Charles M. Fair

Fair was born in New York City. His mother was the stage actress Gertrude Bryan. He attended the Buckley School, Fay School, and St. Paul's.^[1] Fair attended Yale University but was asked to leave before graduating.^[2]

Fair began to study the nervous system in the late 1950s out of his conviction that psychiatric theories of the self had failed.^[2] In spite of his lack of a college degree, Fair distinguished himself as an independent scholar by holding several prestigious positions and writing three books on neuroscience. He was a Guggenheim Fellow at UCLA's Brain Research Institute^[3] and worked as a scientist for MIT's Neuroscience Research Program and Massachusetts General Hospital.^[4][5] Fair published several technical papers^[6][7] and contributed to the academic journals Science^[8] and Nature.^[9]

Fair wrote poetry, literary commentary, and screenplays.^[2] He published light verse in Punch and The New Yorker, wrote book reviews for the Providence Journal and the Washington Post, and had a column in the American Poetry Review.^[4] Fair wrote and narrated the soundtrack for the original Salem Witch Museum in Salem, Massachusetts.^[4] He wrote three non-technical books on the subjects of the history of war (From the Jaws of Victory) and cultural criticism (The Dying Self; The New Nonsense: The End of the Rational Consensus).

Fair was a skeptic and early member of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.^[10] Fair's The New Nonsense critically examined pseudoscience and paranormal topics such as mind control, ESP, UFOs, and Velikovsky's cataclysm theory.^[2][11][12] He pleaded for "rational renaissance" and praised reason as a guard against looming fascistic revolution and cultural decay.^[12]