--- The bookshelf ---

My dyslexia wears me out. It took me three years to read Lord of the Rings. I can read 10 pages of a book and, regardless of how enthralling the story is, I have to stop and do something else. And I read sloooooowly.

So I do my best to find a digital copy and use my screen reader to listen to the book. LibriVox is a godsend.

But reference books are different. I keep them around for, well, referencing. For adventuring, I preview he topic I'm studying and books play a big part in that.

Let me tell you about some of my favorite philosophy and psychology books.

Top of the list - Will Durant's, The Story of Philosophy (1926, Simon and Schuster, Inc.). It's the most readable introduction to philosophy I know of, which is surprising since it's not a lightweight. It really gives you a good overview of psychology.

If you want depth (great depth - and don't expect it to be easy going), check out the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (https://plato.stanford.edu). This is for advanced, serious reading and it is my vote for the best philosophy reference source.

The classic college text of logic is also a pleasant read - Irving Copi's, Introduction to logic. If you want to learn about logic, it's a clear presentation with lots of examples to show you how it's done. There's about a million editions out so just find one and read it. The 14th edition was published by Routledge in 2013.

I'll strongly recommend three books on problem solving. They are fun and informative.

Conceptual Blockbusting, by James Adams gives you tips on what to do when your brain freezes up and just refuses to work. The fourth edition was published in 2008 by Basic Books.

Wayne Wickelgren's, How to Solve Problems (1977, W. H. Freeman and Co.), goes way deep into problem solving theory and leaves the reader amazingly able to understand what they read.

The absolute classic text for problem solving and teaching problem solving is George Polya's, How to Solve It (1945, Princeton University Press - they keep coming out with new editions with various introductions and prefaces, but I sorta like the antique.). It's a tiny book that manages to encapsulate just about everything anyone really needs to know about how to solve problems and does it in a clear, engaging, and fun manner.

If you want an understandable introduction to symbolic logic, try the online text Forallx, by P. D. Magnus, which can be had here: https://www.fecundity.com/logic.

If you want to go so deep that you get a nose bleed, I heartily recommend Rudolf Carnap's, Introduction to Symbolic Logic and it's Applications (It's available in English as a Dover addition). Expect a challenge.

In psychology, I think a required text for every person on the globe should be Eric Berne's, The Games People Play (1996, Ballantine Books). It's a great read, but be careful, you might realize that he's talking about you.

The other must read in psychology is Desmond Morris' Peoplewatching (2002, Vintage Books). It's like a field guide to human beings.

If you want to read some classic papers in psychology, check out the website, Classics in the History of Psychology, http://psychclassics.yorku.ca .

But, honestly, I don't have many recommendations for psychology. Psychology texts tend to be blah, sensationalistic, or shallow.

--- Links and lectures ---

This blog is about active lifelong learning - getting out and experiencing your world - but I don't want to completely dismiss audiovisual and other kinds of more passive experience. After all, opencourseware and other Internet resources, lectures, books, and documentaries can certainly prepare us for real life adventures and enrich our activities. Here, I'd like to tell you about some of my favorite podcasts and lecture from the Internet and commercial sources.

Let me first dispense with my favorite commercial source of audiovisual lectures. The Teaching Company provides college (and some high school) level courses. The lecturers are auditioned and, typically, I would call the some of the best I have ever seen and heard. More recently, they have partnered with organizations such as National Geographic and the Smithsonian Institute to offer visually rich, fascinating, and informative series. One thing I like about these lectures is that most tell me quite a lot that I have never heard before and the lecturers are active in their fields so that much of the information is current.

On scanning their website (https://www.thegreatcourses.com) the prices seem pretty steep. A course on photography is listed at $234.05, but there are 24 half hour lectures. A new movie costs $20 or more. It's like 6 movies. Still a little steep. On sale the lecture series is only $59.95 and every title goes on sale at least once every year.

In psychology and philosophy, the Teaching Company has The Great Ideas of Psychology, presented by Professor Daniel Robinson. My1997 copy is a little out of date but is still a great introduction to the subject.

The Great Ideas of Philosophy is presented by the same instructor. He does quite well in both fields.

Plato, Socrates, and the Dialogues is narrated by Professor Michael Sagrue. This is one of my favorite lecture series in philosophy. I always enjoy hearing a presenter who is passionate about their subject.

There are several series on logic and problem solving that make the difficult subjects clear. The Art of Critical Decision Making, presented by Professor Michael Roberto of Bryant University is sold as a business course but provides a useful coverage of decision making strategies for any field including everyday life.

Argumentation: The Study of Effective Reasoning, presented by David Zarefsky, and Tools of Thinking: Understanding the World Through Experience and Reasoning, presented by Professor James Hall of the University of Richmond would be a great start for anyone interested in sharpening their reasoning skills.

Now, on the free download side, one of my favorite series in philosophy is Peter Adamson's, The History of Philosophy without Any Gaps. Professor Adamson is the Professor of Philosophy at the LMU in Munich and King's College in London. When he says "no gaps" he means "no gaps". This is the most complete presentation of philosophy I have ever seen (well, up to the Renaissance, anyway. It's an on going project). The website is at https://www.historyofphilosophy.net .

Academic Earth (http://academicearth.org) is an excellent website for lifelong learners. Like The Teaching Company, they look for the best video college courses. Unlike The Teaching Company, they are mostly filmed in classrooms so you generally won't see many of the beautiful cinematographic bells and whistles on Academic Earth, but they're free downloads! I don't want t give you too much in the way of recommendations. All the courses are great and you'll want to look through them. But I do have some favorites.

By far, my favorite psychology course is Yale's Introduction to Psychology presented by Professor Paul Bloom. Professor Bloom's presentation is insightful and surprisingly humorous. Just go to the Academic Earth website, open the "Psychology" list form the "Course" menu from the top of the page, and find Yale's Introduction to Psychology course on the alphabetical list that appears.

You won't see philosophy courses in the Courses menu - you have to use the Search box, but there are some good philosophy courses. Peter Mullican of the University of Oxford presents a great series of lectures on the Introduction to General Philosophy.

I keep an eye on MIT's opencourseware (https://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm) and occasionally donate because...whoa! The courses are absolutely up to date and range from web pages that tell you what books they use - go read them - to full, everything-you-need assemblages of video classes, printed materials, complete textbooks - the whole shebang.

Professor John Gabrieli presents a great Introduction to Psychology complete with video classes and transcripts, lecture notes, problems to solve and their solutions, and more.

If you want a good overview of ethology (animal psychology and sociology) and biological anthropology, take a look at Professor Gerald E. Schneider's class, Animal Behavior.

The philosophy courses tend to vary widely in subject and not be very introductory, but there are some enthralling courses, such as the several courses in logic. If you want to dig deeper just look through the philosophy courses and select one. And if you ever decide to devote the time and effort to fight your way through the adventure of Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, certainly check out Robert Speer's presentation - It'll make the fight considerably easier.

--- Notes on the soul ---

The soul is neither apart from the body nor the same as the body; for it is not, indeed, the body; yet is something of the body.... It is not the body, for it is not matter; but it is essentially involved with the body, because it is its actuality....

Aristotle

It seems to me that everyone, myself included, talk as though they know what "soul" is. I'm admitting here that I don't know what soul is and I don't believe anyone else does either. I don't think Aristotle did but I suspect that our opinions are close enough that we could have had an amiable conversation on the topic.

The word "soul" is as scrambled up as the word "love". Sometimes it seems that people are using "soul" and "spirit" interchangeably. At other times, they seem to mean different things. Any discussion about soul needs to start with an attempt to agree on what "soul" refers to.

First, I'll tell you about my model of a person, then I'll tell you what I think a "soul" is.

I conceptualize a person as having four parts: a body, a soul, a spirit, and an environment.

You might debate whether you're environment is part of you. I frankly can't see any reason for differentiating sharply between self and other, but I've commented on that in other places.

The body is the material, organic part that you have most control of. Along with your environment, this is the part you can measure aspects of in a lab.

Spirit is, of course, debatable but my experience leads me to believe that there is a part of us that's outside of our material existence. Where I diverge with many people who also believe in spirit is that I believe that everything has an underlying spirit component - not necessarily conscious but composed of something that can be called "spirit".

The soul is that part of a person that makes them who they are. In my model, it is synonymous with "mind".

So what is "soul"?

In any list of unanswered questions of science, pretty close to the top, quite often number one, is the questions, "What is consciousness and how does it work?" If you don't see the problem here, you're not trying hard enough. The central aspect of our existence is our consciousness and our science, the most powerful tool we have for understanding our world, can't tell us what it is.

I've watched several lectures and documentaries on consciousness studies (a real field that combines philosophy, psychology, medicine, and just about everything else) and they all tell what we know about consciousness and they are all quite honest in saying that we don't know what consciousness is. Sartre would say (and did say) that it just is and that's all you can say about it.

So, I can tell you what I think but in the end, I don't know.

I think that, as we live and develop as persons, our brains generate information. That information holds together to give us an idea of who and what we are. Information, like fields, is primary in our universe. It's the bottom level. You can say what it does but you can't say what it is.

If you say that a field is a map of values of some quantity in space, you're describing it - you're not saying what it is. You can say what just about everything else is in respect to fields. For instance, mass is a product of the Higgs field, but you can't say what a field is.

In the same way, you can say what information does, but you can't say what it is, and information is not necessarily the same thing as "meaning". Meaning, a kind of information, is derived from information by conscious minds but information doesn't require a mind to exist. When scientists ask whether the information in a particle is lost when it spirals into a black hole, that kind of information would exist whether there is a thinking being in the universe or not.

The thing is that the kind of information called "soul" or "mind" has no independent existence. It requires some substrate to exist. That substrate, in my experience, can be a material brain (the one that generated it) or spirit. The 1s and 0s in a computer's memory and zipping along it's wires are information, but the soul of the computer is the meaning that those 1s and 0s have for the computer (if any) and for others. Destroy the body, spirit, and environment and there's no longer a substrate for a soul and the soul no longer exists.

Does this all make sense? I hope so because this blog has been an awful lot of work (Whew!)

--- Local philosophy and psychology: college tour ---

On March 31 I walked up to the Oxford station and took a couple of trains to the University of Denver. I enjoy college campuses. They're like huge, sprawling museums. Many of the schools keep exhibits in their buildings and this university is no exception. I don't understand why edutourism isn't more of a thing.

The University of Denver, just a street over from the light rail station, is a nice mix of old stone buildings and modern brick and glass. Streets surround a large campus devoid of street traffic. Like most campuses I've visited, there is a large building, in this case, a golden spired carillon tower, that can be seen from most points on campus and serves as a landmark that can prevent a visitor from getting lost. The first point on my agenda when visiting a new campus is to identify that landmark, for colleges campuses are typically labyrinths. I've never seen the big, bull-headed guy, but I always expect to.

Here are a few pictures:

The Frontier Building, home of the Psychology Dept.

A chapel on campus

The Sturm Building, home of the Philosophy Dept.

Art on campus

The carillon tower

More specifically, I wanted to visit the schools of philosophy and psychology. As usual, they were tucked away in small corners of huge buildings housing liberal art schools. Groups of new students were being shown around and all of the students were working out the classes of a new session, so I didn't learn much over what I have seen on the websites, but I did learn that I look so mush like one of the anthropology professors that several people thought I was him. On looking him up, I felt quite flattered, although, well, accident of appearance - right?

The University seems to focus on Continental and Asian philosophies, and Analytic philosophy. I am particularly interested in philosophies outside the conventional Western Philosophies. They tend to caulk up the gaps. Maybe they'll offer some lectures. They have one coming up, presented by Professor Naomi Reshotko, who believes that we take Plato too literally when he talks about forms.

I, frankly don't know if Plato was completely serious about his "heaven of forms". Certainly it would be a bit much for modern humans to swallow, but, regardless, it is certainly a productive turn. For instance, was Zeno being literal about his arrows. Take the allegorical turn. Perhaps he was not commenting on reality itself, but he might have been pointing out glaring gaps in the philosophy of his day. Why couldn't philosophers reconcile the impossibility of infinite regress with the obvious fact that an arrow can, and often did kill people?

It can be difficult for people of one culture to nail down what people of other cultures are really getting at.

My own position is that these forms do actually have a form of existence - it's an existence that can't support itself and needs a substrate. And that's why I feel that Asian philosophies fill gaps in Western philosophies. They have categories of existence beyond the Western, exist/nonexist dichotomy. Information doesn't actually exist. Show me a circle - and I don't mean a round drawing. That isn't a circle since a circle doesn't have any thickness. It is a string of points, all of which have the same distance from a  single point. But how the circle has played a part in the history of humanity. It certainly must have some kind of existence. It resides somewhere between existence and nonexistence. And now I hear (from the Teaching Company's  lecture tapes on the Higg's boson) that modern physicists hold that matter doesn't exist - that matter is only a way that we perceive fields. And what is a field?

I told you that philosophy is dangerous. Didn't I tell you?

I rejoice to see (on the website) that this university emphasizes integrative psychology. I shudder at the memory of a time when, if you had any aspirations of being a psychologist, you had to claim a particular school of thought. (Grph!)

I find myself remembering what I liked about college before graduate school burned it out of me. I could have very happily been a student for life, and, in effect, in my retirement, I've returned to that, but in a rather altered manner. But college campuses and newsletters still make me happy.

On the 27th, I took buses and trains for a two and a half hour trip to Boulder and the University of Colorado campus. It's a beautiful place with the Flatirons towering over rough stone buildings. Since tourism is a priority alongside academics, there are things to do in Boulder. The Museum of Natural History is well known for it's paleontology exhibits and there are other museums and theaters. I checked out the schools of psychology and philosophy and found....bulletin boards.

Hellems Arts and Sciences Building

home of the Philosophy Dept.

Boulder

The Muenzinger Building

Home of the Psychology Dept.

The Flatirons from campus

Well, as you have probably gathered, psychology and philosophy are not terribly visual fields and exhibits in those fields do not abound. But I talked to students and almost collided with faculty - as busy there as on any other college campus. I had a short but interesting conversation with the Boulder Socialist Revolution. Too bad I'm not focusing on social sciences this year.

It looks like, from the website of the psychology department, that they have a particular emphasis in neuroscience with current work on marijuana and a researcher (Dr. Tor Wager) becoming pretty well known for his work on the placebo effect. (It's on the Internet, folks!)

Meanwhile, the philosophy department (again, not a huge draw for academic tourism) seems to have a focus on ethics with a social flavor. That shouldn't be a surprise since Boulder has been on the leading edge of human (and nonhuman) rights. Boulder was one of the first cities in America (maybe the first) to extend legal rights to pets as active members of their community. And there is, of course, an active group (PAWS) on campus for animal rights. If that excites you, you should check out this site:

http://boulderrightsofnature.org/

They're working to obtain legal recognition for the Colorado River as a person. Some of you are laughing - I know you are, but more power to them. Trans- and Posthumanism is most definitely a thing and it isn't going away anytime soon. Maybe it will get people thinking about how they connect with the world around them.

--- Some cool software ---

This blog is about getting off the computer, getting away from the television, and experiencing your world first-hand, but, occasionally, I will post a nod toward interesting cyber-experiences that I've found. I, too, enjoy a good documentary or lecture...or interesting software package, which is what this article is about.

Most folks read about philosophy and psychology, so, as would be expected, software about philosophy and psychology is relatively rare, but they do exist. Here are some of my favorites.

Argumentative developed by John Hartley and available here: http://argumentative.sourceforge.net/index.html is a well designed program to help construct and evaluate arguments. The program should be valuable for anyone interested in debate or decision making theory. It's well documented and should be easy to learn. The help files are integrated into the program (you don't have to go online to access them) and if they're not clear enough, the Teaching Company has a great lecture series on debate that I will bring up later in a blog on Links and Lectures (Wait for it....)

The National Science Digital Library's Online Psychology Laboratory (http://opl.apa.org/Main.aspx) is "way cool" (I picked that phrase up from some high school students I was tutoring) because any individual interested in psychology can join with others across the Internet to perform group experiments in psychology, then they can download the results and even use statistics to process the data just like a psychology researcher. I repeat - "way cool".

The Online Psychology Laboratory has a limited set of studies you can take part in (a bunch, but still limited). If you want to design and carry out your own experiments, there are two programs (also "way cool") that can be used. They're actual programming languages, so it helps to have some background in programming if you are going to use them. Both are well constructed and well documented. Both install with a collection of experiments ready-to-run.

Todd Haskell's FLXLab is available here: http://flxlab.sourceforge.net/ (Note that FLXLab is no longer maintained and may not work on recent operating systems.

PEBL: The Psychology Experiment Building Language, originally developed by S.T. Mueller and B.J. Piper (users have contributed heavily to it) is still maintained and very flexible and extensible. It is available here: http://pebl.sourceforge.net/

Notice that many of these programs are available from SourceForge. All the ones above are free downloads but, if you like them, send a donation their way. Otherwise, they might disappear.

For philosophy software, I am still very impressed with Warren Weinstein's The Play of Mind website, http://www.theplayofmind.com/index.htm . I can't imagine a more enjoyable way to explore philosophy.

And, talking about "free downloads", I'm continuously developing macros for my ToolBook. Recently, I'm developing a kymograph for the Psychology page, that will be out soon. A kymograph is a tool used to study memory. It's used to flash words and/or numbers at set intervals (or randomly) to a subject. Mine is cool ("way cool", in fact) because it will flash a list that contains anything that can be placed in spreadsheet cells including colored and formatted text or cells. It should be up by the end of the year. The ToolBook can be downloaded from here: http://www.theriantimeline.com/ToolBook.ods

Currently it may not be way cool, but it is cool because it has timers, counters, and randomizers in it.

It's all free, so, if you're interested in psychology or philosophy, you should download all of them and have fun.

--- Watching birdwatchers ---

As an exercise in peoplewatching, I planned to sign up for one of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science birding field trips, but I waited until too late in the season. That's okay, though. I've run into many birdwatchers in this area on the trail.

You really can't miss them. Birdwatchers are interesting people. In the first place, they're passionate about their hobby and they don't mind telling you all about what they're doing and I can't imagine anyone minding.
A couple of years ago, in the spring, I was in the city park in Morrison, Colorado when the only other person there, an elderly lady with a wonderful accent (I think it was German) asked if I was a birder. I said that I was a lifelong learner and that I watched birds sometimes, but I wasn't really a birder. Then she asked if I was looking for water ouzels and, when I said that I didn't know what a water ouzel was, she told me all about them.

The water ouzel, also called the American Dipper, is a pretty little, gray water fowl that looks like a song bird. It likes swollen mountain streams because it likes to perch on rocks in the stream where it's safe from predators. Then, when it gets ready to eat, it jumps in the fast water and walks along the bottom of the creek to eat the water insects there.

There were no water ouzels in Bear Creek at the time, but I made it a point to go back on Mother's Day, when the lady told me they are always there and I did spot one under the C470 overpass. Birdwatchers' enthusiasm is infectious.

This is the only unblurred picture I managed to get of the ouzel - they....flit.

                                                                 Ouzel (in the circle)

Birdwatchers can often be identified by their equipment. They will almost always have binoculars, possibly a camera and it will usually be pointed at something you can't see. Like many Weres, I have a predator's vision and, if something isn't moving, I have a hard time seeing it. I have a horrible time tracking down canned milk in a grocery store because it might be anywhere and I can be looking straight at it and not see it.

I was on the Stone House trail, which parallels the Bear Creel Trail near Wadsworth Boulevard and I saw an elderly lady (despite Doonsberry and other sources, not all birdwatchers are elderly) circling a cottonwood tree with binoculars pointing upward. She collared me and asked, "Do you see the owls?"

I strained my eyes but couldn't.

She pointed excitedly and directed my gaze to a crook in the tree's branches and then I saw the tiny birds. She was almost as excited for me as she was about herself spotting the owls.

Birdwatchers may travel in groups. The Denver Museum's bird watching filed trips are a case in point.

Last year, near Fox Hollow Golf Course on Bear Creek Trail, I ran into a party of three birdwatchers - a man and two women, who were taking  part in a competition to record the most different bird species. They were resting on a park bench but, unlike most joggers and bikers, were more than happy to explain what they were doing.

In brief, birdwatcherwatching can be an interesting and fulfilling hobby. You can even learn about birds as a bonus!

--- What's "para" about "paranormal" ---

There are so many assumptions that humanity makes from ages past but has yet to test. Our attitude toward the other occupants of this planet are based on untested assumptions. In the distant past, our method was to base our understanding on "what works" and not try to understand why it works. That is why science appeared in the 1500s, as a tool to understand.

But now I'm sliding into a region of the Dewey Decimal System rife with assumptions, where we are still quite satisfied with "what works" without thinking to question where we got our knowledge or even if, in fact, it actually does work or not. Assumptions:

The paranormal is "para". "Para-" means "beside, beyond", certainly "outside". Therapists occasionally encounter cases that include elements that place them in a quandary as to how to proceed and they call those elements "AEs' or "anomalous experiences". I lived in Selma, Alabama for 20 years, one of the most haunted cities in the United States and the majority of people who have lived there for any time have had an experience with ghosts. I have lived in a haunted house (not by choice but by pure chance, whatever that is) and every city I have lived in has had one or more "haunted houses" within their borders. The paranormal is certainly not infrequent. What's "para" about the paranormal?

The supernatural, by etymology and, I would assume, by definition, outside of nature, apart from creation. I guess the common assumption that such things as ghosts, angels, demons, God or gods, transdimensional portals, etc. are the product of overactive imaginations  would lend credence to the idea for, if these things do not really exist, then certainly they would be outside of our existence; but the frequency of experiences of people with these unaccountable (and inconvenient) entities and phenomenon lead me to suspect that just saying "it doesn't exist" doesn't nearly cover it. But wholly other? I should think not. Just because we don't understand something (and it looks like we've put woefully inadequate effort into such understanding) does not mean it's outside of the nature we all accept as "our nature". What's "super" about the supernatural?

Everyone knows what a ghost is - it's what's left of a dead person after they've been dispossessed of their body. But I've never seen anything that would move that bit of information from the realm of assumption into the kingdom of founded knowledge. In fact, as many people who have experienced ghosts, I haven't met with a convincing explanation yet. I've run into a few things that could make sense, but without any substantive support.

Let me try to enumerate the official list of entities acknowledged as real in the Christian church, which seems to be the authority in the Western world. Starting at the top:

God
Angels
Humans
Animals
Plants
Demons
maybe add devils and their master, Satan.

I think that's all. Biologists added a few more kingdoms of life - slime molds, bacteria, extremophiles, and the like.

But is that all? I've studied the Bible for over 40 years and I can't even see where it supports that. As I have mentioned I many such conversations, the Bible doesn't talk about plumbers, llamas, Chinese, Black folks (well, it might have, but certainly not) Australian Aborigines - all of which existed in Biblical times. Bottom line, just because the Bible doesn't mention it, it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. And, shockingly, just because scientists haven't mentioned it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. E. O. Wilson in his The Future of Life predicts that by 2100, up to half of the species currently on our planet will be gone, many, if not most, without even having been recognized by science.

You can't use Carl Sagan's vaunted "exceptional claim clause" either. There seems to be nothing exceptional about ghosts.

So, without apology, I will soon be exploring the assumed and the maybe not so exceptional about the Denver area and I will be encouraging lifelong learners everywhere to go boldly where no lifelong learner....oh forget the Star Trek thing and go out and enjoy yourselves - and stay safe.

--- Healths ---

When I was a kid, we had health classes - walk on the side of the street facing traffic, don't eat too much sugar, that kind of stuff. Back then, we could talk to strangers and, of course, people who weren't adult never had sex (oh, of course not).

Sex and drug education came around as I was about half way through high school and, of course, I had already heard all of it (in some version or another) from my peers. And films like Reefer Madness convinced me that the adults had no clue. We had lots of films showing, gruesomely, what would happen if we did not drive responsibly. It was like going to the weekend matinee horror flicks!

But President Kennedy had determined that America would be physically fit so everyone had physical education in high school, which consisted of picking up cigarette butts around the high school and putting up with the jocks bullying. At least back then kids didn't often kill each other or drive people to suicide.

In the 60s, President Kennedy had demonstrated a commitment to the physical fitness of Americans. Due to his programs, by the time I entered college, institutes of higher learning required students to take a certain number of physically demanding physical education courses and a certain number of "leisure" recreation courses. Of the three courses I flunked in college, one, golf, was in the latter category. Regardless, I figure it was a good idea. America was getting flabby.

The problem is that physical fitness isn't the only kind. When I was growing up, when a coach was confronted with bullying, the most common response was, "Boys will be boys." If the coaches' ideas were that bullying was age appropriate, they were not mentally fit. If the bullies' only source of self-satisfaction was to have the power over weaker people so as to make them miserable (and, of course, to get the prime breeding stock), then they were not emotionally fit. And if the people they picked on were not equipped to deal with the bullying, they were not socially fit. And I mean "fit" in the same terms as "physically fit" - having the equipment and strategies to fit into the environment - to survive.

Physical fitness isn't the only health issue. I recognize five domains of health - physical, emotional (which relates to the barriers between mind and body), mental (which deals with problem solving), environmental (which addresses the barrier between self and other), and spiritual (which deals with the ability to "step outside" oneself and get a realistic understanding of how the world works without self-serving biases and agendas).

The famous Robbers Cave experiment of Muzafer Sherif underscored the idea that, once groups were separated by group affiliation, the only way to bring them back together was by presenting them with a common enemy (you should look up the Robbers Cave experiment). Talk about a horror story.... American politicians have always known that. If you want to manipulate a large mass of people, give them something to fear.

So, why is bullying, mass and serial murder, xenophobia, and police brutality such an issue in "the Greatest Country on Earth"? I honestly believe that we don't know how to deal with stress, self-image, relationships, our environment...

We favor completely inappropriate strategies to deal with our problems. Every kid, at leasts in high school, should be required to study Eric Berne's The Games People Play.

We might be physically healthy (and we're slipping at that. JFK, come back!), but we have never been emotionally, mentally, environmentally, or spiritually healthy and nightly news (I guess, now, Internet news) continue to give ample evidence of that.

--- Intelligence 7 ---

Yolanda U. Trapps article "Multiple Intelligences: The Learning Process in Our Students" is a decent and brief introduction to modern education. For those who associate "modern education" with the kind decried by C. S. Lewis in many of his works, this ain't it. This is more modern.

Actually, if you want a real update, The Teaching Company has a couple of lecture series. "The Art of Teaching: Best Practices From a Master Educator" presented by Patrick N. Allitt, and "How We Learn" presented by Monisha Pasupathi, will get you up to speed, but those will take you a couple of weeks, at least.

The exercises described at the end of the module are for classroom activities but they might suggest some interesting adventures. If you've never visited a nursing home, You might get permission to go to one and record some life stories. Old folks can be fascinating, and many of them love telling stories. You may even have some elderly family members that would like to tell you some tales. All the ones in my family are long gone and I sorta miss them. Grab the chance before they're gone.

There are actually organizations that invite you to take part in their adventures to record life stories, such as StoryCorps (https://storycorps.org/). You might just find out that that's your thing.

Awhile back, I tried to learn some Spanish. We have a large Hispanic population in the area and I figured it might be nice to be able to talk to some of my neighbors in their own tongue. I was devastatingly unsuccessful. I did learn that age interferes with learning new languages, but one of the exercises in this article gave me an idea. I've also wanted to brush up on my American Sign Language and I might have a better run if I combine the two goals. The act of internalizing signs might be paired with foreign vocabulary to make them both stick. The problem I had with Spanish was that, a week after I had learned a set of words, and was learning new words, I found that the older set was just, flat gone.

Next year, I plan to be looking at social sciences and languages in the area, and this might be a great adventure for me to take on. Starting now will give be a running start and I can let you know how I do.

Thomas O. Merritt's "A Multiple Intelligence Approach to the Physiology of the Brain and How Middle School Students Learn" is a good review of the structures in the brain that house the different "intelligences" outlined by Howard Gardner. He suggests looking at diagrams of the lobes of the brain (actually, all you have to do is browse "brain" in Google Images) and dissecting a cow brain - eh, you might or might not want to do that. You can likely get one from your friendly neighborhood butcher.

Here's something you can try - it usually works (but not always). If you're right handed, visualize the image of someone or something that you are very familiar with to your right, but keep your eyes fixed straight on (if you're left handed, do everything from the other side). Don't move your head or eyes and visualize the image drifting across your field of view from right to left.

Go ahead - don't read any further until you've done it.

The first time I did this, it was startling. Right at the center line in front of me, the image vanished. This was a demonstration performed by a visiting speaker in one of my psychology classes. She was a specialist in psycholinguistics.

Evidently, the eyes really are windows into the mind. They trace activity going on in the brain. The right side of the brain in right-side dominant people deal with memory and learning. The left side deals with creative activities.

So, when people are remembering some image, their eyes tend to track to the upper right field of view. When they are thinking up some new image, the eyes track up and to the left. It's as though the eyes are following the activity in the visual centers in the back and central parts of the brain.

When people are remembering in a sound, their eyes track to the right at about eye level and when they are thinking of some new sound, maybe composing a piece of music, their eyes track across to the left.

The, when people are talking to themselves, their eyes track down. Often, when someone is lying to you, they will look a little down and to the left. When people are depressed and their inner voice is making it worse, they will be looking down and to the right. The presenter told us that, often, all a depressed person has to do to "raise" their spirits is "look up". I've tried that and, by George, it usually works for me!

The last section in the Yale-New Haven module on intelligence is Judith L. Bollonio's "Multi-Sensory Manipulatives in Mathematics: Linking the Abstract to the Concrete", which has some fun things to try with mathematical manipulatives, things that illustrate mathematical concepts that you can, well... manipulate.

I'm quite fond of manipulatives. If you have a problem grasping some concept and you can find a model you can play with, that's often a great way to get a hold on it. Since I'm not dealing with mathematics right now, I won't go there, but you can be sure that, if we do get that far, I will be talking a  lot about it.

So, now back to the topic at hand. I can't take the standard IQ tests anymore. I've taken all the old ones so many times, I just know the answers. The new ones would require that I were still a practicing evaluator to use them. So, since I'm just doing it for fun, anyway, I'll just go onto the Internet, find some random IQ test, and not worry about validity and reliability.

On the other hand, if you want a challenging test, The Brain Game by Rita Aero and Elliot Weiner (1983, Harper Perennial) includes an IQ test developed by Mensa.

In my case, I found this test at the University of Cambridge.

https://discovermyprofile.com/myIQ/introduction.html;jsessionid=667B94D5277D176D35B4C60BDC489370

It seems to be a legitimate test under development and that gives me some added satisfaction of helping develop a new instrument. The introduction says that it will take from 45 to 60 minutes to take the test, so I will wait until I have plenty of time.

The test seems to be based on the Raven Matrix test, which is one of the more unculturally biased tests, having mostly performance items rather than verbal. It's called My-IQ and it was developed by Fiona Chan of the University of Cambridge Psychometrics Centre and Michal Kosinski of the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Wow! That was a cool test. I scored the lowest score I've ever scored on an IQ test but it was fun.

I did notice that I have consistently scored lower as I have gotten older.

I wouldn't have given this one to one of my clients because all it gives is an IQ score and I like to have more multifactorial (multiple scores measuring different things) results, but I recommend it for recreational purposes.

Is it culturally biased? I don't know. I suspect that many of the items could have been interpreted and analyzed in more than one way and it may be that different cultures would orient people to see the items differently, but I see that they are recording where respondents are from, so they should be able to tell if there are any strong cultural biases.

--- Intelligence 4 ---

Francine Coss' offering, "Developing and Assessing the Intelligence of a Kindergartner: A Practical Approach" is an interesting read, but it doesn't have much for the adventurer - unless you have a kindergarten age child.

But the next time you're in a grocery store, pick up a 3 pound bag of something. That's about the weight of an adult human brain. Somehow, that three pound mass of tissue creates your world for you.

Linda Baker's section has some interesting experiences. Oriented toward children and groups, the exercises are pretty easily adapted to adults either alone or in groups. There is an old book called Mind Games: The Guide to Inner Space by Robert Masters and Jean Houston (2nd ed. 1998. Quest Books) may be more appropriate for adults and I have put it to good use, but I would suggest being selective. There are some "opening" exercises in there that provide a guided exercise involving opening up to external entities. I, personally, consider that dangerous. Some folks think it's trivial because such entities (they think) are just psychological constructs. Others think it's okay because the universe is good and nothing is going to hurt you. I've had too much experience with entities that are "out there" and will hurt you. Be forewarned.

It's interesting that this comes up at a time that I'm specifically looking at the contemplative groups in the area. Typically, I'm not too comfortable with New Age philosophies but there is something to say for contemplative practises. It's pretty well established that meditation and similar practices do improve cognitive functions and I have written before on the practice of walking meditation to enhance learning on the trail. Also, there's no question that stretching and breathing exercises are great tools for hikers.

Although Ms. Baker talks about avoiding New Age practices in public school settings, even this section is a little too New Agey for me. For instance, I seriously question that "Love is all there is." Love is a lot of it - but you gotta eat sometime.

--- Intelligence 3 ---

Afolabi James Adebayo's section, "Teaching Awareness of Human Development" is a good read about sleeplessness and stress, especially for people having problems in those area. There's even information about why people might want to be stressed - some games people play.

Me? I rarely have problems with sleep. I learned to sleep in one of the noisiest environments I can think of - a lay barge. About the only time I have any real problem - it's a cosmic law that Wolf doesn't get to sleep the night before a long hike. My body knows what I'm going to do to it and does everything it can to sabotage my plans.

I will say that lack of sleep effects the results of psychological tests. I got to the point, as an evaluator, that if I saw my client dozing (sometimes, they would literally fall out of their chair), I would send them home and tell them to get a good night's sleep before they came back. And as the author of this piece indicates, lack of sleep interferes with both mental and physical performance.

--- Intelligence 2 ---

Again, Cynthia Wooding's module, "Self-Fulfilling Prophecy in African American Students" presents group activities to help African American students counteract biases in standard American educational systems by highlighting role models from the African American community that exemplified the analytical, creative, and practical approaches to intelligence.

The culturally biased testing issue was still going strong while I was a professional vocational evaluator and I'm not so sure it was ever resolved. I did give culturally unbiased test, because they were requested by counselors. And, yes, there was a cultural bias problem with the "classical" tests. Unfortunately, the culturally unbiased tests were lame.

The ones that I had to give produced minimal useful information that made me ask, "What am I measuring here?" Again, I dutifully gave the tests, along with informative additional tests and drew lots of useful information from extensive interviews, and I thoroughly deprecated the tests that I had to give in the report.

One counselor was in love with an scholastic aptitude test that had a reading level about 6 grades above the reading abilities of the clients I was testing.

(Sigh)

In the end, there are no culturally biased (or culturally unbiased) tests. There are only culturally biased evaluations performed by individuals who don't know how to design and interpret individualized evaluations.

--- Intelligence ---

Being a psychologist and retired vocational evaluator, I have what may seem like an embarrassing confession to make. I don't know what "intelligence" is, but I suspect that no one else does either - at least not in any precise way. I'm certainly not sure what an IQ is good for.

I've given many IQ tests, to be sure. I generally gave them for two reasons. First, the schools required them, but I had choice words for that requirement in my reports. That anyone could use the results of a test that can be so drastically influenced by indigestion for purposes of placement - to decide the future track of a person's life - boggles my mind.

I was disillusioned by IQ tests early on. My first client, in fact, was a charming young lady who chatted with me in a witty and smart manner as I stared at her profile that assured me that her IQ was 65. That's a heck of a way to break a vocational evaluator in. After the intake interview I went straight to the behavioral specialist and said, "This can't be right." After a brief interview with the client, the behavioral specialist returned and said, "You're right. I'll retest her." And sure enough, her IQ was 65!

I never trusted an intelligence quotient again.

But I won't say I didn't like IQ tests. My favorite ones were the ones that gave multiple scores. I used them in a more straight forward fashion. Instead of trying to get a blanket score to tell me how well people could solve problems, I looked at the individual scores to see how well people could solve those specific kinds of problems, and then I compared them with scores from other tests, and more importantly, I compared all those scores with what the person had done with their life - their successes and failures, their interests and their dreams, and I pulled all that together into a narrative. No one score could have ever satisfied me when the object under my scrutiny was anything so complex and magnificent as a person.

Uh....there is one other reason I liked IQ tests. They are fun. I like puzzles, so, obviously, I liked IQ tests.

Over the next week or two, I will be reading the Yale-New Haven Teacher's Institute's unit on Human Intelligence: Theories and Developmental Origins (http://teachersinstitute.yale.edu/curriculum/units/2001/6/ last accessed 7/18/2017), and then I'll see if I can find an IQ test that I haven't taken and given so many times I already know the answers by rote (and I'll recommend some that you can take yourself). I expect to have fun.

The first section was written by Dina Pollock and focused on intrapersonal intelligence, which is one of the intelligences mentioned by Howard Gardner in his work on multiple intelligences. Intrapersonal intelligence somewhat calls into question the classical idea that personality is the characteristics that are fairly stable in a person over their lifetime. A skill  included in intrapersonal intelligence is the ability to know self and to guide the development, to some extent, of self.

Most of the exercises suggested by Ms. Pollock are group exercises, which is reasonable since the section is about knowing self and we learn much of what we know about ourselves from other people. But some of the exercises are amenable to individual self exploration. Be careful with "Know your potatoes" if you don't live alone.

I'll add to Ms. Pollock's suggestions the Berkeley Personality Inventory, available in the book "Who Do You Think You Are?" by Keith Harary (the 2nd edition was published in 2005 by Penguin Putnam Trade). This brief personality inventory allows you to explore the way you see yourself (perceived personality) and the way you would like to be (ideal personality), and you can even let others score the inventory for you to see how they perceive your personality (if you dare).

I'm working on a guide for professionals working with therians and I have just finished reviewing a report by the International Anthropomorphic Research Group (Roberts, S. E., Plante, C., Gerbasi, K., & Reysen, S. (2015). Clinical interaction with anthropomorphic phenomenon: Notes for health professionals about interacting with clients who possess this unusual identity. Health & Social Work, 40(2), e42-e50). In their study, they found that furries (people who belong to a culture based on anthropomorphic characters and/or art) use alternate personas to move from the way they see themselves closer to they way they want to be.

I would expect the players of RPGs (Role Playing Games) could use characters created during play to do the same thing. But, then, I know a lot of gamers who intentionally choose characters that are not at all like themselves and are not at all like who they would want to be, as a kind of challenge.

I suspect that RPGs present a very fertile ground for psychological and sociological research.

--- Notes on knowledge ---

Thus the faculties of consciousness, of memory, of external sense, and of reason are all equally the gifts of nature. No good reason can be assigned for receiving the testimony of one of them, which is not of equal force with regard to the others.

Thomas Reid

There is a huge difference between Descartes' epistemology and our epistemology. A lot of our epistemology has drifted from philosophy to science - cognitive science. And science has worked out techniques for research that reduce uncertainty and bridges the gap between what we perceive and what is actually "out there".

Some still are suspicious of "faculties of consciousness" like intuition, emotion, and aesthetic judgment but these abilities developed with our race to take care of situations important to our survival and they are as important today as they ever were. We are often called to make "snap judgments" in situations where there is no time for long deliberation and many of our cognitive abilities are there for those situations.

But it is, nevertheless, important that our "faculties of consciousness" and, also our more respected faculties be trained to work well and to work together. Intuition, for instance, with attention and collaboration with reason can be fine tuned to be an effective and reliable tool for assessing situations that are "fuzzy", open to multiple interpretations, or that require a quick, cool summation.

I still run into people who think that memory is like a video recording in which everything that we've done or perceived is stored in our brains (if only we could get to the recordings). That idea has been disproved over and over by cognitive scientists who know that memories are reconstructions from very summary clues stored in our brains. We reconstruct situations every time we remember them and there is much room for error. But the same cognitive scientists have discovered and developed techniques that help us to reduce that error greatly. Rehearsing memories, associating new memories with salient information, and the use of memory systems greatly empower us to remember accurately and reliably.

At the same time replication, triangulation, and good research design allow scientists to certify that the results of their research actually resembles reality enough to understand and predict the workings of nature.

Nevertheless, we should be careful about "what we know". A little humility is called for because we are still once removed from the world. What we perceive will always be processed through our senses and our brain before we consciously apprehend our world. We will always be stuck with mental models of the way things work but, as long as we keep firmly in mind that they are models, that will be good enough.

No, I don't think we can know with absolute certainty what's really "out there", but we can have a consistent and reliable view of how our world works. If it's not "absolute reality", it's our world. We can't go beyond that - or can we.

The major problem is that we are incapable of directly perceiving the universe. Our sensory organs are limited and our brains are material organs that are limited in their programming to certain patterns. They are linear and time bound. Most of the universe, we can't even grasp, but we know that there are things beyond what we can grasp. What we know - our models - require other things. A physicist told me that the universe isn't made of matter - it's made of fields. We can't perceive fields, but they have to be there or else nothing we know would work.

I've had experiences that my brain can't grasp. That's part of shamanism, and there's another way we can go beyond. We're approaching a time when we can construct artificial intelligences that work qualitatively different from our material brains. They can think things that we can't. Can they open up new areas of the universe for us? I guess the question is, "Do we want them to?"

--- Intelligence ---

Being a psychologist and retired vocational evaluator, I have what may seem like an embarrassing confession to make. I don't know what "intelligence" is, but I suspect that no one else does either - at least not in any precise way. I'm certainly not sure what an IQ is good for.

I've given many IQ tests, to be sure. I generally gave them for two reasons. First, the schools required them, but I have choice words for that requirement in my reports. That anyone could use the results of a test that can be so drastically influenced by indigestion for purposes of placement - to decide the future track of a person's life - boggles my mind.

I was disillusioned by IQ tests early on. My first client, in fact, was a charming young lady who chatted with me in a witty and smart manner as I stared at her profile that assured me that her IQ was 65. That's a heck of a way to break a vocational evaluator in. After the intake interview I went straight to the behavioral specialist and said, "This can't be right." After a brief interview with the client, the behavioral specialist returned and said, "You're right. I'll retest her." And sure enough, her IQ was 65!

I never trusted an intelligence quotient again.

But I won't say I didn't like IQ tests. My favorite ones were the ones that gave multiple scores. I used them in a more straight forward fashion. Instead of trying to get a blanket score to tell me how well people could solve problems, I looked at the individual scores to see how well people could solve those specific kinds of problems, and then I compared them with scores from other tests, and more importantly, I compared all those scores with what the person had done with their life - their successes and failures, their interests and their dreams, and I pulled all that together into a narrative. No one score could have ever satisfied me when the object under my scrutiny was anything so complex and magnificent as a person.

Uh....there is one other reason I liked IQ tests. They are fun. I like puzzles, so, obviously, I liked IQ tests.

Over the next week or two, I will be reading the Yale-New Haven Teacher's Institute's unit on Human Intelligence: Theories and Developmental Origins (http://teachersinstitute.yale.edu/curriculum/units/2001/6/ last accessed 7/18/2017), and then I'll see if I can find an IQ test that I haven't taken and given so many times I already know the answers by rote (and I'll recommend some that you can take yourself). I expect to have fun.

The first section was written by Dina Pollock and focused on intrapersonal intelligence, which is one of the intelligences mentioned by Howard Gardner in his work on multiple intelligences. Intrapersonal intelligence somewhat calls into question the classical idea that personality is the characteristics that are fairly stable in a person over their lifetime. A skill  included in intrapersonal intelligence is the ability to know self and to guide the development, to some extent, of self.

Most of the exercises suggested by Ms. Pollock are group exercises, which is reasonable since the section is about knowing self and we learn much of what we know about ourselves from other people. But some of the exercises are amenable to individual self exploration. Be careful with "Know your potatoes" if you don't live alone.

I'll add to Ms. Pollock's suggestions the Berkeley Personality Inventory, available in the book "Who Do You Think You Are?" by Keith Harary (the 2nd edition was published in 2005 by Penguin Putnam Trade). This brief personality inventory allows you to explore the way you see yourself (perceived personality) and the way you would like to be (ideal personality), and you can even let others score the inventory for you to see how they perceive your personality (if you dare).

I'm working on a guide for professionals working with therians and I have just finished reviewing a report by the International Anthropomorphic Research Group (Roberts, S. E., Plante, C., Gerbasi, K., & Reysen, S. (2015). Clinical interaction with anthropomorphic phenomenon: Notes for health professionals about interacting with clients who possess this unusual identity. Health & Social Work, 40(2), e42-e50). In their study, they found that furries (people who belong to a culture based on anthropomorphic characters and/or art) use alternate personas to move from the way they see themselves closer to they way they want to be.

I would expect the players of RPGs (Role Playing Games) could use characters created during play to do the same thing. But, then, I know a lot of gamers who intentionally choose characters that are not at all like themselves and are not at all like who they would want to be, as a kind of challenge.

I suspect that RPGs present a very fertile ground for psychological and sociological research.

--- Self reference ---

"Does everything have to be about you?"

How many movies have you heard that in?

But maybe it's justified.

Here's another great experiment that you can take part in on the Online Psychology Laboratory. I won't tell you anything about it because, again, anything I told you would ruin your fun and spoil your outcome.

Find it here:

http://opl.apa.org/Experiments/CategoricalList.aspx

under social psychology, and have fun learning about yourself.

--- Notes on free will ---

What is freedom? It means not being a slave to any circumstance, to any restraint, to any chance; it means compelling Fortune to enter the lists on
equal terms.

Seneca

My position on fortune, destiny, and the like is that we're dealt a hand at the beginning and we can choose how we play our cards. Destiny is at the first, not the last.

As long as free-will remained in the claws of the philosophers (and I include unthinking thinkers like Skinner in that group), humans could not reasonably be said to necessarily have free-will because their every action, every thought was predetermined by their circumstances. The physicists and neuroscientists have reopened the question. That's an odd twist.

As it is, there is too much chaos in the works to be able to say that there cannot be free will.

Freedom, in the language of physicists and statisticians, is the number of directions a thing can move in. They rarely talk about freedom - they talk about "degrees of freedom" - how many different ways can a thing move or change. I get the idea that when people talk about free will, they're talking about the ability of a person to make literally any decision within their physical capabilities. I hope not. Random action is not free will. Free will is the ability to choose between any of a range of rational decisions available to a person. It's the ability to think things out and then decide a course of actions.

Cognition is fuzzy enough to easily allow for free choice. The logical positivism set (may logical positivism rest in peace) wanted to believe that everything was strictly determined - it would make the calculation of everything a lot easier. But then Heisenberg came along with his uncertainty nonsense and put a stop to their dreaming.

I often have recourse to, "That's a good explanation, but not a very good excuse." Serial and mass murderers often have very good reasons for doing what they do. Hate humanity? I can see that. I was mistreated as a child? Yep, so people go through that. Humans taste good? Probably do.

But those are not good excuses. I know too  many people who had horrible childhoods and they grew up to be caring, helpful people. I know too many people who have every reason to hate humanity but, surprisingly, don't. I don't want to hear anyone use their bad temper as an excuse. I have a murderous temper, I can easily go into a berserker's rage, but I don't. People are supposed to develop self-control as a part of growing up. I don't want to hear any one say, "I just couldn't control my sex drive." I'm a satyr and have been plagued with a raging libido since I was 8 years old. If anyone had the right to claim over-active sex drive it would be me, yet I respect other people. Too many minorities grew up to be great people who quite obviously love humanity and live lives that make life worth living for others for other individuals to justify bad actions by, "I was mistreated by The Man."

So I just can't buy the, "I had to do it," or "the devil made me do it," or the "they just caught me in a weak moment," defense. I believe that people do have choice and they're responsible personally for how they use it.

--- Notes on animals ---

The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind. We have seen that the senses and intuitions [including reason]... of which man boasts, may be found in an incipient, or even sometimes in a well-developed condition, in the lower animals.

Charles Darwin

I will insert a resignation, though, that this doesn't adequately capture the diversity in the animal kingdom. And it's not "just" a matter of degree. Wolves don't have thumbs. Gorillas and raccoons do and gorillas, unlike wolves, do use tools. I suspect that raccoons can also pick locks. That's the only way I can explain how they can get into things as adroitly as they do.

Still, as vociferous as prairie dogs can be, humans, I suspect, are the only animals capable of technical communications. I would think that to be the big distinctive of humans in the animal kingdom.

Well, I've blogged about animals before and you can search the blog, so I won't belabor that point. I'm sure I'll return to the topic again.

I assume that they are not less or more mentally than I am. They obviously think. They feel pain and fear. They plan and connive. Some use tools; some communicate quite well. I suspect that they are all different, just like hominids. I assume, instead that they are simply different - alien in the sense that they think differently enough that we might have a difficult time grasping what's going on inside their heads. Sometimes, I think that my neighbors minds are just as alien. And, of course, that would imply that my mind is just as alien to them.

--- Memory tricks ---

I often need to remember things on the trail - usually directions, addresses or license numbers. Given that my memory has never been particularly powerful, at 63 years (almost 64), it is even less reliable - I need all the help I can get. I use the same system that got me through 10 years of college. It's the extended version of the Major system published by Jerry Lucas and Harry Lorrayne under the title, The Memory Book. It's still in publication, so, do yourself a favor and go out and buy a copy.

After learning the ten mnemonics for the digits and establishing your own standard mnemonics for the 26 letters, you can remember almost anything - long numbers, strings of letters and numbers (such as automobile tag numbers), positions on maps or latitude and longitude positions measurements, directions, instructions, just about anything but passages.

The Major system isn't to useful for prose, poetry, or the like, or it hasn't worked that well for me. I use other tricks for that.

Honestly, what has worked best for me in memorizing things like song lyrics or parts in plays (I used to get sucked into community plays with disturbing frequency) is over-memorization. After you've gone over Macbeth's soliloquy a couple of hundred times ("Tomorrow and tomorrow, and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day...." yadda, yadda, yadda...) it never leaves you. You wake up reciting Shakespeare. But there is an aid that is much older than Shakespeare and can even be fun for hikers.

It's called the locus method and it was used by Roman orators way back before the birth of Christ. It involves visualizing a very familiar place, such as your villa, and associating each phase of your speech with a part of the place as you pass through. Why not use your favorite trail?

At the plaza on the far side of the South Platte from where the Bear Creek Trail joins the South Platter Trail, I imagine a huge calendar flapping hard to blow people off the bridge. ("Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.."), but I ease by it stealthily and gain the other side ("creeps in this petty pace from day to day"), but - oh, no! - I'm attacked by syllables! ("Until the last syllable of recorded history."). And there's a big spotlight - what's that prison tower doing there? ("and all our yesterdays have lighted fools the path to dusty death"). Hack, hack! and all this dust - gotta get away! so I turn down the trail and run toward the plaza on the trail, but everything is cast into blackness and I turn to see that the guard tower was lit by a big candle which has gone out. ("Out, out, brief candle!") I'm almost knocked down by a strutting fret board (guitar or violin - I don't know.) worrying about the lack of a shadow ("Life is just a walking shadow, a poor player, strutting and fretting his last hour upon the stage.") I get past the fret board into a brief silence ("And then is heard no more.") But then there's this stupid loudspeaker amplifying the sound of the weir dam into a cacophonous roar (It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,"), but I make it past that, eardrums intact and continue down the trail to home ("signifying nothing.")

I guarantee that there is a high school student somewhere trying to memorize this very passage, and I've had numerous requests to do it in my best redneck accent (not difficult since I grew up in the South and am, in fact, a redneck.)

Believe it or not, it works. Give it a try sometimes.

--- Why I talk to "animals" ---

People may think I'm crazy, greeting all the dogs on my hikes with "Hey guy!" and carrying on my one-sided conversations with them. But there is method to my madness.

If you want a good read into the mind of the nonhuman, I suspect that you couldn't do much better than to get Temple Grandin's and Catherine Johnson's  Animals in Translation. Ms. Grandin writes from a personal perspective since, she says, there are many similarities between the way a person with autism thinks and the way a nonhuman animal thinks. And she is autistic.

I also suspect that there are things that she gets wrong because, despite the similarities she sees, nonhuman animals are not autistic humans (and I will emphasize that she expresses the same in the book, so I am not contradicting her.). But it seems to me that she gets a lot of things right.

Pet owners and animal trainers are aware, have always been aware, of how stupid the Cartesian idea that nonhumans are only automatons, is. Beside that, I almost respect the Skinnerian idea that humans are also automatons. At least Skinner recognized that like implies like. If what nonhumans are doing things that look like what humans do (e.g., think), then it make more sense to posit, at least unless it has been shown to be otherwise, that they are, at least, quite similar. If it looks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck....

Regardless of what a dog thinks I'm doing when I give out a hearty, "Hey, guy!", it at least registers in it's doggy brain that I'm not aggressive and that I'm not afraid of it. There are several dogs in the neighborhood that sounds like, if they ever were to get out of their enclosure, they could do some real hurt to whoever is available. I hope it's someone like me because, at least I will be starting at a point of recognized equanimity.

I had a friend many years ago who trained his chows (in my memory, there were four) to attack on command and he wanted to demonstrate their training to me so he asked me to stand at a point in his yard and he let the dogs out of their enclosure and then he said, "Get him!".

I don't know what he planned to do to keep them from "getting me," but it was a non-issue.

They advanced on me, snarling and snapping, and I stared at them and growled. They stopped in a line and continued snarling and snapping, but they came no closer. My friend was furious and rushed them back into their fenced yard.

I think that people die in encounters with vicious dogs because the situation is so seemingly alien. Dogs are short and furry and their passion looks almost demonic. People don't seem to realize that, yes, they can fight back. They might get bit, but dogs don't enjoy being battered in the face any more than anyone else. They don't enjoy being kicked or punched in the kidneys. They're not the automatons that Descartes said they were.