HEWARD: I get the privilege each week to ask our guest faculty to start things off by sharing something in the way of their personal history. What happened to Og Lindsay that led him to get so interested in behavior and to devote his life to measuring and changing it?

LINDSLEY: I was at Brown University in 1939 and 40, trying to get a Bachelor of Science in engineering. Those were troublesome times. After Pearl Harbor in 1941, the United States lowered the age requirement for aviation cadets. I’d always wanted to fly so I became an aviation cadet. I did quite well with preflight and everything but a routine flight physical detected prism divergence in my right eye. I'm a little bit cockeyed if I look up to the right above 12 diopters or something. During the flight physical a lot of the guys were erasing little red marks and stuff. The guy next in line to me said do it. I was a kid then and believed in everybody. But I thought, well, my God, be just my luck to take the nine people to their death just because I wanted my silver wings.

A few days after they washed me out as an aviation cadet, I enlisted in the Army Air Force. I ended up in the military police guarding the gate at Maxwell Field. I shot at a prisoner trying to escape. They gave me a carton of cigarettes and sent me to aviation mechanics school at Kingsley Field in Biloxi, Mississippi. I graduated top of my class in aviation mechanics and was all set to go be an engineering officer on helicopters. But because I was on detached service from the military police, I got sent back to Maxwell Field to guard the gate.

I was so angry that I went to post headquarters every day and said I was an aviation mechanic. I had an IQ of 147 and was now a corporal. I mean, what am I doing at the gate here? They finally sent me off to gunnery school and I became a gunner on a B-24 bomber. I was a top turret operator for a couple of operations. We were shot down on the way back from the Ploești oil fields [in Romania], and I became a POW in prison camp. I’m not very religious, but I kind of promised the world or the sky or something that if I got out, I'd work half the time to have fun and half the time to try to prevent this crazy thing that was going on. After the War, I went back to Brown on the GI Bill and tried to study advanced calculus. I had trouble because after 6 years in the Air Force about all I knew were four letter adjectives and the parts of a B-24 airplane and engine.

I used to study all night, trying to catch up. One morning about 4:30, I imagined the guys that got killed in the plane walking in the door and saying, “What the hell are you doing to yourself?” I would be ashamed to tell them that I was doing something I really didn't like. So, the next morning, I got out the Brown University catalog and put a checkmark next to every course I'd like to take just because of its content. If I dropped dead the day before graduation, what would I like to have in my head before I died?

I put most of the check marks next to courses in biology and psychology. I skipped an advanced calculus exam, went to the dean’s office and said I want to change to pre-med with a major in psychology. The chairman of the psych department asked if I'd ever had a course in psychology. I said, no, and he said I suggest you start with the intro course. So, I did. I got straight As and completed my bachelor’s with highest honors. I got a master's in electrophysiology. For my thesis, I used a cathode-ray oscilloscope, amplifiers, nonpolarizable microelectrodes, and all that sort of stuff to study conduction velocities in rats’ nerves.

My advisor had won notoriety with some great work recording the nerves that have to do with taste. My plan was to do the same thing with olfaction for my doctorate. I was working on my dissertation when the graduate dean dropped dead with a coronary. The acting dean was a guy with three degrees from three different universities who declared there’ll no more three degrees at Brown.

So, I went to Harvard to work with a guy who had a micro electrolysis technique that I wanted to learn. Harvard gave no credit for anything I had taken at Brown. I found myself in Psych 101 all over again and had to take maybe 120 graduate hours where usually it's like 60 or something for a doctorate. I was really angry. I got a B-minus in Boring’s exam because I missed the question, "When did psychology begin?" A B-minus was the lowest grade possible in the graduate program! Almost everybody got an A-plus-plus, an A-plus, a flat A, an A-minus or an A-minus-minus. A B-plus-plus was barely acceptable, but a B-minus could get you washed out of the program.

I was saved when Skinner asked me to assist him in the introductory course he was teaching for undergraduates. The notes for that course would become the book, Science and Human Behavior (Skinner, 1953/2014). Skinner asked me to train a high-jumping rat for a class demonstration. Skinner had pigeons playing ping-pong and doing different kinds of things, but he wanted some more rats to show the species generality of operant conditioning and shaping. To train the high jumping rats, I set up some ring stands and meter sticks to move the little bar up. One of the rats grabbed the end of the meter stick and started pushing it down. I thought, “Well, I'll put some weight on it with a hinge and turn him into a weightlifting rat.” In 2 weeks, Samson was lifting 250% of his own body weight.

I couldn’t believe that I had more control over a full animal in a free environment than I ever had over a nerve in a moist chamber. I would sometimes work five or six or seven Saturdays just to get one nerve firing on a cathode-ray tube. The darn things would die just before you put the electrodes on. The animal wouldn’t die, but the nerve would go dead because it had been so tortured by teasing stuff away from it and so forth.

So anyway, for a long while, I kind of compromised. I thought that I would learn the operant conditioning techniques from Skinner and then go back to electrophysiology. When you record from rat brains, you get a lot of noise from the biggest cells, which are the motor cells. And my plan was to train the rats to hold themselves still, which would clean up the brain, and then you could see the things you were studying. So, I was going to combine both techniques. I still have my electrodes, but I probably will never get around to doing that. I've been pretty much working with Skinner’s ideas ever since. That’s the story of how I got started.

HEWARD: That’s some origin story, Og! That B-minus is just still eating the hell out of you, isn't it.

LINDSLEY: No! What's eating the hell out of me is graduate students having to study equal trivia still today. I mean, there's almost no courses about the future, about where we're going, and they're going to live where we're going. What kind of sense does it make to train graduate students to be ready for 1955 or ‘65 or ‘75 or ‘85? We should be thinking about 2025.

HEWARD: At this point, let’s turn things over to the students who are excited to talk with you.