Even at the basic input stage, our stored knowledge helps us interpret the world. For example, if I were to ask you, ‘Do you wreck a nice peach?’ I expect you would look at me quizzically. Now, if you ask this question out loud rather than reading it, you hear and understand it as ‘Do you recognize speech?’, not as an inquiry about whether you are inclined towards destructive acts aimed at pleasurable juicy fruits. You hear one interpretation and not another. This is because destroying a peach is not a common phrase or idea that we entertain. In the same way that we saw the illusory square in chapter 1, our stored knowledge helps us hear and interpret such ambiguous input. We hear one sentence and not another. Where does this knowledge come from? It seems such an obvious answer that knowledge must come from the world of experience. Everything you know must be learned. But is it as simple as that?
Most people are familiar with the blank-slate metaphor that was originally popularized by the British philosopher John Locke in the eighteenth century.17 The idea is simple enough – children are born without knowledge, and experience shapes them by writing on their minds as though they were blank sheets of paper. Other philosophers, such as Descartes and Kant, pointed out that something has to be built in, otherwise it would be impossible to extract knowledge from a cluttered world of experience.18 The brain is more like a biological computer that has an operating system we call the mind. That operating system tells us what to pay attention to and how to process information. Without the right operating system, you can’t make sense of input – like listening to a foreign language and being unable to understand a word of what is said. Where would you begin? How would you know what you were looking for without some plan? It’s like trying to build a house without foundations – you need some embedded structures in the ground to make it stable. The same is true for knowledge. You need rules built in from the start to anchor the information.19 In other words, you need to be born with some form of mind design. How else would you get beyond James’s ‘blooming, buzzing confusion’?
AT THE SOUND OF THE DINNER BELL
For many years the importance of mind design was largely ignored in Western psychology. This was partly because in Russia, at the turn of the twentieth century, Ivan Pavlov, working on the physiology of digestion in dogs, stumbled on something that every dog owner knows. Dogs begin to salivate just before you bring them their food. Pavlov called this ‘psychic secretion’, because it was a reflex behaviour that seemed to be triggered before food was delivered. Dogs are not psychic. They simply learn when dinner is coming by noticing clues such as the sound of the electric can opener in the kitchen just before food arrives. This seems so trivially obvious today, but Pavlov recognized a really important discovery when he saw one – so important that he was awarded a Nobel Prize for it. He realized that animals could be trained to anticipate rewards on the basis of cues. By pairing the sound of a bell with food that naturally causes dogs to slobber, eventually the dogs learned to associate the sound of the bell alone with the impending arrival of dinner. On hearing the bell, the dogs began to drool. It may be my overactive imagination, but I seem to remember a similar response in my old school playground when the bell sounded for lunch. The ringing was enough to make mouths salivate and stomachs rumble.
Pavlov had discovered ‘conditioning’, a mechanism that would become one of the bedrocks for a whole theory of learning based on association. The idea was that all learning is simple association of events in the environment, like a complex pattern of standing dominoes all stacked up and ready to fall. If you push one over, the others fall in a chain reaction. One event simply triggers the next because of the way the pattern has been formed by association. You do not need to think about a mind making sense of it.
This theory, which provided a way of explaining how babies learn, would dominate Western psychology for the next fifty years. By simply controlling the environment, it was thought that any behaviour could be described and predicted without bothering to know what was going on inside the head. The theory became known as ‘behaviourism’, and those who followed it treated the mind as a ‘black box’ that was not only unopened but also ignored. Minds were irrelevant when all behaviours could be described by a set of simple learning rules that created the patterns of mental dominoes.
One of the staunchest early advocates of behaviourism was our old friend John Watson. When he was not tormenting Little Albert, dangling newborns from pencils, or making out with his graduate student, Watson famously boasted:
Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.20
By applying the learning rules of reinforcement and punishment, you can shape patterns of behaviour. If you want to encourage behaviour, give a reward, and an association will be strengthened. If you want to discourage behaviour, give a punishment, and the association will be actively avoided. By linking together chains of behaviour through punishment and reward, it was claimed, the laws of associative learning can shape any complex pattern, be it personality, skills, or even knowledge.
These laws were even believed to explain supernatural thinking. In what was one of the first experiments in irrational behaviour, the Harvard behaviourist B. F. Skinner described in 1948 how he trained birds to act superstitiously.21 He achieved this with a laboratory box that was wired to give out rewards randomly. For example, if the bird happened to be pecking at some part of the cage when a pellet was delivered, it soon learned to repeat this behaviour. Skinner argued that this simple principle could explain the origins of human superstitious rituals. Like pigeons, tennis players and gamblers seek to reproduce success by repeating behaviours that happened at the time of a reward. Behaviourism explained how something that had long been regarded as a product of feeble thinking could be understood as a consequence of the random reinforcements that the environment occasionally tosses out.
FIG. 6: Deborah Skinner in her father’s ‘Air-Crib’, Skinner’s baby crib, in 1945. © LADIES’ HOME JOURNAL
Skinner would go on to claim that all aspects of child development can be explained by associative learning. He was even accused of taking this too far when he was featured in a Ladies’ Home Journal article with his infant daughter, Deborah, pictured inside what looked like a giant box similar to the ones Skinner had used to train his animals.
Actually, the box was a special thermostatically controlled crib he had designed for infants so that they did not have to wear baby clothes. In the article, he described the benefits of the ‘Air-Crib’ as a labour-saving invention that simplified a young mother’s life and improved baby welfare. That did not stop the urban myth that circulates today of Skinner raising his own daughter like a laboratory rat.22This reputedly led her to grow up psychotic and commit suicide by blowing her brains out in a bowling alley in Billings, Montana, back in the 1970s. Apparently that is a lie. In 2004 Deborah Skinner Buzan wrote an article in the Guardian refuting that she had ever been to Billings, Montana.23