However, Skinner did go too far with his theories. In the same way that superstitions and rituals emerge, Skinner used behaviourism to explain the uniquely human capacity for language. He proposed that babies acquire a language by a long process of learning words by association, encouraged by their parents to link them together in the appropriate manner. However, when Skinner came to publish these ideas in a book in the 1950s, scientists had already begun to change how they thought about the mind. Behaviourism might have been fine for explaining how the behaviour of pigeons and people can be shaped, but not all human abilities can be taught. This change, known as the ‘cognitive revolution’, was to become a revolution in thinking.24
Skinner was a Harvard heavyweight, but it was a young upstart linguist from down the road at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who lit the fuse by writing a review of Skinner’s book that would go on to become more famous than the book itself. That upstart was none other than Noam Chomsky. Using language development as his test case, Chomsky launched an attack on behaviourism. He pointed out that no association theory of learning could explain how every human child acquires language through learning for the simple reason that the rules that generate and control language are invisible to every natural speaker (unless you are a linguist, of course). Linguists had demonstrated that all the languages of the world share the same deep structures that are hidden from most of us. There is something in our mind design, Chomsky asserted, that we are not privy to but that we can tap when we need to communicate, and this is known as the universal grammar – the invisible laws that govern how language works.
If universal grammar is invisible and most of us are idiots when it comes to linguistics, how can we possibly teach our children by reinforcement and punishment? How can every child acquire language with these hidden rules at roughly the same time, at roughly the same pace, and with little evidence that associative learning plays a role? Something has to be built into the brains of all children that helps them learn language. Chomsky’s rapier-like attack dealt a fatal wound to behaviourism from which it would never really recover.
OUT OF SIGHT, OUT OF MIND
The cognitive revolution that took place in the United States did not really happen in Europe, largely because the mind had always been so central in European psychology. In adult psychiatry, Sigmund Freud talked about a fragmented mind in constant conflict with itself. In pattern perception, the German Gestalt School we met earlier, with its meaningful structures and organizations, put the mind at the forefront of human abilities. In the United Kingdom, we had Sir Fredrick Bartlett at Cambridge describing memory as a set of active mental patterns, constantly changing and shifting. But it was in theories of child development that the mind took centre stage as the focus of interest, and no more so than in the theories of the Swiss child psychologist Jean Piaget.
Like Locke, Piaget also had a blank-slate view of newborns, but he thought that they possess learning rules in their tiny minds that enable them to construct knowledge from the apparently simple act of play. Learning and knowledge emerge as babies discover the nature of the world around them in a gradual sequence of revelations. Every simple act of playing with objects – batting them, grasping them, sucking them, pushing them off the high chair – is a mini-scientific experiment for infants, the results of which help form the content of their minds.
Piaget believed that from the start young infants do not understand the world as made up of permanent, real objects but that they treat the world as an extension of their own minds. As though having a bizarre vivid dream. Piaget claimed, infants cannot tell the difference between reality and having a thought. Their world is like the world depicted in the sci-fi blockbuster The Matrix, in which evil computers keep the human race in a state of virtual reality by directly feeding experiences into their brains.25 The computers create the illusion of a normal world. In truth, all the humans are captives, harvested for the energy they produce but completely unaware of their true predicament or surroundings. They are unaware of the external reality that exists outside their minds. In the same way, Piaget’s newborns are oblivious to an external reality. They have no concept that the sensations and perceptions they experience in their minds are generated by a real, external world that continues existing even when the baby is asleep. So if some object is really out there, but out of sight, as far as the infant is concerned it does not exist. ‘Out of sight, out of mind’ became Piaget’s signature slogan for this extreme view of the young infant’s failure to grasp the permanence of reality. A true understanding of external reality is something babies have to discover for themselves, he claimed, and to do this they need to get interactive.
SEARCHING FOR THE MIND
Somewhere around four to five months, babies get good at reaching and grasping objects.26 It soon becomes a compulsive behaviour that they just can’t stop themselves doing. Any graspable object within reach will do. When my oldest daughter was about this age, I used to carry her on my back in one of those papoose baby holders that leaves their little legs dangling but their arms free to stretch out. When she was not pulling my ears or hair like some demonic monkey on my back, she was always trying to grab anything that came within reach. One day in a supermarket, unbeknownst to me, she reached out and grasped a polythene bag that was hanging from a roll next to the fruit aisle while I was preoccupied with selecting the best apples. I continued walking down the aisle, unaware that I was trailing thirty feet of bags before the smirks of other shoppers alerted me to the growing train of plastic bags behind me.
This fascination with grasping objects is something that Piaget recognized as really important. It means that babies are starting to take an interest in their surroundings. The baby is actively engaging the world. Yet the young infant still does not understand that reality is something different from their mind and independent of their actions. Piaget came to this bizarre conclusion by watching his own young children at play and noticing something peculiar that was to become one of the most famous and studied phenomena in infant psychology. You can repeat this demonstration yourself if you happen to have a six- to eight-month-old infant at hand.27
Take one baby and place a graspable object in front of him. So long as he is not already holding something, he will automatically reach out and pick it up, and then jam it in his mouth for taste evaluation. Now unclasp the object and repeat the procedure, only this time quickly cover the object with a cloth and momentarily distract the infant by snapping your fingers. Hey presto! It’s gone. It’s the easiest magic trick in the world. Most babies will stop and then look around as if the object has disappeared. They do not search underneath the cloth for it. They may pick up the cloth, but rarely as a way of retrieving the object. Because it is out of sight, it is literally out of mind. It no longer exists.
When infants do search under a cloth, a few months later, they still do not understand objects as separate from themselves. For example, if you hide an object under a cushion, a ten-month-old baby will look for it there. But if you then hide the object at a new location in full view of the baby, she will go back and search under the original cushion. The baby believes that his own act of searching will magically re-create the object at the old location. Young children behave as though their minds and actions can control the world. Only through experience do they begin to appreciate the true nature of reality as separate.