Especially as we age, laughter is good for the soul. For a good, long life have a sense of humor. It can take us through life’s turns and twists. Mastery and grit are important for all ages. Create art. Good for the brain is the endeavor to want to improve. Stay active in your passions. Make modifications. Do what is possible. Keep going. Keep moving! Older people too often lose their confidence. They quit trying. They grow discouraged. They just quit living. The important thing is to keep trying at something you care about. Be willing to work for something and keep at it. It is part of our human nature to want to be able to create something.

Clemens must have continued to have his doubts about the head readers into the 1870s, because he decided to conduct an experiment of his own on a leading head reader in 1872. Having discovered some of the tricks mediums were using, he made two trips to Lorenzo Fowler’s phrenological emporium in London. He dressed and acted like a nobody during the first trip. Then, after some weeks had passed, he returned and presented himself as the famous American humorist and author Mark Twain. He would later describe his great awakening in a short but serious published letter, and with humor and artistic liberties in an autobiographical dictation and his posthumous but never-completed novel Eddypus. The letter and phrenological parts of his dictation and Eddypus are presented in this chapter. Being told on his first visit that his head had a cavity above the organ for a sense of humor and on his second that he had a Mount Everest in the same spot would change how he would depict the head readers in his most famous novels. Writing as Mark Twain, Samuel Clemens would now set forth to educate the gullible public.