by Merle Jacob
How long does it take to train a pigeon to bowl? A good pigeon trainer can do it in 30 minutes. And just as pigeons can be trained, so can people be trained out of mental and emotional illnesses through behavioral psychology, Prof. James McConnell of the psychology department said yesterday morning in his lecture on Men, Machines and Madness.
McConnel was one of the series of University professors who have been participating in the freshman orientation program of student-faculty discussions.
Man is a machine when which it break down can be fixed by reached it with the proper tools, McConnell proposed. Just as biological medicine did not get off the ground until doctors adopted the attitudethat man’s body was a biological machine, neither did psychology until it started experimenting with the human mind.
Change
In discussing the science is emotional reaction, McConnell explained that behaviorism is just becoming in important part of psychology. If a man had a mental breakdown 200 years ago he was placed an in institution where it was assumed he was out of God’s grace and infested by devils. He was beaten and chained in trying to cure him. around 1900 Freud developed thr theory of the id, ego, and super ego which has carried psychiatry up to today, the professor explained.
However there is no evidence that Freudian psychotherapy has ever cured anyone, McConnell stated. Freudians would of course refute this, but looking at the hard core cases in our mental wards would disprove their claims.
Behavioral psychiatry assumes that
there ain’t nothin’ up there
or in other words there is no mind or soul, only behavior.
Man Machine
McConnell said that man could build a computer that looked like a man and program it to speak, think and act. They could even program it to think it had a soul and free will, but just because it thought that wouldn’t mean that the computer had a soul.
Just because men they have something inside them like a soul, dosen’t necessarily mean that they do, he added.
McConnell explained that just as men can teach pigeons to bowl and mice to run through mazes by rewarding them with food when they do the right things, so psychiatrists can do the same with the mentally retarded and the mentally disturbed.
Sick Children
Ivar Lovaas, an assistant professor of psychology at UCLA,
The University of California, Los Angeles is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California.
has done a number of experiments with ad petting autistic children with extremely successful results.
Autism is a form of split personality in children in which the child does not speak, is completely withdrawn form the real world. generally sits in the corner and rocks himself, and is very self-destructive.
Lovaas too reasoned that instead of loving and petting these children whenever they started to injure themselves, the children should be punished. These children had learned that by harming themselves they would get attention.
Cure
Lovaas took a child who had been strapped to a bed for seven years because he was so self-destructive and release him. When the child began to beat himself he was put in a room by himself. Seven hours later the doctors came in, cleaned up the blood, and put him to bed. Lovaas continued this experiment for one week. and by the end of that time the child was no longer beating himself.
The amazing thing is that Lovaas has cured these children of their wild behavior in a matter of weeks, and in a few months he has taught them normal behavior. Yet when he tried to extinguish this learned behavior it took over a year with some children and never others McConnell said.
He concluded the lecture by stressing his point that men are wild and crazy machines, and that the trouble with crazy people is that they act crazy. Behavioral psychology tries to cure this behavior.
McConnell has been famous for his work with flatworms while studying phisiological bses of learning and memory. In 1963, he received The Research Carrier Award from the National Institute of Health,
The National Institutes of Health, commonly referred to as NIH, is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research.
made on the basis of a nationwide competition.
McConnell graduated from Louisiana State University
Louisiana State University is a public land-grant research university in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
in 1947 and came here in 1956.
Kathleen Stein. King of Worm Runners
By the mid-Sixties many research groups reported success in memory transfer-using higher organisms. Brains of educated rats were ground up and injected into naive rats. The newly sophisticated rats behaved in a manner that indicated they had learned by hard experience. Paying Your Dues could become obsolete, at least for rats. Maybe not just for rats. Other experiments indicated that injections of smart-rat brain could raise the I.Q.’s of hamsters, suggestion that RNA contains components of memory and intelligence that span whole species! If rats to hamsters, why not hamsters to man, and man to rats, and so on?
Distinguished biochemist George Ungar went so far as to isolate, characterize, and synthesize a specific transferred memory: scotophobin, or fear of the dark. Ungar would actually make up batches of scotophobin, a complex polypeptide 15 to 16 amino acids long, and send it to you in a bottle. He also had a whole bunch of other phobins. But this tantalizing research went the way of the worm when Ungar died in 1977.
To date there have been thousands of successful memory-transfer experiments reported in the literature. But the subject of the chemical code for learning still can elicit violent negative responses from otherwise cool men of science. One leading artificial-intelligence honcho exploded at a lunch table recently when the 15-year-old transfer work was brought up.
Sophomoric! Ridiculous! A stage many people in neurophysiology seem to go through, and then reject quickly, he retorted.
The battle was waged in the periodicals and at the meetings. According to scientific historian David Travis in his paper on McConnell, Constructing Creativity: The Memory Transfer and the importance of Being Earnest, the transfer results were rejected as sloppy science, or unconscious experimenter bias, or mass hysteria. One peer review angrily denounced the work as either the biggest finding or the biggest hoax in psychology in years, and probably the later. Another esteemed researcher called a memory-transfer article in Science a branch of crap.
The one recurring complaint, Travis says, was the suspicion of subversive flippancy. The McConnell group over the years had allowed an aura of schoolboy humor to surround their investigation. And the reaction of the scientific community to this mirthful attitude was swift and vengeful. McConnell calls it autistic hostility. What brought all this offending research and its frivolous attitude to a head was a unique and irregularly published journal. It was born when McConnell’s planarian experiments became known throughout the scientific and popular press, and he subsequently was inundated with requests for information about the care and feeding of flatworms and for ideas on how to set up the experiments. His Michigan group produced a set of mimeographed instructions and dubbed it The Worm Runner’s Digest, Vol. 1, No. 1. The cover was complete with heraldic device: a two-headed worm rampant, a coronet of connected nerve cells, the S/R of Dr. Pavlov’s stimulus response, and legend Ignotum per Ignotius, which Koestler translates as
