Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

Norm’s insistence on deliberate instruction, all his treat dangling and clever byways of circumventing the deeply problematic and frankly inhuman aspects of behaviorism, this cynical system of trapping a creature between pleasure and pain, of bribing and withholding — all this points to his original sin of misunderstanding. His misunderstanding was to underestimate language’s connections to love, to beauty, to pure awe of the universe. A being does not acquire language because scientists give it treats if it learns words. A being acquires language because it is curious, because it yearns to participate in the perpetual reincarnation of the world. It is not just a trick of agreement. It is not a process of painting symbols over the faces of the raw materials of the cosmos. A being acquires language to carve out its own consciousness, its own active and reactive existence. A being screams because it is in pain, and it acquires language to communicate.

On one of my better-behaved days — which, as my size, strength, intelligence, boredom, and general restlessness in the lab increased, became less and less frequent — one of Norm’s teaching assistants brought a class to the lab to visit, to watch me prove my competency at understanding spoken English. By this time they had removed the metal cage they had put me in during the early days of the project, and built a large enclosure in the room made of thick glass. The glass wall divided the room into two areas: one for me and the scientists, and the other for people who would visit, so that they could stand behind the glass and watch me work without fear of me ripping their faces off. The arrangement unpleasantly reminded me of the zoo, but I dealt with it. The students all crowded round outside the glass wall, their wet breaths blowing spots of fog on the surface of the glass. This particular experiment had been filmed many times. Nearly everything we did in the lab was now caught on video, by several cameras perched on tripods that had been erected at several points in the room to catch all the action. The Bruno Show was filmed every weekday, beginning in the morning when Lydia brought me to the lab and ending when she took me home. The scientists would later spend countless hours analyzing my behavior, watching my videos and carefully recording data.

I knew the drill. Lydia sat with me inside the glassed-in area of the lab. Norm was outside the wall with the students. Lydia was the one conducting the experiment because I responded to her vocal commands far more often than I did to Norm’s. My personal dislike of Norm rendered me less inclined to grant all his meaningless requests. But nowadays I almost always did them when Lydia asked, as a personal favor to her. Safely protected by the glass wall, Norm was showing me off, speaking about me to all his students, like a mountebank at a county fair, step right up, ladies and gentlemen, come marvel at the freak of nature we’ve grown in this very laboratory. Inside my play area were all kinds of objects: boxes, bags, stuffed animals, toys and such.

Lydia would say to me, “Bruno, please put the snake in the bag.”

And I would respond by picking up the slack green lifeless rubber snake and dropping it in the nearby brown paper grocery sack. Then she would say, speaking slowly, forcefully and articulately, “Put the soap on the doggie.”

I would pick up the bar of soap, walk over to the stuffed dog, and place it on its back.

“Good job, Bruno. Now put the elephant in the box.”

I picked up the stuffed elephant and dropped it in the cardboard box.

This is the way it usually went. However, Norm had recently added an extremely unsettling detail to this procedure. Lydia wore a flat black metal mask that completely obscured her face, with a rectangular window of opaque green glass for her eyes. I am told that this was a welding mask. She also wore a pair of oven mitts on her hands. Dressed in this insane costume — like a baker in Hell — she would ask me to perform the pointless tasks with the objects strewn about the floor of the playpen. I did not know what could be the reason for these new details that had been added to the ritual. Lydia looked slightly terrifying in this costume. Still, I knew it was her under there, and so I gamely complied with the requests coming from the tinny, echoey voice buried beneath the black metal mask.

And why, you may ask, why did Norm require Lydia to wear oven mitts and a welding mask during the experiment? This was to assure skeptics that I was receiving no visual cues from her face or hands, and had to rely on her spoken words alone for information. It was done to dissuade any potential accusation that I wasn’t comprehending spoken language so much as constructing a web of understanding out of external information inadvertently provided by her body — facial tics, gaze-following, the tensing or relaxing of her muscles, accidental gesticulations: the sort of things a seasoned gambler calls a “tell.”

But why, I ask — why, Dr. Norman Plumlee, did you decide that external bodily elements of communication do not count as part of language? Is language not comprised of an entire flexible interface of both spoken and visual interaction? No human mother speaks to her infant only while wearing oven mitts and a welding mask! Spoken language is but a single component of communication. We speak as much with our hands and eyes and faces as we do with our lungs and throats and tongues — namely, principally, with our brains. Analog gestural communication isn’t “cheating.” Removing words from the interface of the body only removes them from their natural environment, like putting an animal in a cage.

Yet Norm doggedly continued to insist upon the necessity of the mask and mittens, so the fact that I understood what Lydia was saying might be taken more seriously by potential skeptics. Taken seriously by whom? By whom , Norm? Whence this desperate, this pitiful fear of not being taken seriously? This fear permeates everything, everything humans do! This terrible fear of not being taken seriously haunts the heart of every scientist!

What is science? Must science necessarily be enslaved to rigid methodology? — to the quantifiable? — to the repeatable? — to the measurable? — to the (dare I suggest it) publishable ? If you’re studying the inanimate world, sure… the unconscious world, the world of quarks and quasars, of waves and particles, of the chemical and mechanical movements of the universe’s material… I have no beef with the scientific method as it is applied to, say, physics. But when you are studying another sentient being, a fellow conscious organism? Of course, of course the good scientist must follow proper methodology, collect data accurately and draw conclusions carefully and responsibly if he is to publish, and the good scientist must of course publish if he is going to apply for grants to fund further research and maintain his post at his institution, if he is to secure tenure, in order to keep making money, in order to eat ! And in order to do all this, he must publish, publish, publish — or not get any money — and by extension, perish! I sometimes wonder if the demands of capitalism enfeeble certain fields of science. Because that was why Norm was in such a rush to test, to record, to document, to prove, to publish— to be taken seriously . He wanted this to be hard science. He did not understand how soft it is — soft and vulnerable, like flesh itself. Like life. Like me. My brain, the seat of my soul, is as mysterious and plastic and irrational a thing as yours, Norm, or any man’s for that matter. It bucked against your numbers! In your frenzy to publish, in your desperation to be taken seriously, you tried to cram “soft” science into the same box as the hard stuff — and in the process you ignored all the evidence that was right in front of your face! You lost it! Lost! Much is lost, and much is never found that might be if scientists would only allow themselves to look in the right places. The very hardness of hard science sometimes renders it too impoverished to study a subject so protean and spontaneous as language. Lydia came to understand this, and Norm did not, and that, I believe, was at the heart of their falling-out. That and, obviously, me.