Rat runners

 I guess Freud was the guy who put psychology on the map.  Well why not, his theories were pretty lurid.  Well sex sells.  It's such a basic thing, everybody does it, more or less, but nobody wanted to talk about it.  Well it was such a touchy subject, such a sinful subject nobody wanted to say the wrong thing and run afoul of The Church.

Freud is pretty marginalized these days.  He is credited with at least getting people to talk about psychology, but again his theories, crazy talk.  

Freud did some studies I think, but mostly he was an armchair philosopher, sitting in that easy chair with a pipe in his mouth and a pot of ink and a dip pen, maybe a little vial of cocaine, on one of those little tables, and every time a good thought came to him writing it down.  

There is deductive reasoning where you just apply reason to the subject and make conclusions without ever having to leave your easy chair, then there is inductive reasoning where you go out and gather a bunch of data and then from all that information you can propose theories.

The thing about the physical universe is it is very complicated and you need more information.  All electrons are the same, but every person is different.  

Hence B F Skinner who introduced behaviorist psychology.  None of these dreamy thoughts, just the cold hard facts.  We can never know what is going on in the mind of our fellow man.  The mind is a black box into which we can never peer, so forget about that.  Behavior (i e, drool from Pavlov's dog) is the only thing we can measure so let's stick to that and forget about what is going on in the black box.

The University of Illinois in those days was a behaviorist school, Skinner all the way, (they called us, and we called ourselves, proudly) rat runners.  Basically you had hungry rats on one side and food on the other and a bunch of buttons that in the correct combination would yield access to the food, and that was basically it.

One button, experiments, two button experiments, three, four, five buttons.  You'd be surprised at how many variations there are, but they pretty much filled the curriculum.  We never did get around to boredom.  

I'll try in the next post.

How I came to study psychology

 Underneath my yearbook photo it says biochemist.  I was, of course under the sway of my hero, Isaac Asimov.  But it was hard Man.  I did okay with the lectures, with talk of valences and you know, how oxygen lacks two electrons to fill its outer ring so it hooks up with a couple lonely hydrogens and viola water.   It's all in the electrons with the elements on either end of periodic table needing only one electron to give up or one to add to have a full outer ring with no pesky extra electron all by itself.  Acids and bases, all there is too it.

Well no, actually there was a lot more to it, and a lot of that is included in lab, that smelly old place with all those weird instruments, and complicated recipes that you have to follow just so if you want to get the proper results, and that's the thing I am no good at all at.  I like theory but I am no good at all when it comes to practice.

So after a year I was out of chemistry and into math which is pretty much all theory, and I was pretty good at that.  I had a knack even if I didn't know what I was doing meant, I was just good at manipulating symbols.  

And the profs, guys with their heads in the stratosphere high above us.  Every now and then somebody would raise their hand and ask what good is all this crap, and of course it would turn out that he was an engineer and all us pure math types would snicker.  What good is all that crap?  Well what kind of question is that to ask?

Anyway because the profs had their noses in the air they had little interest in mundane things like figuring out how to grade their students so they would just give the whole class A's or B's, and that is pretty much how I was able to skate through it until my senior year when I encountered the hard nut of Math 317.  Abstract algebra, which is the kind of thing I like, but by then I was running with a dope smoking and beer drinking crowd, and I really had no time for all that crap, and this being a mandatory class the profs had to pay attention to their grading.  I took it three times before I barely passed it.  My math GPA was below C.  I could never graduate in math.

Along the way to not getting my math degree I had taken a few elective courses in psychology because they were easy and I had a good GPA in them so I switched my major to psychology.  What would I learn there about boredom?

That will have to wait for my next post because it's 6 AM and the morning is about shot.