The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [57]
The difference between Lydia’s and Norm’s approaches to the project—the “project” that was my life—becomes evident in merely contrasting their personalities. For one thing, Norm was considerably older than Lydia, and when I met him he was already a scientist standing on a whole career’s worth of respect and distinction: tenured at his university, the value of his opinion secure in the scientific community. He sloughed his classes off on his teaching assistants, usually not even bothering to attend them. His science was rigorous, skeptical, fiercely adherent to responsible methodology. I’m not saying that Lydia’s methodology was sloppy by comparison—far from it. It’s only that Lydia was young, untested, untenured, scarcely published, only recently matriculated, and almost unknown in the world of science. She held a doctorate in cognitive psychology and a master’s in—not physical, but cultural—anthropology, whereas Norm was a behavioral biologist, through and through. Norm was a Skinnerian at heart, an operant conditioner, a pleasure-and-pain man, a pigeon-pecker. To Norm, if something couldn’t be meticulously and unambiguously measured and documented, then it could not be published in any way, ergo it did not “count.”
I sensed tension between them. Or thought I sensed it, or at least now I think I thought I sensed it, many years in retrospect. I sensed it in the way a child senses that his parents are fighting with each other, even if they conduct their arguments out of earshot. This philosophical gulf between them yawned ever wider over the duration of the project. Although I spent the vast majority of my time at home with Lydia, she would obligingly drive me to the lab nearly every day to do experiments with Norm.
During this time, Lydia was like a loving and permissive mother to me, and Norm was like a stern schoolmaster. I resented the way Lydia seemed to defer respect to Norm. From what source did Norm derive such respect? I knew nothing of—nor did I care anything for—anyone’s tenure or publishing history or the thickness of curricula vitae. (Now that I do know of these things, I care for them even less.) At home, with Lydia, Norm’s system of rewarding me for virtually everything—giving me a peanut, a piece of fruit or candy or whatever was on offer for every task I performed correctly—had been utterly abandoned, although this system was still pretty much in place at the lab, where the immediately gratifiable desires of my stomach apparently ruled, because they were all that could be methodologically counted on. If I did not always want a sticky delicious little piece of candy to put inside me, then Norm’s whole silly Skinnerian system of positive reinforcement for desired behavior would fall apart. Which it often did! The problem with Norm’s dogmatic insistence on his methodology of rewarding my behavior with food was that sometimes I didn’t really want the reward. I just wasn’t hungry. So, as a rigid behaviorist (I’m afraid nothing ever really changed his mind about that), what Norm realized he needed was some sort of objective currency, something that could be divided into small increments that would always be held to be valuable and desirable in and of themselves. Something I would always want. Essentially, what he needed to establish in my consciousness in order to keep up the simplistic yes/no/yes/no format of operant conditioning was a concept of abstract economics, some notion of, basically, money.
Norm set up a sort of “company store” in the lab, where I could “buy” my treats. So instead of being given treats directly for the tasks I correctly performed, everything I ate (in the lab—of course I ate for free at home) had to be purchased, by me. With what, you ask? Norm minted special play money for use in the closed economy of the lab. He cut thin chips out of wooden dowels of varying diameters and stamped