Love at Goon Park (18 page)

If you really think about the learning-for-food idea, Harry said, it makes no sense anyway. We're primates ourselves and if primates learn only to satisfy hunger, then few people in the well-fed United States would have an incentive to learn anything. People and monkeys alike learn because they are curious or interested—and that can be more potent a force, on occasion, than a wish for a second slice of pie. Harry could hardly wait to tell his colleagues about his monkeys, their cheeks puffed out with food treats, still puzzling over a tricky set of locks.

“He had this enormous and contagious enthusiasm for research data being collected in the lab,” says Robert Butler, a postdoctoral researcher at the time and later a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago. When he first came to Harry's lab, Butler had begun to think that he'd chosen the wrong profession; his early psychology classes seemed completely flat. “I had been wondering why I went for my Ph.D. in psychology. It was so boring. Psychology was so defensive about being a respectable science by doing experimental work. But Harry made you see it differently.”

Harry put Butler to work doing delayed response trials with the WGTA. While he was waiting the proper delayed time period—thirty seconds or so—Butler became curious himself. He started to wonder what the monkeys were doing while they waited for the
sliding panel to open. So he added a mirror, angled so that he could watch the animals in their cages. He hadn't considered that the monkeys could also see him. And he certainly hadn't considered that it might matter if they did. Suddenly, though, his test results started falling off. The monkeys were fumbling through their challenges. Finally, Butler realized that the monkeys had lost interest in the trays because they were more interested in him. Instead of sorting blocks, they were watching that strange face in the mirror. For all the years that scientists had been finding monkeys fascinating, no one had thought that monkeys might find scientists equally interesting. These monkeys were abandoning the food rewards on the tray just to study a reflection in an angled mirror. Butler started thinking, once again, about the curiosity experiments.

So he built the first scientific testing box for Harry's laboratory. Butler's solid-sided box had two moveable windows, one red and one blue. It was designed so that a monkey inside could hear noises outside the box but not see what made them. Would they wonder about what was out there? If the monkey pushed the right window—picked the color correctly—the window would slide open for thirty seconds and he could peer out at the world around him. That glimpse was the only reward for picking the correct color. Did he open the window? Is the earth round?

In one experiment, a monkey persistently raised that colored panel from sunrise until the last grad student left the lab at night. In another test, Butler alternated a plate of delicious fruit outside the window with the chug-and-toot of an electric train. Food was, sure, food; but the train became an obsession. The monkeys studied the fruit with undeniable greed. But the train—so completely strange—riveted them. They couldn't figure out what it was. They needed just one more look. The windows flew up and down like winking eyelids.

When Butler first proposed the box, Harry was doubtful. But, as Harry frequently said, he was often wrong. That was exactly what Harry told Robert Butler: He thought the box wouldn't work, but try it anyway. And when Butler ran the tests and the results were electric
with curiosity and nothing else, Harry was “ecstatic,” Butler said. The idea was so smart and the results so good that some of Butler's friends warned him to publish in a hurry. After all, major professors had been known to take credit for their students' ideas. Instead, Harry plastered Butler's name all over the findings. He named the device “the Butler box.” “I didn't name it,” Butler relates. “Harlow named it because he wanted some opposition to the Skinner box.” In Harry's mind, the Butler box was the perfect counter to rats pressing bars. Butler's invention demonstrated, without a doubt, that animals were curious. They had thinking minds of their own and they used them, whether researchers dangled food bait in front of them or not.

Harry liked to point out that this was a beautiful example of science catching up with everyday common sense. It was his favorite kind of psychology—the kind that made sense in the real world as well as in the laboratory. As he said, “An informal survey of neobehaviorists who are also fathers (or mothers) reveals that all have observed the intensity of the curiosity motive in their own child. None of them seriously believes the behavior derives from a secondorder drive. After describing their children's behavior, often with a surprising enthusiasm and frequently with the support of photographic records, they trudge off to their laboratories to study, under conditions of solitary confinement, to study the intellectual processes of rodents.”

Harry liked the Butler box so much that he kept it, even when he was no longer himself doing intelligence studies. It would turn out to be a smart decision. When he became interested in mother love, Harry put baby monkeys inside the box and their cloth-soft surrogate mother outside. He knew that electric trains and strange scientists fascinated monkeys. None of that compared, though, to the way the baby monkeys would doggedly raise the panel to see their mother's face. The little animals would open the window and open it and open it, over and over and over, until one by one the graduate students watching them dropped off to sleep. In one experiment, a baby monkey continued to seek those flickering glimpses of his mother for
nineteen hours straight. It might have been longer, actually, but yet another student fell asleep as he watched the window flick up and down. The baby monkeys were so fixed upon seeing their mothers that Harry took to calling the Butler box a “love machine.”

You couldn't watch the small monkey faces, their eyes anxiously searching for their mothers, without beginning to see love as a tangible force, a physical cord pulling tight between mother and child. You might even come to believe that love is so powerful that it can influence anything, including the brain. You might, if you were a scientist watching those monkeys, start thinking that the tireless blink of that window, the serious little face peering through it, had something to tell you.

FIVE

The Nature of Love

 

 

 

ALREADY A FEW OTHER REBELLIOUS scientists were arguing that love and intelligence could be connected, literally, from dot to dot. These were not animal researchers but doctors and psychologists working directly with children in orphanages and foundling homes. They suggested that social intelligence and cognitive intelligence might be linked. The end point was that children raised without affection might lose more than their ability to relate to others. Isolation and loneliness might dull the brain in other ways—and that dimming down might even show up on the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale.

To those opposing the idea—and Lewis Terman was definitely among them—the concept was ridiculous. Sentimental. And unnerving. If the healthy development of the brain depended on being loved, wouldn't that suggest that affection and nurturing were akin to breathing, basic to life itself? If that were so, wouldn't we be impossibly
vulnerable to loneliness or isolation or the vagaries of parents and home?

Terman didn't see the brain as anything like such an unstable structure. The human brain gleamed in his mind like finished marble, sculpted by genes, polished by superior biology. If you had inherited good genes—the kind possessed by Clara Mears Harlow—you possessed “splendid hereditary equipment” and were born to be smart. If not, you were destined to be average, or worse. Children who inherited the good genes looked good on IQ tests. Children who inherited less-splendid genetic material didn't. Terman's vision didn't allow for a smart child who faltered in a hostile environment. It allowed little room for environmental influences at all, including the difference between a warm and loving home and an unfriendly one.

By such standards, a slow-maturing baby could be judged harshly. If an infant seemed behind the curve, some pediatricians would advise that the child be institutionalized. The parents could then try for a better one. Arnold Gesell, one of the best-known pediatricians of the 1930s, had a reputation for recommending that approach. Gesell, a Yale University psychologist, remains famous in baby-doctor circles even today. He was a pioneer in working out developmental timetables—all those charts that dedicated parents follow in anticipation of when their babies should start smiling or rolling over. And Gesell used to say that the inborn development tendencies were so strong that parenting styles didn't matter that much. A child was going to turn out as his genes dictated, so that he “benefits liberally from what is good in our practice, and suffers less than he logically should from our unenlightenment.”

Gesell opposed the adoption of very young babies. He thought prospective parents should wait to see whether a child suffered from inborn brain deficiencies. It didn't occur to him that being institutionalized might foster deficiencies. But when he evaluated those older orphans, he quite often found them less sharp than the parents had hoped. Another Yale psychiatrist, Milton Senn, complained that Gesell's habit of diagnosing mental defects in institutionalized children
kept them from being adopted at all. Senn recommended early adoption as a preventative measure
against
mental retardation. Gesell had a ready answer for that: He accused Senn of not understanding child development.

And yet there were these annoying studies that kept turning up here and there. In New York City, one outspoken psychiatrist was making the most inexplicable findings about affection and IQ. The researcher in question was named William Goldfarb, who had been studying children in the city's Jewish foundling homes, trying to assess their social and intellectual development. Goldfarb had been one of the first researchers to worry that social isolation could permanently affect children's ability to connect with other people. He also tracked the IQ scores of children raised in foundling homes and compared them with the scores of children raised in foster homes. His findings directly challenged the notion of superior genetic lines.

The mothers who had left their children in the foundling and foster homes had to fill out an education and background survey. “It is a matter of some importance,” Goldfarb insisted, “that the mothers of the institution children are significantly superior to the mothers of family [foster] children in occupational background.” With this statement, he was deliberately taking on the Terman point of view, the belief that superior parents produced superior children. Just in case anyone had missed his drift, Goldfarb hammered it again. The mothers of many children placed in institutions came from the higher social classes. Their children were the result of unplanned and unwanted pregnancies. By contrast, many of the foster children came from a less impressive family background. They were placed in foster homes due to neglect, the death of a parent, desertion.

If you followed the laws of inherited intelligence, you would expect that the children given to foundling homes would inevitably be smarter than the fostered children. After all, Goldfarb said, “One might even infer that the mothers of the institution children are also superior in intelligence.” What he found and reported, though, was the opposite. Over all, the fostered children averaged 96 on the IQ
scale. The foundlings averaged 72, falling into the dreaded feebleminded category. The foundlings were less determined, less interested, less willing to explore. What could have happened to these children of supposedly bright and capable mothers, then? Goldfarb thought they were probably diminished by the sterile, unnourished nature of the homes. The places were stripped down, after all, and understaffed. The children were raised in an atmosphere of clean rooms, carefully ordered play, many domestic chores, and very basic instruction. It was hard to imagine that a child would thrive intellectually in such a world.

Goldfarb, though, also worried about another kind of diminishing effect—less obvious but, he suspected, no less real. He reported that many of the foundlings were so apathetic that they appeared as shadows of children. They were silent and withdrawn. Some could hardly be tested because it was so difficult to awaken them into focused participation. One problem was that no one was interested in them, he said. The caretakers seemed indifferent. But was that surprising? Goldfarb asked. Is an adult ever interested in a child who doesn't stir his heart? An odd kind of chicken or egg issue underlies that query. Does affection for another person create interest in him or does interest lead to affection?

When it came to the foundlings, Goldfarb had an idea that interest and affection twined together, tight as a rope, almost inseparably. All of us, even as babies, are a bundle of feelings and desires, he said. Our positive emotions grow best in an interactive sense, fostered by how we react to others and how they respond to us. A baby, a child, even an adult, needs at least one person interested and responsive. We grow best in soil cultivated by someone who thinks we matter. A baby, in particular, needs such encouragement and will do his best to please in return. Infants imitate adults and coo back to them and smile back, and through those ordinary exchanges they have their best chance at developing into an engaged and confident child. Without such affectionate interaction, Goldfarb thought, those positive responses would fail to flourish. The exterior child would look
healthy; the interior would be stunted. Lacking a strong caretaker relationship, a child surrounded by other children in an orphanage could still grow up in a kind of curious developmental isolation.