Episode 187 - Memory w/ Dr. David Palmer

Meet Your Podcast Guest

Dr. Dave Palmer discovered Skinner by reading Walden Two while on a caving trip to North Carolina, because he thought it must have had something to do with his hero, Thoreau. He spent the next decade on a soap box preaching about Walden Two and reading the rest of the Skinner canon. Eventually he realized that he was no Frazier, and he applied to graduate school in behavior analysis under John Donahoe. He was happy in grad school and would be there still if the University of Massachusetts hadn’t threatened to change the locks. He is the co-author, with Donahoe, of Learning and Complex Behavior, a book that attempts to integrate behavior analysis with physiology and to embed the field in the context of the broader study of selectionism. Palmer retired from 30 years of teaching statistics and behavior analysis at Smith College, but he continues to teach verbal behavior in the graduate program at Western New England University and will continue to do so until senility claims him. He continues to puzzle over the interpretation of memory, problem-solving, and, particularly, verbal behavior. He once referred to himself, in a jocular vein, as a goose-stepping Skinnerian, but he found that the label fit, and he now wears it without apology.