When Frank A. Logan, died at age 80, he left a legacy of thousands of
small kindnesses, a genuinely friendly and charming fellow and a teacher
who really cared about his students.
Professor Ferraro said it best of Dr. Logan
"No
one who worked with Frank was untouched by his intellect and
scholarship, his passion for psychology, his integrity as a
professional, his generosity, and his genuine supportive caring."
From 1978 to 1981 I served as his lowly lab assistant, charged with
emptying the rat and money poo from his labs.
It turned out to be one of the luckiest things that ever happened
to me, to get a change to work closely with one of the most brilliant
experimental psychologists of the 20th century.
Dr. Logan noticed that I was taking computer science courses and one day
a brand-new VT100 dumb terminal appeared in the lab (this was years
before the PC was introduced). He
got this terminal just for me, just so that I could avoid the chaos of
accessing the mainframe in the "pit", a shared area for the computer
students.
From this one small kindness, I was hooked!
Frank taught me electromechanical programming, and I learned how
to code with physical steppers, flip-flops, timers and switches,
building elaborate experiments for monkeys and rats, all under his
tutelage. To this day, I understand programming at a higher level, and I
feel sad for programmers who have never had a chance to program a
mechanical device!
Frank Logan taught me electromechanical programming, a useful skill
A great example of the upwardly mobile "greatest generation", Frank was
born and raised in Florida and served 3 years World War II as a combat
medic. Seizing his GI bill along will zillions of other ex-soldiers, he
received a PhD from the University of Iowa in 1951 and taught at Yale
University, eventually becoming chairman of the Yale Psychology
Department.
In 1964 Dr. Logan came to the University of New Mexico as Chair of the
Psychology Department, with is now Logan Hall, named in his honor.
While he deliberately hid from fame (unlike his attention-hungry
peers like B. F. Skinner at Harvard), Frank Logan deserves a place as
one of the 20th centuries top behavioral scientists.
I kept in-touch with Dr. Logan over the years, and he greatly
helped me meld theory and practice:
"Fully to appreciate these principles, you must first accept the fact
that you are an animal.
Like other animals, you eat, drink, copulate, sleep, eliminate wastes,
and try to avoid pain. To
be sure, as a human animal, you have (or hopefully have) many qualities
that are either not found, or found in very rudimentary form in other
animals.
The most important of these is language, but no less vital is some sense
of meaning and purpose to life accompanied by such qualities as love,
honesty, tolerance, and benevolence.
But always lurking beneath these qualities is the animal that is
in each of us. The better
you understand these basic principles, the better you can gain control
over own behavior and be the person you would like to be."
When
my wife and I began training small horses to guide the blind, providing
research into horse learning and memory.
I've kept his notes
on this web page. It
was this one key observation that encouraged Janet and I to go forward
with our experiment:
"The current topic in animal learning is to take into consideration the
species-specific responses in the animals' niche in nature.
That is to say, one needs to pay some attention to what that
particular breed/species does "naturally."
For example, rats are good at running mazes and pigeons are good
at pecking. Rats are good
at auditory tasks, pigeons at visual tasks."
This was the key we needed, verification of our observation that a
horses natural safety instincts made them ideal guide animals for the
blind!
Always modest, but never demure, Frank Logan
claimed to be of
below-average I/Q,
but I knew the man, and I don't believe it:
"Farb
went on to say that a score of 105 was simply too low to succeed in a
field like psychology and that Frank would be far better off pursuing
another field, perhaps business or the meat trades. wasn't sure if Frank
was sneering or smiling as he told me this story, but panic swept over
me I as imagined him waiting all these years to get revenge and deciding
that if skewering one of Farb's students would be the way it would go
down, then so be it. I'm not sure if wet myself at that point, but do
remember assuring Frank that Farb was obviously mistaken and had
probably mis-scored the test.
Frank quickly refuted my surmise and proudly declared
that Farb was right about the score but wrong about the prediction.
Frank proclaimed that he really did have an average IQ and that he used
every point of it every day. have only the vaguest memory of the rest of
the interview but, as it turned out, was lucky enough to watch Frank use
every one of his IQ points every day for the next 25 years."
Frank was not above telling a tall-tale every now
and then, even if it stirred-up controversy, especially if it was done
with the noble goal of learning.
He used to say
"The grapefruits are always sweetest on the trees
near the septic tank".
He was supremely self-confident, yet he was not above
being curious and respected even the lowliest freshman.
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Dr. Logan was all-about the pragmatic application of animal
learning and memory research, and he was a genius at finding the
parallels that made sense.
Frank especially like the studies on superstition
in pigeons, and like to tell about his own experiences gambling
in Las Vegas, one story where he came back to his room in the
wee hours and
gave his wife $800 in cash, demanding that she not give it back
to him, no matter how much he begged! |
Few students count themselves to have been as lucky as I was to have
such a great mentor, and hopefully professor Logan influenced his
younger peers to carry-on his great tradition of intellectual curiosity
and experimentation.
