Hood, Bruce - Supersense

Pavlov had discovered ‘conditioning’, a mechanism that would become one of the bedrocks for a whole theory of learning based on association. The idea was that all learning is simple association of events in the environment, like a complex pattern of standing dominoes all stacked up and ready to fall. If you push one over, the others fall in a chain reaction. One event simply triggers the next because of the way the pattern has been formed by association. You do not need to think about a mind making sense of it.

This theory, which provided a way of explaining how babies learn, would dominate Western psychology for the next fifty years. By simply controlling the environment, it was thought that any behaviour could be described and predicted without bothering to know what was going on inside the head. The theory became known as ‘behaviourism’, and those who followed it treated the mind as a ‘black box’ that was not only unopened but also ignored. Minds were irrelevant when all behaviours could be described by a set of simple learning rules that created the patterns of mental dominoes.

One of the staunchest early advocates of behaviourism was our old friend John Watson. When he was not tormenting Little Albert, dangling newborns from pencils, or making out with his graduate student, Watson famously boasted:

Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. 20

By applying the learning rules of reinforcement and punishment, you can shape patterns of behaviour. If you want to encourage behaviour, give a reward, and an association will be strengthened. If you want to discourage behaviour, give a punishment, and the association will be actively avoided. By linking together chains of behaviour through punishment and reward, it was claimed, the laws of associative learning can shape any complex pattern, be it personality, skills, or even knowledge.

These laws were even believed to explain supernatural thinking. In what was one of the first experiments in irrational behaviour, the Harvard behaviourist B. F. Skinner described in 1948 how he trained birds to act superstitiously. 21He achieved this with a laboratory box that was wired to give out rewards randomly. For example, if the bird happened to be pecking at some part of the cage when a pellet was delivered, it soon learned to repeat this behaviour. Skinner argued that this simple principle could explain the origins of human superstitious rituals. Like pigeons, tennis players and gamblers seek to reproduce success by repeating behaviours that happened at the time of a reward. Behaviourism explained how something that had long been regarded as a product of feeble thinking could be understood as a consequence of the random reinforcements that the environment occasionally tosses out.

FIG. 6: Deborah Skinner in her father’s ‘Air-Crib’, Skinner’s baby crib, in 1945. © LADIES’ HOME JOURNAL

Skinner would go on to claim that all aspects of child development can be explained by associative learning. He was even accused of taking this too far when he was featured in a Ladies’ Home Journal article with his infant daughter, Deborah, pictured inside what looked like a giant box similar to the ones Skinner had used to train his animals.

Actually, the box was a special thermostatically controlled crib he had designed for infants so that they did not have to wear baby clothes. In the article, he described the benefits of the ‘Air-Crib’ as a labour-saving invention that simplified a young mother’s life and improved baby welfare. That did not stop the urban myth that circulates today of Skinner raising his own daughter like a laboratory rat. 22This reputedly led her to grow up psychotic and commit suicide by blowing her brains out in a bowling alley in Billings, Montana, back in the 1970s. Apparently that is a lie. In 2004 Deborah Skinner Buzan wrote an article in the Guardian refuting that she had ever been to Billings, Montana. 23

However, Skinner did go too far with his theories. In the same way that superstitions and rituals emerge, Skinner used behaviourism to explain the uniquely human capacity for language. He proposed that babies acquire a language by a long process of learning words by association, encouraged by their parents to link them together in the appropriate manner. However, when Skinner came to publish these ideas in a book in the 1950s, scientists had already begun to change how they thought about the mind. Behaviourism might have been fine for explaining how the behaviour of pigeons and people can be shaped, but not all human abilities can be taught. This change, known as the ‘cognitive revolution’, was to become a revolution in thinking. 24

Skinner was a Harvard heavyweight, but it was a young upstart linguist from down the road at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who lit the fuse by writing a review of Skinner’s book that would go on to become more famous than the book itself. That upstart was none other than Noam Chomsky. Using language development as his test case, Chomsky launched an attack on behaviourism. He pointed out that no association theory of learning could explain how every human child acquires language through learning for the simple reason that the rules that generate and control language are invisible to every natural speaker (unless you are a linguist, of course). Linguists had demonstrated that all the languages of the world share the same deep structures that are hidden from most of us. There is something in our mind design, Chomsky asserted, that we are not privy to but that we can tap when we need to communicate, and this is known as the universal grammar – the invisible laws that govern how language works.

If universal grammar is invisible and most of us are idiots when it comes to linguistics, how can we possibly teach our children by reinforcement and punishment? How can every child acquire language with these hidden rules at roughly the same time, at roughly the same pace, and with little evidence that associative learning plays a role? Something has to be built into the brains of all children that helps them learn language. Chomsky’s rapier-like attack dealt a fatal wound to behaviourism from which it would never really recover.

OUT OF SIGHT, OUT OF MIND

The cognitive revolution that took place in the United States did not really happen in Europe, largely because the mind had always been so central in European psychology. In adult psychiatry, Sigmund Freud talked about a fragmented mind in constant conflict with itself. In pattern perception, the German Gestalt School we met earlier, with its meaningful structures and organizations, put the mind at the forefront of human abilities. In the United Kingdom, we had Sir Fredrick Bartlett at Cambridge describing memory as a set of active mental patterns, constantly changing and shifting. But it was in theories of child development that the mind took centre stage as the focus of interest, and no more so than in the theories of the Swiss child psychologist Jean Piaget.

Like Locke, Piaget also had a blank-slate view of newborns, but he thought that they possess learning rules in their tiny minds that enable them to construct knowledge from the apparently simple act of play. Learning and knowledge emerge as babies discover the nature of the world around them in a gradual sequence of revelations. Every simple act of playing with objects – batting them, grasping them, sucking them, pushing them off the high chair – is a mini-scientific experiment for infants, the results of which help form the content of their minds.