The Glorified Amoeba

...Their behavior looks rather as if they kept the noise and the rabbit separate, responding to the one and then to the other, as if they saw the noise didn't come from the rabbit and had nothing to do with the rabbit...

...A new-born baby makes its first attempts to suckle...

...To this second stimulus he responds vigorously, attempting to escape from the loose harness which confines him...

...A "diagram of the learning process" appears triumphantly on college blackboards, and the instructor, with a Q. E. D. wave of the hand, closes his lesson with the impressive words, "from which it appears that any response may be attached to any stimulus by the process of conditioning...

...Thus intelligent observation may protect a child from a multitude of senseless fears...

...It may be worth while to consider briefly the experiments of Pavlov as they have been presented to the American public, and to evaluate the conclusions drawn from them by the Watsonians...

...Latin teachers have for ages presented the words "boy" and "puer" together until one became the stimulus that evoked the other...

...Pavlov has told us a little about the physiological and temporal conditions under which habit formation takes place, and has used a very questionable term in so doing...

...I am inclined to believe the opinion of Doctor Cannon quoted above, especially since the translation of Pavlov's work brought out at Oxford in 1927 is subtitled, An Investigation of the Physiological Activity of the Cerebral Cortex, and also since the American edition published two months ago makes no mention of psychology...

...The Russian mentions no experiments with children in his book (in the Oxford edition, at least) and he does say definitely in Lecture XXIII: It would be the height of presumption to regard these first steps in elucidating the physiology of the cortex as solving the intricate problems of the higher psychic activities in man, when in fact at the present stage of our work no detailed application of its results to man is yet permissible...

...This part of the film is rather tiresome and naive: for instance, much time and many learned terms are expended to demonstrate that although a blind monkey cannot see, he can eat...

...The implications, if Pavlov had intended them, would at any rate possess no more validity than has any other one-principle explanation of human affairs...

...Doctor Cannon, who had not previously seen the picture, insisted from the start of his talk that Pavlov was a physiologist, not a psychologist...

...no biscuits...

...As for the film presented under his name, it was assembled and edited by Sov-kino, the Soviet film agency, with an eye to propagandizing the proletariat...

...The "atheist university" in Russia (which will be due for more newspaper publicity one of these days, when it goes to the length of banishing the "praying mantis" from the catalogue of insects) will probably use Mechanics of the Brain as a complete course in psychology, and in the present condition of the Russian proletariat, it won't be far wrong.letariat, it won't be far wrong...

...To take one example: A dog is allowed to listen to the ticking of a metronome...

...Thus the text-book writer, whether he be a behaviorist or not, has started the student off with a mechanistic axiom on the very first page...

...David Seabury, reviewing the American edition in the New York Times says: Professor Pavlov is not so sweeping in his conclusions as the group of behaviorists who rally about him as a central figure...

...Doctor Watson is still with us, however...

...The new combination is the "conditioned reflex...

...There is nothing mysterious and very little new about the process of conditioning...

...As the Watsonian doctrine filtered down from scientific treatises to popular expositions of Why We Behave Like the Beasts of the Field, from the magazine to the newspaper and so to the conversation of the man in the subway, it was shorn of the criticisms it had elicited...

...To saddle the S-R psychology on Pavlov, then, is unfair not only to the student but to Pavlov as well...

...Using a motion-picture device with which we are all familiar, the film cuts back every few minutes to re-expose pictures of the dog and the monkey learning, and views of the uncoordinated movements of an idiot, so as to imprint firmly on the minds of the audience the analogy among the three kinds of conduct or behavior...

...Watson has, it is true, attempted to condition infants to fear a rabbit, for instance, by presenting a loud noise to the child in the presence of the animal but here again intelligence often takes charge in a surprising way...

...For reference, he is told that Pavlov has settled it all in his experiments with the conditioned reflex...

...So much for Pavlov...

...He told how the Russian, in his endeavor to keep out of the psychological field, fined his laboratory workers if they used psychological terms in their reports, and he asked those who were viewing the picture not to draw psychological conclusions...

...But the fact that sticks out in the whole performance is that, instead of the slow trial-and-error process of the dog in the harness or the monkey in the cage, there is a vastly more rapid learning and unlearning because of the intervention of human intelligence...

...Finally, he is "reconditioned" to open his mouth once more at the pressure accompanied by biscuits...

...then to open it again after the first occasion when the pressure brings biscuits once more...

...Watson cared nothing for the fulminations of the scientists once he had found his real audience, the common man who wants to be told that he is not morally responsible for what he does...

...The consoling formula was provided, in this case, not by an argument on determinism, but by recourse to the "conditioned reflex" of Pavlov, which Watson has taken over to explain the learning process and the inevitability of all human reactions...

...Some children turn around and scowl at the harsh noise, but then return to the rabbit...

...These one-principle men are always either fools or fanatics, and Pavlov seems to be neither...

...Pavlov presents his physiological data: the behaviorist reads into the data psychological implications...

...A child of five or six is shown in an experimental box, learning to open his mouth in order to catch biscuits that are sent down a chute...

...Then he is given an electric shock by means of an electrode attached to the leg...

...The student is told that instead of considering human nature under the categories of mental faculties (those obsolete mediaeval terms, to replace which we have invented "phases of consciousness" and "aspects of intelligence" sounding more important, but meaning exactly the same thing) it is the business of the scientific psychologist to reduce all human thought and conduct to units of stimulus and reaction, and the smaller the unit the better...

...their verdict, as I have attempted to show in a previous paper (The Metaphysical Behaviorist, in The Commonweal for November 6) was to the effect that Watson had himself fallen into the trap of speculation from which he was claiming to free psychology...

...children learn to handle toys, to wash their hands and faces, to wait on themselves at table, and finally to solve simple problems involving the reaching of an object suspended high on the wall...

...but the behaviorist gets a great deal more than that out of it...

...As Woodworth says: The conditioned fear experiment does not succeed with all babies...

...Such fine distinctions as this were not to the taste of the audience, however, and at the second presentation of the film Doctor Cannon was replaced by Doctor Watson, who at once announced that the picture epitomized modern psychology...

...THE GLORIFIED AMOEBA By FRANK WHALEN WHEN Doctor John B. Watson announced some years ago that his system of psychology, to be known as behaviorism, would explain all human conduct on a purely physical basis, he at once gained the attention of the leading psychologists of the world...

...In the past two or three years there has been exhibited in New York from time to time a film entitled, Mechanics of the Brain, advertised as having been made in Russia at Pavlov's laboratory...

...All this exposition is cleverly planned to lead up to the big scene...

...Then the ticking and the shock are repeated simultaneously many times...

...yet it appears that their opponents avail themselves of question-begging methods which a young Schoolman with two weeks of logic behind him would scorn to use...

...Briefly, the child is "conditioned" to open his mouth for biscuits whenever he feels the pressure of a small rubber bag strapped to his wrist...

...If the reasoned verdict of the scientists had been the final word, Watson would have joined the dodo, Queen Anne and Coue, and behaviorism would be no more...

...Indeed, I have known a superannuated boarding-school doctor who cured all the students' ills with castor oil, and who on one occasion made out a very good case for the amelioration of a black eye with the Fascist potion...

...Then he is "decon-ditioned" that is, he learns to keep his mouth closed when further pressure brings no biscuits...

...The eye-blink, the knee-jerk, and so on, never vary if the subject's nervous system is normal...

...Despite its illogical nature, however, the term has come into general use because of its novelty...

...the dog struggles just as violently as if he were experiencing the electric shock...

...to keep it closed after the first time no biscuits are forthcoming (his lips can be seen moving to form the Russian equivalent of "What...

...At the first public showing, the film was introduced by Doctor Walter B. Cannon, of the Harvard Medical School, a co-worker and friend of Pavlov's for many years...

...The spectator is expected uncritically to believe in the analogy with animal, infant and idiot conduct to see only the likenesses and overlook the differences...

...In no case, moreover, has he touched any reaction above the level of habit...

...The dog learns to salivate at the ringing of a bell which had previously been linked up with the presentation of food (the "summer-boarder reflex" this has been flippantly called) ; a monkey learns to come for food when a red disc is shown, but not to respond when a blue disc is shown...

...The child short-circuits the performance: he learns to open his mouth almost immediately after the pressure and the biscuits come together...

...The film continues, repeating the same technique in various situations to reinforce the proof...

...In short, it is another example of the modern method of settling things in the beginning by tagging them with the labels you think they ought to have...

...Many of these men were frankly eager for a physiological synthesis which would sum up the work that had been done by investigators in the laboratories of the "new psychology" during the past half-century...

...The term "conditioned reflex" is in itself rather illogical, though Pavlov certainly does use it...

...We have always with us the expert who lays all happiness and all misery to the tariff, or the single tax, or the tonsils, or the spinal vertebrae...

...Thus we see, says the behaviorist, that the dog has learned or rather, his nervous system has learned to "condition" (or associate, as we should say) the ticking with the shock, and has made the ticking a stimulus to which he no longer gives the natural or "adequate response" of the head and ears, but a "substitute response" that used to be attached naturally to the electric shock...

...Little children are the subjects in the next portion of the picture...

...Wood-worth says that Pavlov Means only that it has the general form of a reflex and is based on a reflex, not that it is a response at the reflex level and carried on by the lower nerve centres, without participation of the brain...

...Finally the electrode is removed and the metronome started once more, and lo...

...To qualify this name with the adjective "conditioned" seems to take away all the meaning of the term: it becomes something naive yet learned, rigid yet flexible, perfectly black yet somewhat white a perfect example of contradiction in terms, if ever there was one...

...Scholastic philosophers are constantly being accused of reasoning a priori to the detriment of scientific truth...

...The analogy it presses so strongly is really the basis, not only of the behaviorist's explanation of the learning process, but of the whole "S-R" (stimulus and reaction) postulate with which most modern text-books in psychology begin...

...He has been made to learn, to unlearn and to relearn a comparatively simple response...

...Then while heads are nodding vigorously the most important experiment is portrayed, in the hope that the audience will keep on nodding intellectually as well as physically, not to mention homerically and so believe...

...The lecturer in educational psychology who lets slip the tabooed word "association" apologizes at once and substitutes the word "conditioning...

...The film is therefore but another attempt to tie small men's doctrines to a great man's name...

...As the argument proceeds, the audience "behaves" according to expectation, nods its head and says, "Yes, they're all the same...

...Set against the performances of monkey, dog, infant and idiot, it becomes something entirely different in kind...

...The next section of the film extends the use of the term "reflex" to the process of learning, with the now classic experiments on dogs...

...always, of course, with violent effects...

...The sequence was very carefully arranged to slur over all the characteristically human actions on the part of the children involved, and to demonstrate the doctrine that we differ from the protozoa only in degree...

...At the end of this section of the film there are several short studies in pure physiology, to show how animals and human beings are limited in their responses when certain parts of the nervous system are extirpated...

...The instrumentation is very elaborate two observers in surgeon's dress looking at the child through concealed glass panels, electric wires and recording apparatus galore...

...He has shown us somewhat of the how, but nothing concerning the ultimate why...

...Stranger than that, the student who responded "puer" to "boy" in the Latin class, answered "pair" to the same word in the Greek class...

...The film certainly has its value as an objective demonstration of the part the body plays in learning...

...he has stubbornly refused to be impaled upon the horns of a dilemma, or to be slaughtered with a syllogism...

...he is comparatively indifferent to it the stimulus calls forth no more response than a pricking up of the ears and a slight turning of the head...

...And if the belated student boning his Hamlet in the rear of the room mumbles, "It needs no ghost to tell us that, my lord," his comment is lost in the buzz of sophomoric wonder that always accompanies the rediscovery of the obvious...

...The word "reflex" as hitherto used in physiology has distinct connotations of inevitability, of immediacy, of mechanization and especially of unmodifiability...

...The film starts with a review of the spinal reflex experiments on frogs, familiar to all high school students, demonstrating that the true reflex arc runs into the spine (not the brain) and out again to the muscles...

...Pavlov has many apologists for his use of the term, but every one of them makes out a poor case...

...Their examination of Watson's theory was critical and minute...