Follow the follower

All this horse talk (my open letter to Buck Brannaman continues to draw more readers than any other post here) sent me back to Jane Smiley's novel Horse Heaven, an intimate, multivocal conjuration of the brutal and beautiful world of thoroughbred racing. I'm curious to know whether people who know horses and horsepeople find it as persuasive as I do... Reading this passage last night gave me a thrill of recognition, as Smiley describes the ebb and flow of "leadership" that's possible between two skilled and supple animals:

"The noise was incredible -- hooves pounding, horses breathing like the roar of a high wind, jocks talking and calling -- and the whole time Justa Bob held Roberto's hands with his mouth, steadily and calmly. Now they were on the second turn. Roberto found himself wondering whether Justa Bob would chose to go wide or slip through the hole between the number-three horse and the number-two horse, and then, when he realized that it was supposed to be him making the decisions, maybe, Justa Bob chose the hole, and threaded that like a needle... Now Justa Bob began to close on the leader, a chestnut with a long silky tail that gleamed in the early-afternoon sunshine. Roberto could feel his horse gauge the distance and put on more speed, but Roberto didn't quite know whether to trust the horse's judgment. The chestnut's jockey was really riding -- going for the whip, yelling -- and the red horse was responding. But this was Roberto's first race; he literally didn't know what to do, so he went with his instincts -- just do the thing that feels the most delicious -- which in this case was to let Justa Bob take care of it. Now the animal's brown nose was at the other jockey's knee, then at the other horse's shoulder, neck, and head. The wire was upon them, and just then Justa Bob stretched out his nose and stuck it in front of the chestnut's nose. Three strides after the wire, Justa Bob was already pulling himself up. He cantered out calmly, turned without being asked, and returned to his groom, who said, "Hey, fella. No extra effort, huh?" Behind them, the tote board was flashing 'Photo Finish!' and so there was plenty of time to be taken. But Roberto had no doubts, and neither did the groom. He said to Roberto, with a laugh, 'This guy likes to give the bettors heart attacks, that's for sure. He is such a character.'

Roberto said, 'That was so much fun. Does he always make the decisions?'

'Always does. He does it his way or he doesn't do it at all.'

'I can't believe he doesn't win every race. He seems to know how.'

The groom shrugged, and now gave Roberto the best lesson of his life as a jockey. He said, 'Some jocks can listen and some can't.'"

Beautiful. The one question I asked Buck directly at the clinic I attended was about his description of the ideal rider as an "enlightened monarch." Given how few of us were perfectly enlightened, I asked, was there room in his philosophy or methods for honoring the horse's often superior knowledge, for rewarding a choice the horse made when it wasn't the rider's choice but was the choice that kept both horse and rider safe? The question got a laugh out of Buck, and he admitted to having occasionally led his horse to do something dumb, but, no, he said, the most important thing is for the rider to remain in charge. This was a disappointing answer, and optimistically I hope maybe a less than honest answer, the one he thought we all needed to hear. "I'm in charge" is a common human refuge when we're confronted with intelligence and/or wisdom that exceeds our own.

Rethinking negative reinforcement

Animals in a state of relief.

As I wrote in my last post regarding the increasingly fuzzy distinction between classical and operant conditioning, old terminology can hobble new thinking, and given how awkward the language of behaviorism was at its inception, we shouldn't be surprised to discover how creaky it has become in its dotage. (The surprise lies in its holding up at all!) The positive/negative confusion has never really cleared up for many lay training students (positive punishment? WTF?), and no term has given people more trouble than "negative reinforcement," which bundles all the paradoxes and blurred connotations of behaviorist theory into seven dry-sounding but intellectually and emotionally fraught syllables. Technically, it's negative because it describes the removal of some "thing" (which may not be a thing at all). Colloquially, it's negative because the thing that gets removed needs to be nasty or at least unpleasant in order for its removal to be reinforcing, and so the deliberate use of negative reinforcement implies (and carries the ghost of) the deliberate introduction of nasty or unpleasant things, i.e., positive punishment. That's the theoretical tangle as clearly as I can state it (not very!), and it has significant consequences in practice, as teachers and trainers line up on either side of the R+/R- divide (and take occasional potshots at each other over the crevasse that yawns between them).

Does the theory still encompass what we know of reality? Do the terms describe with satisfactory accuracy our growing knowledge of how animals learn? On the contrary, they appear to be busting at the seams. We're patching as fast as we can right now, but I think our best hope of finding our way to a new kind of coherence (to a description of teaching and learning that covers our collective butts once again) may be to pick at the threads where they're coming unraveled. To combine my canyon and sewing metaphors, these may become the ropes that swing us over the training divide. (Ack.)

Some of the most exciting work in contemporary learning theory is being done by scientists and practitioners (e.g. teachers and trainers) who dare to test the boundaries between behaviorism and humanism; between the body and the mind; between emotion and thought; between psychology, ethology, and neuroscience; between biological and historical accounts of the past; between objective and subjective accounts of the present. On the scholarly and/or scientific side, Frans de Waal, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Oliver Sacks, Irene Pepperberg, Marc Bekoff, Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, Alison Gopnik, Timothy Wilson, Gerd Gigerenzer, Antonio Damasio, Daniel Kahneman, and V. S. Ramachandran are some of the great "unravelers" I've encountered (if only on the page), and Jaak Panksepp seems like someone who might actually help us knit a new pattern.

But I think all of us who practice learning theory with focused intent and honest reflection can contribute significantly to the radical revision now underway, and a re-examination of the R+/R- split could be an excellent place to begin. I'm not prepared to say that, as a philosophical distinction, it's totally illusory (I'd like to tackle that question in another post), but as a scientific distinction, it may be. This is one of many places where Jaak Panksepp's work is so fascinating and potentially useful, as he's been investigating the physiological and neurochemical bases of approach and avoidance, of appetite and satisfaction, of aversion and reward. I look forward to the publication of his promised book for the lay reader, because I hope it will make his insights more widely accessible. (Temple Grandin's Animals in Translation remains the best introduction to his ideas for the general reader, as far as I know.) In the meantime, I've been making my way very slowly through Affective Neuroscience and highly recommend it despite its density. I hope I don't distort its content too badly here!

In his book, Panksepp describes a discrete number of affective (emotional) processes whose physiological coherence is marked enough that he is comfortable labeling them "systems." These are activated and expressed in more or less predictable ways by animals of diverse species, and we can guess from our common evolutionary history that there are also strong similarities in how they are subjectively experienced. Panksepp is keen to avoid Skinner's mistake of choosing his terms in opposition to common parlance, so he simply capitalizes the colloquial names for these primal emotions/processes to denote their technical use: FEAR, PANIC, RAGE, and SEEKING. While this group may appear heavily weighted to the unpleasant, the SEEKING system encompasses many varieties of pleasurable anticipation.

If I understand him correctly, Panksepp suggests that most of our strongest appetites or drives (and the emotions that accompany their satisfaction or frustration) arise from various kinds of disequilibrium. A truly safe and contented animal is an animal at rest. FEAR is activated by perceived threats to the self, PANIC by social isolation, and RAGE by constraint (especially of one's access to valued resources). The SEEKING system may be engaged when any of these other emotions is in less than full flower. When we're a little anxious, a little lonely, or a little hungry, our minds/brains are primed to seek out whatever will restore our internal equilibrium: an escape route, a friendly touch, a Hostess cupcake.

In such situations, our minds are also primed to learn, to draw connections between environmental circumstances, our own behavior, and the consequences that result from their meeting. Indeed, our capacity to learn has so many advantages for our continued survival that we are primed to find it intrinsically pleasurable. Thus the SEEKING system affords us pleasures that are largely independent from the satisfaction of consuming a good meal or the relief of escaping a fearsome predator. They're compelling enough to be literally addictive - the SEEKING system appears to be modulated primarily by the action of dopamine, and gets easily hijacked by cocaine and methamphetamine among other stimulants.

In addition, while the research remains sketchy, it appears that the (intrinsically rewarding) SEEKING system is activated whether an animal is seeking out the object of some appetitive desire (food, a mate, etc.) or seeking escape from a perceived threat.

Okay, if you've followed this far, I should finally be able to bring the conversation back around to positive and negative reinforcement and the question of whether they're entirely distinct. Once we start thinking about drive or desire in terms of disequilibrium, it becomes harder to draw an absolute line between the internal pressure of hunger and the external pressure of a bit or a leg; it becomes harder to separate the gift of peace from the gift of an apple. It becomes clear that all effective teaching necessarily "exploits" one appetite or another. And it becomes much more interesting and rich to talk about how to do so in a way that best enlists an animal's SEEKING system and taps into our shared love of learning.

I don't want to tax your patience much further in this post, but in closing I'd like to quote a couple of eloquent descriptions of expert horse trainers who supposedly sit on opposite sides of the R+/R- divide, but who clearly overlap in their ability to help other animals to flourish. I already knew I needed to learn more about Alex Kurland's work, but Cindy Martin persuaded me that I'd better do it soon. She wrote in an email, "When the dog world found clicker training, many people abandoned their leashes, vowed to free-shape everything and never touch their dogs. Well, with horses, we're bound to have physical contact. Riding is about tactile cues. Our weight shifts, we squeeze with our legs, we ask with the reins. Alex developed the idea of pressure as information, below the level of a
true aversive. So is it still R-? Probably. But if we very quickly lighten pressure, by highlighting the first approximations of a desired behavior, with the click/treat, then all these kinds of pressure can be information, simply cues for the horse. And they can still learn to work for 'the release.' In fact, the release of subtle pressure can be a low value reinforcer, once the horse gets more sophisticated, and the click/treat can highlight the especially good responses. Alex calls this process, 'Shaping on a point of contact.'"

Emma Kline attended the same Buck Brannaman clinic in Spanaway that inspired me to write my bumptious letter back in November. You can find some lovely reflections on the SEEKING system on her blog, and you can also find her poetic response to seeing Buck at work:  

"At one point Buck was talking about how extraordinary it was to be with a horse that was hunting the feel. He talked about giving the horse what it wants most in the world: PEACE. No wonder this guy doesn't need to use treats.

I could feel the lines in my forehead getting deeper as I strained to see how he was utilizing the laws of science and behavior modification with an accuracy I have rarely seen. And sure enough, he was using a marker and a reward. His marker was the release and his reward was the Peace of Feeling Together.

I think that it is very important to note that this is not a "peacefulness" that comes from robbing the horse of his sense of security or taking away the little peace he, as a flight animal, is born with. Its about adding a peace the horse didn't have before. That's when horse and human become more than what we were separately. So in fact, the release is a marker and not a reward."

Have we outgrown our vocabulary?

A couple of weeks ago now, Professor Jesús Rosales-Ruiz (of the Department of Behavior Analysis at the University of North Texas) gave an esoteric but fascinating talk on the disappearing distinction between respondent (a.k.a. classical) and operant conditioning. By tracing the history of the terms and describing the difficulties that contemporary researchers often encounter when trying to apply them with any consistency, he exposed their contingency and fragility: while they have been extremely useful as springboards to the investigation of how we learn, they may prove not to have any real substance. They might even have brought us far enough that we can safely discard them (and move forward more easily without their dead weight). Wittgenstein once noted how many stubborn philosophical problems are in fact problems of vocabulary; we are sometimes slow to recognize when we've exhausted our terms.

But dying words (and the concepts or categories they name) have something left to teach. By looking closely at their definitional foundations, and then taking note of their specific failures vis-à-vis reality, we can identify some of the perceptual biases that made them so appealing in the first place. The lay distinction between "respondent" and "operant" has always hinged on the question of whether or not a response to a given stimulus (or set of stimuli) is voluntary, whether or not it can be brought under conscious control. But as Jesús described in his talk, even during Skinner's time, the erosion of that distinction was already underway, as physiological responses that had been considered perfectly autonomic (such as blood pressure) were brought through biofeedback under conscious control. More recently (and provocatively), challenges have come from the opposite direction, as individual cells have been observed in response patterns that mimic operant conditioning. As Jesús noted, anytime that relationships between contingencies (in the environment and behavior) grow measurably more consistent, learning is taking place. Our loyalty to the terms "respondent" (or "classical") and "operant" may obscure the complex but unified realities of that process.

Among the phenomena resistant to any simple respondent/operant dichotomy has been the tendency of certain behaviors to wander from unconscious to conscious and back to unconscious "control." We're all familiar with this dynamic as it applies to our assimilation of complex skills. The famous four stages of competence trace the general pattern, from unconscious incompetence (we don't know we can't do something), to conscious incompetence (we know we can't do it), to conscious competence (we can do it with great mental effort and focus), to unconscious competence (we can do it without effort and without conscious focus). If I'm a skilled driver, or soccer player, or surgeon, as long as the given challenge falls within the range of what is well-known to me and therefore predictable, the relationship between the contingencies of the environment and the contingencies of my behavior may be so consistent as to appear reflexive, and I will hardly have the sense that I am making a voluntary decision at any juncture. Only novelty is likely to wake me from the dream of competence and force me back into a state of conscious engagement.

"Respondent" and "operant," like "unconscious" and "conscious," may only describe different modes of energetic expenditure. The brain is a highly economical organ, a regular Bartleby when it comes to the heavy lifting required for conscious thought. ("I would prefer not to.") That said, it is much more active at an unconscious level than we generally give it credit for being.


Image by Jolyon.

Calm before assertive

I recently picked up Cesar's Rules, Cesar Millan's newest book (co-written by Melissa Jo Peltier), and dug in with interest and a little trepidation. Like many who shelter under the "positive trainer" label, I have strong misgivings about Millan's methods and influence, misgivings inspired partly by the handful of his shows that I've seen and the smattering of his articles that I've read, but in the main by the multitude of people I've encountered who claim him as an authority in their efforts to become "leaders of the pack." In Cesar's Rules, Millan laments that many of his critics lambaste him without taking the trouble to understand his teachings, but I think he should worry at least as much about those who lionize him without taking the trouble to understand his teachings, or more importantly, without mastering the knowledge and skills that would enable them to employ his methods with relative safety. And I remain deeply skeptical that certain of his methods can be used by anyone with absolute safety.

Watching The Dog Whisperer makes it clear even to this critical observer that a) Millan is a highly skilled communicator and listener, b) he has amassed a great deal of informal knowledge about dogs, and c) he genuinely desires the best for all the animals (human and otherwise) with whom he works. Artful editing may give a fairy tale glow to each abbreviated narrative, but I don't think it can mask Millan's essential character, and I have never sensed that his use of strong aversives was an expression either of sadism or of an ego run amok. I bought Cesar's Rules for much the same reason that he says was inspired to write it: I think it is vital that people who share similar core values and aims find a way to air their differences and to learn from them. Many of the book's chapters center on other trainers, including a couple of heroes from the positive training world, Bob Bailey and Ian Dunbar. Elsewhere, too, Millan goes out of his way to express respect, and at moments even deference, toward views that conflict with his own.

Beyond that, I have been impressed while reading Cesar's Rules by what may or may not be a new emphasis on patience. Not having read Millan's other books, I don't know whether they supply a similar corrective to the implicit promise his show makes that "calm and assertive" leadership will produce near-immediate results. But it is striking here in his anecdotes and instruction how often he stresses the importance of baby steps. He has generously (and to his own benefit, of course) highlighted and disseminated the wisdom of other trainers, but I've also found myself nodding along with many of his personal insights. His stated desire to honor each individual animal is at the heart of my own philosophy of training (again, whether we're talking about canine or human animals).

Which brings us back to the questions surrounding "assertive" leadership and the use of strong aversives (or "positive" punishment). To Millan's credit, he acknowledges and makes a good faith effort to hear and faithfully represent the criticisms leveled against this aspect of his teaching. As I noted above, I think Millan's message is dangerous primarily for the encouragement it gives to those who lack his skills and understanding. When such people "assert" themselves with their dogs, they often become abusive and/or teach their dogs to be similarly "assertive," and the results can be disastrous. Millan quotes Ian Dunbar on this risk: "I teach mostly noncontact techniques, and there's a good reason for that. Most human hands can't be trusted... It's one thing if you're an experienced animal handler like you or me, 'cause you know which animals you dare touch and how you can touch them. The training methods that I would prescribe have nothing to do with the way I would train a dog or you would train a dog. It has to do with the fact that this is a family and there's two children in it. They're not necessarily going to have the observational skills that we have, or the speed or the timing, and certainly not the dog savvy. But they still have to learn to live happily with their dog."

I think Dunbar lets Millan off the hook a little too easily here, as I don't imagine there exists any great gap between how either man teaches others to train and how he trains dogs himself. And that's really the point. In his defense of e-collars, Millan enlists Temple Grandin to support his point that a strong aversive may be the most effective way to interrupt the prey drive at its highest intensity, and indeed it may be the only efficient way to do it. I'm grudgingly open to the arguments he makes for their careful use in special circumstances where a dog's safety is at stake and other solutions elusive. But I think (I hope) that, once Cesar opens the door to exclusively positive modes of training, he'll have an increasingly difficult time resorting to (and justifying) the regular use of leash "pops" and other physical corrections. Once you recognize that they're unnecessary to pretty much any training (and rehabilitation!) task you might face, and once you see the enormous uptick in mutual trust that results from a strong commitment to a "no harm, no force" ethic, you may need time to shake your old habits, but the logic of love says you must.

If dogs wore shoes...

Really??

...we'd more easily walk a mile in them. But most don't, and those who do don't look happy about it. Our relationships with our pets are wonderfully peculiar, as the ties that bind us braid together intimacy and alienation. This is true to a degree of all relationships (between dogs, between people, and certainly between cats), but when we extend our interest and care beyond the bounds of our own species, we seem sometimes to find more direct access to each other's emotions than we ever enjoy with our nearer kin. At those very moments, however, we may also be struck by the other's unfathomable otherness.

I think we need to sustain and not to collapse the tension between these simultaneous truths -- "we understand each other perfectly" and "we don't understand each other at all" -- if we want to flourish together. More, I think we should celebrate it. In the history of our relations with other animals, and particularly in the history of our domestication of other animals (and their domestication of us!), views have tended to swing from one pole to the other, from the conviction that other animals exist only as extensions of human need (or of human fear, as in the case of the benighted wolf) to the conviction that they exist utterly apart from us. Wittgenstein's oft-quoted aphorism captures the latter belief nicely: "If a lion could speak, we couldn't understand him." Likewise, Thomas Nagel's famous (and to his mind impossible) question -- what is it like to be a bat? -- encourages an all-or-nothing judgment on the possibility of shared experience. But otherness is always radical, and subjective feelings of connection are always an objective illusion. (Or rather, the connection itself is illusory, though the feeling would probably show up on a brain scan.) We have no direct means of access to any other being's perception of the world, no matter the species, so unless we wish to retreat into lonely solipsism, we have to make do with indirect means and earnest approximations.

With that limitation in mind, we have good reason (founded on objective evidence) to suppose that, in many ways, our pets' and other animals' emotional and cognitive experience strongly resembles our own. The speaker whose talk I'm most excited to hear at the upcoming Clicker Expo is Jaak Panksepp, the neuroscientist who holds the Baily Endowed Chair of Animal Well-Being Science at Washington State University (wonderful that there should be a chair so endowed). He is one of a small (but happily increasing) number of scientists who dare to emphasize the obvious homologies (common structures with common origins) among diverse animal minds, especially among the minds of humans and other social mammals. (I use "minds" advisedly, as Panksepp is interested in subjective as well as scientific modes of inquiry and description.) He is also leading research into homologies that are not so obvious, teasing out the physiology and chemistry that underlie those brain processes that we hold in common (and variations that we do not). His book Affective Neuroscience is a marvel. Densely technical in places, it nonetheless serves both as an excellent overview of contemporary research into the dynamics of primary emotions (including their influence on cognition and learning) and as an eloquent, richly speculative description of the big questions that remain.

Befriending the unconscious mind II

In my last post I made a distinction between analytical and associative logic as one way of separating out the primary modes of thought favored by the conscious and unconscious mind. (Depending on your level of comfort ascribing "thought" to the unconscious mind, you might substitute "modes of response" in that sentence, but my own definition is pretty expansive.) However, the distinction between analysis and association is not absolute, and it gets particularly fuzzy when we contrast classical conditioning and operant conditioning. The question of whether the unconscious mind "analyzes" a given situation (and how effectively it does so relative to the conscious mind) here elbows its way to the fore.

A much simplified review: classical conditioning is Pavlov, and operant conditioning is Skinner. In the first case, an initially neutral (i.e. affectively meaningless) stimulus is paired closely with an "unconditioned" (i.e. intrinsically meaningful) stimulus often and consistently enough that it becomes meaningful even in isolation. Unless a dog is temperamentally nervous, she is unlikely to have any strong primary response to the sound of a bell. Unless she is sick, full, or finicky, however, she will almost invariably respond to the presence of food, by salivating, pricking her ears, widening her eyes, etc. As Pavlov discovered, if the sound of a bell is repeatedly paired with the arrival of food, it will soon provoke many of the same reflexive responses that food does, even in food's absence. (These responses will often extinguish if the association is not periodically maintained -- though threatening associations are more resilient than positive ones -- but there are interesting and somewhat counterintuitive laws governing the effectual timing of that maintenance. More on that another day.)

Operant conditioning involves willed (or, if you won't go so far, voluntary) behavior. In this case, some specific action by the animal repeatedly and consistently provokes a change in her environment; if that change is meaningful to the animal, she will alter her behavior accordingly. Thus the Skinner box: rat presses lever, food pellet arrives, rat presses lever again with same result, and rat soon becomes a lever-pressing fiend. A fat lever-pressing fiend. Time to add a complication, in the form of a "green" light: only when the light is on will food pellets be available at press of lever. When the light is off, the rat can press for all she's worth but press in vain. The rat soon stops pressing the lever in the absence of light.

At what point (if any) in that sequence does analysis enter in? At what point does a rat or dog or human begin to perceive "coincidence" (the predictable proximity of two previously unrelated things or events) as a relationship of cause and effect? And is that perception most potent (most behavior-altering) at a conscious or unconscious level?

Even in the case of the planet's Great Brains (i.e. humans), it appears that the unconscious gets there first and most decisively. "Gut feelings" whisper to the frontal cortex the conclusions that older, deeper structures have already drawn -- and in many cases already prompted our bodies to act upon. Gerd Gigerenzer has done some incisive research into this dynamic, and his book Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious is one of the best introductions I've found. I'd also highly recommend Timothy Wilson's Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious, which beautifully assimilates contemporary research with earlier descriptions of the relationship between conscious and unconscious thought. But among books written for the lay reader, Antonio Damasio's Descartes' Error: Emotions, Reason, and the Human Brain remains the most coherent (if necessarily speculative) revision of the "top-down" model of human decision making that I've read, and it's a good place to go if you're ready to dig into the physiological bases of cognition (insofar as these are intelligible to us, which isn't yet very far). His "somatic marker" hypothesis turns the idea that the consciously reasoning mind is in command of the lowly body pretty much literally on its head.

Image by SubVerse Clothing

What it is

In the nine months -- count 'em! -- since I last posted here, my attention has been absorbed by other projects, including the drafting of a memoir that's now more or less at rest. I'm ready to recommit myself to the questions I've been using this blog to explore, but I now think they might best be split. I'd like to establish a clearer focus here on training, and dig only as far into the science and philosophy of cognition as seems immediately useful. I'm putting together a second blog that I'll use as an arena for broader exploration of the overlap between human and non-human minds, also for wild tangents and miscellany.

Forty posts in, I'm finally able to state the premise of this blog: animal training requires self-training. No matter the species I'm working with, if I want to communicate clearly with an animal and persuade him to ally his will with my own, I will need to become more self-aware and self-controlled, more skilled in the signals I send and more attuned to those I receive. By the same token, I can only ask as much of another animal as I'm willing to put in myself. So "as good as I wanna be" makes reference to all the ways that my desire to improve my own behavior might be constrained: laziness, fear, conflicting desires, sheer cussedness. There might be other constraints on my ability to improve my behavior, some of them absolute, others elastic. But I won't discover those constraints except by testing and maybe redrawing the limits of my desire. Just as I won't discover the outer limits of Barley's or Kili's or Pazzo's abilities except by expanding my knowledge of what drives each of them and inventing new ways to channel it productively (i.e., in mutually agreeable directions).

So I start from the assumption that we're all only and always as good as we wanna be. I want to see what's possible from there.

In scientific circles

I think the mirror test demonstrates, at the point where its popularity as a measure of self-consciousness intersects with its inadequacy, the tendency of scientific investigation to wander into tautology when it treats the phenomena of sentience. It requires great care and imagination to conceive an experiment that will yield some verifiable external measure of an internal process, and when someone succeeds as elegantly as the originator of the mirror test, there's a strong temptation among those who credit the significance of the results to "move forward," to avoid any needless backtracking (e.g. to the definitional boundaries of the phenomenon under scrutiny).
     Thus the question of whether an animal possesses self-awareness elides irresistibly with the question of whether he can, with the help of a well-placed polka dot, make a connection between his kinesthetic or proprioceptive sense and an alien image that (bizarrely) coordinates with it; in the absence of any similarly compelling measure, the mirror test becomes definitive for hundreds of scientists who go on to paint scores of unsuspecting animals in their sleep. Will a parrot pass or fail? A tamarin? A zebra? As Frans de Waal observes, "for better or worse, this test has remained the gold standard of self-identity."
     Even the test's critics seem to accept its foundational terms: if, they say, an orangutan who touches a spot on his forehead really understood the image in the mirror as a representation of his own body, then the conditions for self-awareness would be met. But, they argue, he probably just likes to poke at his face. Or he learns to do so because it makes humans grimace in that weird way that means more dates and sunflower seeds.
     Again, methodological limitations lead us to chase our tails: the mirror test measures the capacity for self-consciousness because... we don't have a better test. Or a more complete one. Hell, I don't know what it means to be self-conscious! Do you?
     My feeling, one I'd like to develop into a well-reasoned conviction (so goes the trajectory of my mental life), is that there ought to be a kind of intellectual affirmative action in the direction of granting non-human animals manifold intelligence and complex consciousness. We ought to assume they're endowed with great riches of thought and feeling until they prove otherwise, though we ought not to assume that their thoughts and feelings trace the same patterns as ours. I have some sympathy for Marc Hauser, despite his faults and all the damage he's done to the cause of anthropomorphology, because a bias in favor of non-human intelligence remains so rare, while the bias against almost defines "respectable" research.

Self-consciousness without mirrors

There's a question I want to dig into a little further before I arrange another rendezvous between Hamlet and Burrhus (Frederic Skinner), a question regarding self-consciousness. This is one of innumerable capacities ascribed until recently only to humans. Various experiments with mirrors and paint have widened the circle of self-conscious creatures just a little bit, to include apes and magpies (!) among a few others, but I think the assumption that underlies the research may be too restrictive to allow a full description of the phenomenon. While it may be difficult or impossible to demonstrate under scientific controls (this is clearly a case in which observation itself may distort the nature and behavior of what we observe), informal study argues strongly for the emergence of "personality" in many social species who (pronoun used advisedly) fail the mirror test. Canis familiaris, to take one salient example.
     What if one accumulates (even if unwittingly) a distinct and precious identity, an identity one is motivated to defend (even if reflexively)? Mightn't this constitute a kind of self-consciousness, whether or not the self is pinched off from consciousness and set out as an object for one's contemplation and deliberate manipulation? I think anyone who has ever observed the wounding of a dog's pride or a cat's dignity must admit the possibility.
     The counterexample of the octopus also supports a more expansive definition of self-consciousness. Experiments performed using HDTV suggest that, however intelligent, an octopus has no personality: that is, it demonstrates the patterns of behavior that we generally attribute to personality, but these patterns are extremely short-lived. An octopus that is extroverted and aggressive one day may be terribly timid the next. (Wonderful that the subject of this research was Octopus tetricus: vulgarly, the "gloomy" octopus.)
     If the range of an animal's behavior (and the probability of any specific response to a stimulus) were determined simply by a passive stockpiling of experience and not by any active sense of internal coherence - of individual integrity - one would not expect to see such wild variations in the robustness of behavioral patterns among species.
     **There's another experiment, performed back in 2008, that hints at a canine capacity for self-consciousness. Austrian researchers trained a pair of border collies to sit and shake on cue, then measured the time it took for the behaviors to extinguish when they received no reinforcement. The salient data came from a comparison between "control" trials, wherein one of the dogs worked alone, and trials wherein the two dogs worked side by side but only one received reinforcement. Behaviors extinguished significantly more quickly in the second case (and the unrewarded dog showed many more visible signs of frustration). Discussion of the research has focused primarily on the question of whether this demonstrates that dogs have a sense of "fairness," but it certainly suggests that they have a vigorous sense of "me" distinct from "him," a protective self-regard that might amount to a form of ego.

Mind-shaped world

London's (or rather, England's) National Theatre took a cue from the Metropolitan Opera a couple of years ago and began a series of "live" high-definition broadcasts of selected shows from its season. The quotations wouldn't be there if we lived in New York, where audiences really do see shows in the moment they're being performed, but here we watch them "live." A couple of non-NT shows have made it onto this year's bill, and last night Peter and I joined two or three hundred other people at Portland's World Trade Center (still standing, but not so tall as the "real" but absent WTC) for a pre-recorded performance of A Disappearing Number by the group that used to be known as Théatre de Complicité (sorry, can't find the hat for the a) but now goes more simply by Complicite. Their work tends to the densely imagistic, cerebral, and fractured-- they don't disdain story, but they find other, unexpected paths to empathic connection. I'd seen their Noise of Time nine years ago in London and found it more intriguing than moving, but A Disappearing Number makes excellent use of their intellectual and emotional agility, as they leap nimbly from the abstract to the personal and back again.

The play weaves a fictional contemporary romance of the more or less conventional sort with the true (or at least non-fictional) romance of minds that took place between two mathematicians in the early twentieth century, Srinivasa Ramanujan and G.H. Hardy. The latter story gets unfortunately short shrift, but is implicitly honored in Complicite's romance with "maths." Fictions about mathematical and scientific genius usually have the quality of a trip to the zoo-- they invite an audience to peer through steel bars or scratched plexiglass at the strange creatures trapped within. Proof is a case in point, also A Beautiful Mind (though the book makes a more capacious cage than the film). In contrast, Complicite manages ingeniously to communicate something of the flavor of the genius itself, of the beauty that lights a mind like Ramanujan's, alien as it might at first appear.

Even in that last sentence, I have bumped inadvertently against the subject I want to address here. Late in the play, a contemporary mathematician tries to explain to her exasperated husband how it is that math is more real to her than the life they (sort of) share. She quotes Hardy from A Mathematician's Apology: "A mathematician is working with his own mathematical reality. 317 is prime, not because we think so, or because our minds are shaped in one way rather than another, but because it is so, because mathematical reality is built that way." The line hit a nerve with me, and I misremembered it later without Hardy's qualifications: "317 is prime, not because we think so, or because our minds are shaped one way rather than another, but because it is so, because reality is built that way." I've been getting impatient of late with people I might have considered intellectual kin, all the "bright" atheists who mock religious metaphysics but endow human reason with a numinous glow.

I hope that everything I write here will attest to my lifelong affection for empirically grounded reason. Math? Science? I'm a fan of both. It's just that hubris makes me itchy, whatever its source. My admiration for the scientific method is partly inspired by its implicit modesty, but that modesty goes missing sometimes when its practitioners champion themselves as the lonely votaries of Truth. Meanwhile, those who immerse themselves in "pure" math and logic (Plato's great-grandkids) don't dirty their hands with empirical observation, and their claims on Truth can be still more overweening.

I'm not a fan of the radical skepticism that permeates the "postmodern" worldview, which spirals out into an infinity of dead ends: I know you think so, but what do I? I think the search for common insight, common knowledge is possibly worthwhile and anyway much more enlivening than a proliferation of solitary sandboxes. And yet. The temptation to overreach is strong. I suppose I am a child of Kant, in the sense that I believe every description of the world is necessarily a description of the self. Empirical investigation is constrained not only by our specific and limited senses but by (un)certain a priori structures and biases that are more or less particular to us as different species of animal and different species of human. Not least of these is the bias toward meaning itself: our desire to make sense of what we perceive drives us to see relationships (e.g. of similarity, of coincidence, of cause and effect) where none may essentially exist, and it operates for the most part "in secret," below the level of conscious thought.

The dialogue between nature and nurture begins too early to allow us ever to untangle it completely (generations before an individual's conception, as recent epigenetic research has demonstrated). However, we don't need to arrive at any definitive account of what or how much is pre-written on the slate to recognize that the slate has a given shape and a surface that can only be marked in given ways (a blackboard likes chalk as paper likes a pen). Think of the senses we are missing, and those we possess in only stunted form. How would our notions of "objective observation" be altered if we could more directly perceive magnetic fields like a pigeon, shapes and speed like a bat, scents like a dog?

Yes, we have extended technology into many areas of our sensual blindness, but how much is lost in translation? If I see a sound's echo as a tight burst of peaks and valleys on a scrawled page, and learn to recognize its distinct pattern, is my apprehension of reality expanded to the same degree as if I had acquired the skill of echolocation? If a blind person scores perfectly when I test her knowledge of Newtonian optics ("420 nanometers?" "Violet?" "Yes!"), will I congratulate her and hand her the keys to my car? No. I will apologize for raising her hopes unrealistically and invite her to ride shotgun.

In their unapplied forms, math and logic try to leapfrog past this epistemological quandary. The symmetries they seek are self-sufficient, independent of the marriage (whether it may be intimate or estranged) between the mind (sorry, a mind!) and the world. If a consonance exists between those symmetries and empirical reality, we can never really know it. Hardy seems to have acknowledged this, in a line from the same Apology to which the play continually returns: "A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas... The mathematician's patterns, like the painter's or the poet's, must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colours or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way... It may be very hard to define mathematical beauty, but that is just as true of beauty of any kind. We may not know quite what we mean by a beautiful poem, but that does not prevent us from recognizing one when we read it."

The question seems finally to lie in how wide we presume to draw the circle of "we." Complicite did a remarkable job of making maths' beauty visible, audible, palpable to some of us who don't normally perceive it. But what does my dog Pazzo care for the elegance and emotional resonance of a convergent infinite series? I cannot tell whether he cares for elegance at all. The joy he takes in snatching a frisbee from the air at the moment it pauses in flight suggests that he does, but when he drinks from the toilet I am forced to reconsider.

Skinner and Hamlet I

I don't imagine it will come as a shock to anyone to learn that most of my friends (who trend to the liberal and artistic) wrinkle their noses at any mention of B.F. Skinner. As I've described here, I used to wrinkle mine, too. I've devoted many previous entries to a defense of Skinner, because I believe his insights have been undervalued in many circles (certainly the circles where I've been traveling). I think the reflexive rejection of behaviorism by many humanists poses a barrier to the interdisciplinary dialogue that we need if we hope ever to marry (or even to weave together as independent threads) mechanistic and holistic accounts of cognition and action, our descriptions of brain and mind as they impel the body (or vice-versa, as Antonio Damasio has intimated in his somatic marker hypothesis). Of course, many behavioral and cognitive scientists have been just as stingy and unthinking in their refusal to admit the significance of intangibles like emotion, belief, and individual character to their investigations. The imperatives of their discipline more formally forbid it.

If we cannot invent or cobble together a third vocabulary that encompasses subjective experience and objective observation, we will have to develop fluency with the conventions of scientific and poetic description at once, to take full advantage of both languages while recognizing their respective limitations. It's in the interests of this bilingual approach that I have learned to love Skinner-- I have been intent these last few months on countering my own prejudice. I feel a little more confident now that, if I invite my inner artist back to the table, the discussion won't devolve into a shouting match: "Deluded parasite!" "Heartless bastard!"

Neocortical lipstick

The widespread reluctance to acknowledge (let alone to explore or elaborate) how deeply we remain embedded in "animal" life has serious practical consequences, as it accelerates our destruction of the world we commonly inhabit. This is obvious in the sense that our failures of identification with other species remove barriers to violence and rapacious exploitation; it is less obvious in our expectation that "uniquely human reason" will rescue us from our own greedy appetites. We wishfully suppose ourselves ennobled by our comparatively well-developed cortices, but the reasoning (or rationalizing) power supplied by those wrinkly blankets obfuscates as much as it elucidates; it has made us masters at self-deception.

Jonah Lehrer makes the excellent point (in Proust Was a Neuroscientist) that the neocortex, in its very novelty, may be regarded, should be regarded as less developed than supposedly more primitive parts of the brain-- there hasn't been time to smooth out its kinks, or make its wrinkles perform most efficiently and effectively (that is to say, most adaptively). It remains fundamentally less reliable than older structures, though the dialogue that ensues between them has clearly been productive in the (geologically) short term: it has allowed us to overrun the planet. Yippee.

This is my point: the emanations of the neocortex (e.g. reason and faith) have not yet produced any notable constraint on our "animal" compulsions to consume and procreate, and to expect that they ever will is patently ridiculous, when our brains have been "designed" bottom-up for the opposite purpose. Even our most hopeful discoveries in neurology (of mirror neurons, for example, with their strong suggestion of a built-in capacity for empathy) can only embellish the fact of our dominant hunger, that is, to live beyond ourselves in the proxy of our genes. That superobjective (says the theatre gal) spawns an astonishing variety of more trivial hungers in day-to-day life, few of which consent to be curbed by reason or faith (though both propose compelling accounts of why other people's appetites should be suppressed or refused outright). Even those of us who have abdicated our procreative vocation find alternative modes of proliferation (hello, blogosphere!), and our consumption continues apace, as if we were not genetic dead ends (and indeed we may not be, if we help our nieces, nephews, or cousins to thrive).

Yes, this is to say that I am extremely pessimistic about our ability to pull ourselves by our elastic bootstraps into an enlightened state-- of mind or self-government. But if we do, the mechanism will not, I think, be reason or faith. I think it will have to be pleasure, unless it is desperation. If we cannot channel our appetites in less destructive directions (e.g. by encouraging people to remain "selfishly" childless, by cultivating our inner resources and capacity for pleasure), we will sprint ever faster toward that great brick wall of finitude.

I'm pretty sure it's already too late, at least for anything like the life I happen to lead (the outrageously wasteful kind). But crisis is normal in the long life of the planet. The dinosaurs never dreamed of us, and we can't imagine what (or who) will flourish when we're gone. I can still rage against the dying of the light in my visible spectrum-- the snuffing of lives I am disposed by evolutionary accident to cherish.

Hannah the Homesick Honu IV

You might have guessed by now that the Honu weren’t behaving so strangely because of anything fishy in the waters of Mokupapapa. No, they had all come there to mate. It often happens that shy creatures without many social skills will act rather foolishly when the spirit of romance catches them in its invisible net. Hannah was lucky to have found a steady turtle like Sam, and Sam was lucky that she knew it. I wouldn’t want to embarrass them or you with the details, but it wasn't long before Hannah had a belly full of eggs and an important new journey to make.

Sea turtles are called sea turtles for a very good reason: they don’t like to be on land. Their shells weigh them down when they’re out of the water, and they struggle to move across the sand. The Honu love to swoop and glide and soar, but on land they can only shuffle inch by awkward inch. Hannah knew other turtles who beached themselves for a good dose of sun when the cold slowed them down, but she had only been ashore once before in her life, when a tiger shark had chased her into a dead end cove. She had glided onto the sand just as its jaws snapped shut behind her. Now she would need to leave the water again.

As the sun set, Hannah made her way to the edge of the known world, where shadows gathered around her. These were other female Honu, all waiting like Hannah for the safety of darkness. When the blue waters had finally faded to black, they let themselves be carried by the breaking waves onto the shore, then began a difficult climb, away from the surf’s edge and toward the light, loose sand a hundred feet further up the beach.

Again and again, Hannah thrust her front flippers as far in front of her as she could, then pressed down with all her strength and dragged her heavy body forward. She seemed to make no progress at all, but she knew she could not quit. She had traveled too far to give up now. She thought of all the new turtle lives she held in her belly, each one closed away in its own private shell, and she pulled herself another five inches up the beach.

At last, Hannah made it to the soft, dry sand that lay beyond the reach of the highest tide. Here her work became harder. There was no rest for the tired flippers that had taken her across the ocean and out of the water she loved: she needed to dig a nest. The sand flew all around her, as a dozen Honu hollowed out big shallow bowls as wide as their own bodies. They used their back flippers to carve narrow burrows into the same quiet dunes where their mothers had nested, and their mothers’ mothers, and their mothers’ mothers before them.

Hannah didn’t have to ask whether her nest was big enough or deep enough. She simply knew. She laid her bright, precious eggs—more than a hundred of them!—in the shelter she had made. Then she covered them carefully with sand. When she was satisfied that she had hidden them well, she looked up to see that all the other mothers were making their slow way back to the water.

Hannah hesitated. Were the Honu really leaving their eggs behind? Would that thin layer of sand be enough to protect them from harm? She wanted to stay. She wanted to cover her nest with her own stony shell and fend off every threat that might come. She wanted to be there on the moonlit night when her babies would hatch and emerge in a tumbling crowd from the sand. She wanted to guide them to the water, through the pounding waves, away from the crabs who might snatch them on land, past the tiger sharks who waited for them in the depths. But she knew she could not.

In that moment’s hesitation, Hannah remembered all the many joys of the Honu life. She had been very frightened when she was a hatchling herself, no more than a mouthful for any hungry bird or fish. She might have wished for some protection then; she might have wished for someone to look out for her like Sam had done when she returned to Mokupapapa. But Hannah had traveled hundreds of miles before she met up with Sam, and she had not been afraid. She would never have learned to be so brave if her own mother had nervously followed her on her first great journey across the open ocean. She would never have learned the pleasure of solitude or the value of quiet. She knew her life was sweeter for the dangers she had faced.

“Have a good flight,” Hannah told her sleeping eggs. Then she turned and shuffled back down the slope of the dune, into the welcoming water.

Hannah lingered with Sam at Mokupapapa for many weeks. Three times she returned to the beach. Three times she made a new nest and hid her eggs carefully under the sand. The moon was bright on the night that Hannah dreamed again. In this dream, everything was familiar: the pink coral and the long, swaying grass. She saw once again the strange, peaceful human who had first tickled her curiosity. When she awoke, she could feel her blood humming in her veins.

“It’s time for me to go back,” she told Sam.

“Would you like company?” he asked. He remained a most gentlemanly turtle.

“Thank you, Sam,” Hannah said. “I think I’m good.” She brushed his flipper in farewell and soared out into the boundless blue, on her way home.

Photo by Marc M. Ellis

Hannah the Homesick Honu III

All through the day Hannah swam, and at night she rested. The further she swam, the further the ocean floor dropped away beneath her, and the further she had to dive to find a place to sleep. When she settled on the sand, she became perfectly still, so that you might have thought she was a pretty sort of a rock. Hannah's heart took long breaks between beats, and her blood inched along her veins. There was no hurry—everything was moving in the direction it should.

For a long time, the ocean yawned deeper and emptier than Hannah had ever known it. She took wide detours around a few tiger sharks and marveled at the blue flash of the long, skinny ono who passed her by, but she was as surprised as she was pleased one day to see another turtle swimming right in line with her. In her excitement, she forgot to be shy. “Hello!” she called. “I’m Hannah.”

“Sam,” said the other turtle. “A pleasure.” He looked curiously at her, and she was briefly reminded of the funny human.

The same whisper that had sent Hannah into the open ocean now urged her closer to Sam. He was a handsome Honu, his face gentle, his broad shell gleaming brown. “Did you have a dream, too?” Hannah asked him.

“Ah,” Sam said. “It’s your first return.”

“My first return?” Hannah was puzzled.

“To Mokupapapa. Where the silver monk seals swim and the coral grows wide as a ray.”

“Yes!” exclaimed Hannah. “That’s the place of my dream.”

“You’re headed in the right direction,” Sam told her.

“I know,” said Hannah. But she was glad to hear it all the same. “Mokupapapa. What a beautiful name.”

Sam cocked his head in a silent invitation, and Hannah happily joined her journey to his. They swam together for many days. Though Sam rarely spoke, he looked out for Hannah. “Dolphins,” he’d say, and steer her clear of the speeding pod. “Pa`imalau,” he’d say, and point his chin toward the surface, where a glamorous man-of-war draped its long tentacles like a poison curtain across her path. He shrugged off Hannah’s thanks: “Don’t worry about it. You’d do the same for me.” And he was right, she would.

Hannah had been amazed to find Sam in the middle of the open ocean, but every day more turtles appeared. Their deep memory of Mokupapapa pulled them like a magnet through the water—they swam and swam without tiring. On the very day that Hannah had begun to wonder whether they would ever reach their destination, Sam motioned with a flipper toward a shadow in the distance. “Nearly there,” he said.

Hannah awakened from her swimming trance and noticed that the ocean floor was quickly rising to meet them. After miles of blue, a rainbow of corals sprouted before her eyes, alive with fish and urchins and eels. There was the strange flat coral she’d seen in her dream! And there was the silver seal with its smiling round face!

In Hannah’s dream, she’d been alone, but here the Honu crowded around her. That would have been fine if they had behaved with their usual courtesy, but some were downright rude. The closer Hannah and Sam got to where the reef broke the skin of the water, the more frequently a strange male tried to swim between them. “Back off,” Sam would say.

They'd ignore him and slide in close to Hannah. “Come fly with me” was about the nicest thing she heard from any of them.

“You can do better, baby,” said one, but she didn’t think so.

Another told her, “You gotta be cracked, knocking shells with this guy.”

Hannah gave him a hard nip, surprising herself.

“Ow, hey!” he cried. “You don’t gotta be like that.”

“Get a life, leatherback,” Hannah replied. She saw Sam smiling. “Go chew barnacles for all I care.”

“Whatevs,” said the tactless turtle before he swam off. “You two deserve each other.”

“Yeah, maybe we do,” said Sam. Hannah smiled back at him.

Hannah the Homesick Honu II

Over the next few days, something changed in Hannah, and she wasn’t sure whether the human was to blame. She felt a tickle inside—sometimes in her head, other times near her heart. In her head, it was like a teasing whisper whose words she could never make out, even if she nestled under a soft layer of sand and lay perfectly still on the ocean floor, listening. When she swam, the tickle left her head and moved through her blood. It danced and skipped around her pulse. Everything in Hannah seemed to quicken to this new double rhythm, so that she found herself rising more frequently to the surface to take in a fresh lungful of air.

Unexpectedly, too, Hannah’s appetite grew. She didn’t stop to savor every mouthful of sea grass the way she always had—as soon as she’d taken one bite, she was already thinking about the next. For the first time that she could remember, Hannah felt something pushing her out of the moment she lived in and knew, felt it nudging her toward... what? She had no idea, she only knew that she needed to find a new patch of grass. She’d munched this one almost down to the sand, and she wasn’t even close to full.

When Hannah decided to move on, she noticed another strange thing. She knew that she would find the best and most tender grass on the other side of the reef to her right, but when she turned toward it the water seemed to press her back. The tickle in her head made an ugly buzzing, but as soon as she turned to swim in the opposite direction, it quieted to a lovely low hum. This happened many times, until Hannah no longer knew where she was. She didn’t understand how she had wandered so far, but she wasn’t afraid. That seemed strange, too. She didn’t recognize the surrounding coral and rock, and she didn’t recognize herself. What had changed?

Now, maybe you’re wondering why Hannah didn’t stop to ask another turtle what was going on. It’s a very good question, and I hope you won’t find the answer silly. The Honu, as I mentioned, are extremely polite. They are also terribly shy. It’s hard to say which came first, the politeness or the shyness, but because they like their peace and quiet so much, they really hate to be a bother to anyone else. On the rare occasions that Honu try to converse, they spend so long clearing their throats and apologizing that they often forget what they wanted to say. A typical exchange might go like this:

Horace the Honu quietly coughs, “Um, so. Hm.”

Hannibal the Honu lifts his head in surprise. “Whassup?”

Horace sees that Hannibal is eating. “Oh, dude, I’m sorry,” he says. “I’ll come back after lunch.”

“No, man, stay,” replies Hannibal. “It’s a way tasty tuft. You should have some. Please.”

“Ah, I couldn’t, really. I had a crazy big breakfast, couldn’t eat another bite.”

Hannibal insists, “Come on, just a nibble, man.”

Horace snips off a few blades with his beaky mouth and delicately munches. “Sweet.”

“I told you, right?” Hannibal takes another bite. He chews contentedly with Horace.

Horace coughs again. “Um yeah, so.”

“Something you need, friend?” Hannibal asks. “Just say the word.”

“Yeah, maybe.” Horace tries to remember. “I mean there was. I don’t know.”

Hannibal shrugs. “It’ll come back to you. Or not. Meantime, there’s plenty of grass if you just want to chill.”

The Honu like nothing better than chilling—except when they get a tickle in their blood and they begin to wonder why. One night a dream gave Hannah something new to wonder about. She dreamt of a beautiful place where butterfly fish fluttered and silver monk seals somersaulted through brilliant blue waters. She dreamt of angelfish with sunbright faces, of corals that fanned out flat and wide as manta rays.

When Hannah woke from her dream, she wasn’t hungry anymore. She didn’t want to eat, she only wanted to swim. She had to find her way back to the place of her dream. She knew she’d been there before. That was what the tickle had been telling her all along: it was time to go home.

Anthropomorphology

I've begun writing a series of stories for "middle readers" (the artificial segmentation of kids' reading experience seems silly to me and possibly pernicious, but whatchya gonna do?). They're stories with talking animals, which aren't supposed to interest "middle readers," but I forge mulishly ahead. Here's the beginning of the tale now in progress...



Hannah the Homesick Honu

Like every other green sea turtle she knew, Hannah tried to swim clear of trouble. "Live and let live" had been the Honu way forever, and if trouble seemed to find the Honu more often these days than it had in the past, that gave them all the more reason to love their peace and quiet. Once in a long while, a tiff would break out between two turtles over an especially tender patch of sea grass, but it rarely amounted to more than a nipped flipper and an hour's sulk before everything was right as Hawaiian rain.

Hannah had been hatched knowing that a little distance makes it much easier to be polite. Three feet is good, ten feet even better. Once she found a free spot to lunch, she munched her grass bite by slow bite, enjoying its coarse texture and bright flavor as much as if she had never tasted it before in her life. In fact, she'd been eating the same thing for years, too many years to count. Why bother counting, thought Hannah, when the sun reached through the water and laid its warm hand on her shell? Why count years, or days, or moments, when just now the grass swayed and danced, flickering from gold to green, green to gold, and back again?

A pleasant tingle at the outer edge of her flippers told Hannah to rise from her meal. She swept effortlessly to the surface and popped her head out of the water's embrace, into the thin air. She opened her nostrils and filled her lungs in one great breath. If she'd been counting, she would have known that this took her only a second, but that was enough for her to catch sight of another head bobbing above the water, a head that did not belong to a turtle.

During the course of her uncounted years, Hannah had encountered many of the strange, peeled creatures known as humans. They looked to her like overgrown clams without shells, or octopuses with half the limbs and none of the grace or smarts. Most of them splashed noisily at the surface—Hannah thought they might be trying to swim, but they never got much of anywhere.

In Hannah’s experience, humans did not understand that distance was the better part of good manners. Unlike the Honu, they seemed to love trouble. They chased fish for fun, poked the soft bellies of anemones, and lifted rocks without any thought for the privacy or comfort of the creatures underneath. Worst of all, if Hannah ever let them close, they reached out their long arms with the starlike grabby ends and tried to touch her, sometimes even to hold on to her flipper or shell. Just thinking about it made her panicky.

For all these reasons, Hannah carefully avoided humans, and she didn’t understand at first how this one had surprised her. Then she realized that it was quiet. It didn’t thrash or splash; it dived down through the water almost as easily as she did, but it didn’t swim any closer. She could see its curious eyes peering at her from behind the funny cover it wore over its face.

Hannah felt curious, too. Was this really a human, or a gentler something she’d never met before? Before her fear could stop her, she swam toward it. Not too close—she knew how far those arms could reach—but close enough to admire the tendrils of moss that waved in the water around the creature’s head. It definitely looked like a human, but it didn’t act like one. It made Hannah wonder, and she’d never really wondered before.

When the new human rose back to the surface, Hannah followed it, even though she still had plenty of breath in her lungs. With the moss now slicked flat over its head, the human inhaled sharply through its mouth. It made a series of soft, musical sounds, looking at Hannah all the while. Then, wonderfully, it swam away.

Photo by Hugh, husbandry volunteer at the Aquarium of the Pacific

Oh, joy!

The most unexpected-- and persuasive-- outcome of my early clicker training sessions with Barley was the obvious pleasure she took from the process. She had never guessed that I could be such a source of fun. Of course, I had also suddenly become a generous dispenser of treats, but the tiny morsels of processed lamb or turkey I doled out soon became icing on the click. (Mmm. Memories of my grandmother's beagle, Bruce, whose St. Paddy's Day birthday we celebrated with towering "cakes" of marshmallow-studded Alpo.)

Scientific study of animal behavior has only recently begun to allow for the relevance of emotional states to the process of learning. Again, this reluctance arises in part from epistemological rigor, a respect for the limits of empirical investigation and the impossibility of our directly apprehending any other creature's subjective experience-- the "black box" problem-- and in part (perhaps in the main) from a reflexive and unscientific impulse to distance ourselves from "mere beasts." I've just begun reading Jaak Panksepp's Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions and its first chapter summarizes most lucidly the history of the struggle to marry psychology with neuroscience, which struggle has been made more difficult by the refusal on the part of people on both sides of the divide to acknowledge and make better scientific use of the significant overlap (the structural and functional homologies) between the brains of humans and those of their mammalian cousins.

Even if Panksepp succeeds in legitimizing the scientific description of emotion in animals, it will likely be mediated by functional MRI or its future technological offspring: "Ah, there's the blood flow pattern we'd expect to see when a dog's ears and posture perk up, its (never 'his' or 'her') mouth opens slightly, and the speed of its response accelerates!" But no algorithm, however subtle and comprehensive, will ever name "joy" as well as "joy" does. Panksepp, very much to his credit, emphasizes the importance of folding non-scientific vocabulary into scientific accounts of emotion for the sake of clarity and (strange to say) accuracy.

If science were not so grand in its claims, if its practitioners more readily acknowledged the necessary gaps in its description of reality, I would not get so resentful of the ways that "objectivity" sometimes interferes with perception, so exasperated with the willful blindness and obtuseness that characterize much scientific research, especially when sentient beings are the objects of study. As I said earlier, I only became a fan of Skinner's methods when I put them into extra-scientific, personal practice-- and thereby corrupted them. If I want to be most effective as a trainer, I need to see the animal I'm training, not as a jumble of quantifiable properties and behaviors, but as a fluidly perceiving and feeling being whose mysterious intelligence is momentarily entangled with my own.

By lucky accident or divine symmetry, all creatures appear to learn best when they enjoy the learning. If it were not so, I would reconcile myself once and for all to being a crummy trainer, just to keep Barley smiling.

Just pretend!

There are many people from many fields now exploring the roots of the common (it appears biological) compulsion to play, and speculating on the adaptive advantages it may confer in the broad evolutionary sense and in the individual life. A coherent but inclusive definition of "play" is difficult to pin down, but I want to focus for now on play that includes an element of pretend, the magical "as if" that spreads a safety net under behavior that would otherwise be intolerably risky. Alexandra Horowitz, a cognitive scientist and author of Inside of a Dog, has spent hundreds (thousands?) of hours viewing and reviewing video of dogs at play, seeking to determine among other things how dogs effectively contract with each other to "fight" for fun.

The play bow-- head dipped and front legs outstretched while butt and tail are raised-- appears to be dog Esperanto for "I didn't mean that, and I don't mean this either! Ha!" An exchange of bows, deep or hieroglyphically sketched, typically initiates a friendly bout of wrestling or chasing, and the socially hep dog will repeat the gesture anytime the play contract seems to be fraying. As is the case with people, some dogs have a harder time than others remembering the rules of the game and honoring the agreed-upon distinction between "real" and "pretend." Indeed, play wouldn't be so compelling if that line were perfectly clear, if the safety net weren't a little patchy and the thrill of risk were entirely banished. But that's cold philosophical comfort when you're taking one dog to the vet because another never really got the hang of bite inhibition. (More on the scary side of Kili in a later post.)

One of the reasons I finally decided that I could not hack being a theatre scholar is that I could never quite take theatre seriously, and I honestly didn't think I should. The scholars I most admire-- many of whom are commonly judged to be either hopelessly old-fashioned or lightweight-- are playing in earnest. They recognize the essential frivolity of their occupation (in both senses of the word), its glorious extraneity to "real" life, but this is not a barrier to their investing their work with passion, wit, imagination. On the contrary, the magical "as if" liberates their brilliance as it has that of the artists whose work they study. Unfortunately, they appear vastly outnumbered today by scholars with extremely poor bite inhibition, maddened by their own irrelevance and deeply resistant to the pleasures of play.

Behaviorism and Desire

We want what we want and we want it now. (Humans are better than most animals at deferring gratification, but not always and not by much.) Any deliberate manipulation of another creature's behavior requires that we become attuned to that creature's desires, and these may be almost as idiosyncratic among dogs or dolphins as among people. To paraphrase Sam the Eagle (of Muppet Caper fame), we are all weirdos. This is where behaviorism goes productively amok.

In operant conditioning, one doesn't create behavior per se, one merely increases or decreases the likelihood that a given behavior will be performed, and one does this by controlling the behavior's consequence.

Consequences fall into four categories, defined by two binary oppositions (positive/negative, reinforcement/punishment): positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, positive punishment, and negative punishment. "Positive" in this context refers to the addition of some thing or force, "negative" to the removal of some thing or force. "Reinforcement" names anything that increases the likelihood that a behavior will be repeated; "punishment" names anything that decreases that likelihood. More simply, reinforcement tends to the yummy and pleasing, punishment to the nasty and fearsome ("aversive" in behaviorist lingo).

So "positive reinforcement" is the introduction of something good (chocolate cake, a belly rub, a game of tug, a shoulder massage), "negative reinforcement" the removal of something bad (pressure on the bit, a parent's screaming, a scary dog or mailman): whatever I did to create either consequence, I'm more likely to repeat it. "Positive punishment," which sounds like a contradiction in terms, is the introduction of something nasty (leash jerk, skunk spray, burned fingers), while "negative punishment" is the removal of something we like (attention, bones, freedom): whatever I did to earn these consequences, I'd like to avoid repeating it.

There's a wealth of complications buried in this simple schema, but the most significant concerns the vagaries of desire. We all (human and non-human animals) like different things, and we like them with varying degrees of intensity. Our desires are fluid and changeable, shifting with experience, mood, and context. Once upon a time, I loved bananas and (very briefly) the voice of Suzanne Vega, but both now make me queasy. Conditioning wouldn't be possible if our preferences were forever fixed, but our fickleness makes us slippery subjects. And that seems very much to the good. I have learned to love Skinner only because his account of behavior remains forever incomplete; the "laws" of behaviorism, while they are powerfully, empirically predictive in the aggregate, get wonderfully complicated when they tangle with the rebelliously singular individual.