons can turn their heads all the way around. And his pigeons kept ripping their wires out.

He was at his wits' end when he hit upon an unorthodox solution. It was 2 a.m. and he was sitting in the outer office of his advisor's suite. Suddenly he looked up and saw the phone--and the phone cord.

Fineberg removed the phone from the wall and cut off just enough curly phone cord to replace the pigeons' wires. Then he resoldered the phone into the wall.

"I never got asked about it," he says. "And I never explained. I kept checking to make sure it still worked."

It did--and so did his experiment. The pigeons couldn't tear up the phone cord. Fineberg got his measurements--and graduated magna cum laude with the Class of 1967.