Prelude to the dance

here goes nothing...

As a relatively recent convert to the usefulness of a behaviorist perspective in descriptions of learning, I don't feel strongly wedded to the concepts or vocabulary that Skinner proposed so long ago, as resilient as they've proven to be. My appreciation for them is almost exclusively pragmatic: as long as the behaviorist lens serves my aim of unfolding my own latent strengths, making the best of my weaknesses, and helping other creatures to do the same, I'll hold it happily to my eye. But the moment it threatens to obscure the view, I'll toss it.

I'm fickle that way. When I was a theatre scholar (a role I never wore all that convincingly), I loved the idea of "interdisciplinary" study, and I delighted in conversations that spontaneously transgressed the many boundaries - essential, methodological, temperamental - dividing scientific from literary culture (to borrow C.P. Snow's categories). But formal efforts to close the gap seemed almost invariably to encourage the contempt for "fantasy" that's endemic among scientists and academic fantasists (i.e. literary types). Humanities departments are rife with relevance envy, and many of their faculty are eager to prostrate themselves before every promise of effectuality: you mean I might finally say something, do something that touches the world? Wow, hey. Some expunge the embarrassment of being mere doodlers and dreamers by becoming utterly prosaic (and untrained) scientists. Others eventually take up dog training. Ha.

I mean to say that I'm not immune. I caught the neuroscience bug early, and I got excited a few years ago when the contagion spread among my theatrical cohorts. But nothing quashed my enthusiasm like hearing the moderator of a conference seminar sternly remind us that the terms in play were technical, highly specific, and not to be fooled with in any loosey-goosey metaphorical way. Or hearing a director marvel about how wonderful it would be when she could attach electrodes to her actors' heads and discover what a sense memory really was.

Who's going to speak up for the reality of subjective experience if not for the dreamers and fantasists? What can scientists learn from us - why should they suppose we have anything to teach - if we surrender the stage before the play begins? Loose, sloppy, idle, playful, inexact - these are just some of the many strengths of literary culture. We cavort under the banner of "Not Quite." We spill ambiguity and uncertainty in our messy wake. That's our job, and it matters. Big time.

All this because I want to insist that science (generally) and Skinner (specifically) should not have the last word in every conversation about direct physical pressure in training. Next time!

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.

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

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.

Skinner and Hamlet II

This attempt to bring two unlike minds into harmonious - or anyway not rancorous - relation will necessarily proceed slowly and piecemeal. One of the minds is, after all, fictional, though that may be the least of the challenges I face.** As a gnatty little amateur in the realm of Big Ideas, I am bound to get ahead of myself and run down a dozen or more dead ends before I find a viable path. My arm is strong and my hatchet is sturdy, but it doesn't have the keenest of blades, so I hope, gentle reader, that you'll forgive the rough work I make of this.

Who, me? Stalling? OK. I've already said that I don't think any of us (paramecium, porcupine, person) arrives tabula rasa in the world. Some native and individual proclivity for order springs into being at the moment of our inception, hungry for the world as it makes itself known to us through our various and varied senses. However, the world feeds our hunger so immediately, generously, and unremittingly that it may be impossible ever to say what any of us is in isolation from the world as we know it at any given moment.

When stated so broadly, this seems obvious, but I could say instead, "Oh, of course you're a different person with your friend than you are with your mother, and I've no idea whatsoever how you might act if your life were on the line. No more than I have about how I would act. There's nothing solid in your character or mine - we are creatures of circumstance." Or I could point you to a recent article in Discover detailing the possibility that schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and MS could be caused by a retrovirus embedded 60 million years ago in the ancestral DNA of every monkey and primate, a virus that fortunately only becomes active in special environmental circumstances. Perhaps it is only in these extreme cases that "foreign" matter speaks to us so intimately and shapes our lives so dramatically, but I'm not willing to bet on it. 

If Catholic cosmology reigns, the Ghost who speaks to Hamlet may indeed be honest, but there's no purgatory in the Protestant universe, so he needs be a demon. Freudians hear the voice of the superego, and evolutionary biologists the mischievous mutterings of a rogue amino acid sequence. Behaviorists? Good question. Maybe they'd say (in their best Jesse Jackson imitation): The Ghost is moot!

**I still love the line from Woody Allen's Purple Rose of Cairo, wherein a depressive in the Depression played by Mia Farrow falls in love with a movie archaeologist (Jeff Daniels): "I just met a wonderful new man. He's fictional, but you can't have everything."

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.

Behaviorism and the Queen of Diamonds

The sinister overtones that many hear in the phrase "behavior modification" arise from the perception that it necessarily describes the coldly clinical manipulation of one creature by another. The efficacy of classical and operant conditioning rests on our ability to generate involuntary responses to selected stimuli, a process that appears suspiciously like brainwashing. If someone acquires the power to circumvent my conscious intent, to play upon my more or less submerged desires without my reason's consent, what am I but a puppet?

It's no real consolation to observe that, under the scrutiny of neuroscientists, the whole phenomenon of willed action begins to appear less and less substantial and may prove no more than a sustained delusion: it's a necessary delusion, indispensable to our sense of mental coherence. The related delusion that we might more productively dispense with is the conviction that reason rules (or should rule) our behavior. It leads us to assume that we should seek change in ourselves and others through the careful application of logic, when the truth of our experience (and increasingly of scientific study) is that emotions have infinitely more suasive power than reasons do. Or, as Pascal noted, the heart has its own reasons, to which reason must give sway.

Maybe the general mistrust of behaviorism actually speaks to an intuition in this direction and a general anxiety around the mixing of "cold" logic with "warm" feeling: someone with the power to stimulate my most primal emotions (joy, fear, desire, disgust, etc.) may well abuse it if he regards me through the lens of reason as a mere object for the accomplishment of his ends.

This is jumbled and something I need to work through at much greater length (you see my faith in reason perseveres!), but I do know that my emotional entanglement with my training "subjects" is the sine qua non of my use of behaviorist methods.

Not that emotional entanglement is any guarantor of virtuous ends. (The Manchurian Candidate supplies a case in point.) Sigh. I'll have to try to catch this tiger by a different toe.

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.