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.