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Texas A&M professor and author Bill Klemm sits outside of the College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences Administration Building Wednesday. His book 'Dillos: Roadkill on Extinction Highway? was published in July.

Veterinary professor shows armadillos love

By: Jessica Henning

Posted: 8/28/07

Bill Klemm is known to many of the students and faculty of Texas A&M as a retired professor of neuroscience and veterinary integrative biosciences. However, he is also known as an armadillo lover.

"In the hippie movement in Austin - that's when they really got popular," Klemm said of the Texas state mammal. "If you go to Austin everything is 'dillos."

His most recent book, 'Dillos: Roadkill on Extinction Highway, published in July, talks about the animal's natural history and explains why Klemm thinks they have been able to survive for so long.

In the book, Klemm also predicts what will happen to armadillos in the future.

"Urban sprawl is encroaching on their habitat," he said. "But I think they'll make it. They may not make it in Texas but there are 18 other species in South America that don't have these problems."

He said armadillos are carriers of several diseases, including leprosy, but that they do not seem to contract these diseases themselves.

"They are the only animal that can come down with leprosy," Klemm said. "The organism lives in the soil and so these animals are shoving their nose in the dirt all the time. It's not surprising that they pick it up."

Klemm's interest in neuroscience once led him to perform a sleep study on the armadillo. He said armadillos do have signs of dreaming and regular sleep patterns.

Klemm is also the author of Thank You, Brain, For All You Remember. What You Forgot Was My Fault, a book about the brain and its memory.

"It always struck me that there's a lot of useful stuff being published in scientific journals that nobody reads, that students could use," he said. "So I wrote this book to summarize what's known in research journals that people can use."

The book has received terrific reviews from academic sources and readers. Almost all of Amazon.com reviewers have given the book five out of five stars for content.

Klemm said that dealing with students and watching many of them struggle unnecessarily helped inspire him to write this piece.

Even as a teenager, Klemm was curious about memory function. He went to public meetings with his father where he was taught memory gimmicks. He was given a magazine and told to remember details of pages and at the end of the meetings the men could ask him questions about the particulars of the contents.

"I would really dazzle them being able to do this at 15 years old, but I could only do this because I knew the gimmicks," Klemm said.

The professor said one of the most important things to do for memory function is to get plenty of sleep.

"The brain is processing your day's memories while you sleep," he said.

The professor also said that students should not cram because that is the most ineffective way to remember things.

"It also makes you do stupid things," he said. "Things that you know better, but you just can't think straight because you're so tired."

The book contains about 150 ideas for teaching specific things that people can do to improve memory power. A key factor of the book is teaching students how to use a technique called imaging, which involves memorizing things by mentally turning them into pictures.

"My basic philosophy is that everybody can do better than they think they can, but somebody has to show them how," Klemm said.