The Way the Future Blogs

I have the dog. . . .

For the science-minded among us, there’s a home scientific experiment that you might like to try. For it, you will need the following research materials:

4–6 little opaque cups with lids
1 piece of tasty dog food
1 baby about 1 year old
1 pet dog
1 domesticated wolf
(optional) 1 each bonobo, chimpanzee, gorilla and other great ape

Procedure: In a room where none of the animals are present put the piece of tasty dog food in one of the cups, cover it and line them up on a table. Admit one of the animals. Point to the cup containing the dog food. Observe the response of the animal.

In general, if the animal used in this trial is either the pet dog or the baby of about 1 year or more in age it will then attempt to open the cup. If successful in that effort, it will then eat the piece of dog food. If it is any other kind of animal, it will probably pay little or no attention to your signal but will sniff each of the cups, perhaps attempt to lick your face or simply wander around the room.

You will probably suppose from this behavior that the dog and the baby have inferred that you are calling attention to the one cup that contains a reward — the piece of dog food — for the subject animal and thus attempt to find out what that reward is, whereas none of the other animals will appear to draw that conclusion. At least, that is the conclusion reached by the team of ethologists led by Jozsef Topal at the Institute for Psychology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest.

Interestingly, no other kind of living creature displays this ability to interpret a human signal except for the domestic dog and the human baby, which begins to be able to solve the problem of interpreting this nonverbal human signal around its first birthday. The wolf is the closest relative to the domestic dog, but even a wolf that has been raised since birth in the company of human beings, as well as any of the great apes, the closest species to human beings, fails miserably at this task.

It is suggested that this innate quality of dogs is what has made them particularly easy to domesticate.

Part 7 of “Alfred Bester and Frederik Pohl — The Conversation,” recorded 26 June 1978 at The Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.
 

    Alfred Bester, ca. 1964.

Pohl: I want to tell you something about this arrogance that you were talking about. It is not just editors, although the best in science fiction have been pretty insufferable in one way or another. We’ve mentioned Horace Gold, who was also demented. John Campbell clearly had a very decisive personality and impressed it on everybody around him all the time.

Some years ago two psychologists decided they wanted to find out what science-fiction writers were like. They sent out a questionnaire to a bunch of science-fiction writers and asked them to answer the sort of questions you get on psychological-testing papers. How do you feel about your mother and this and that. And from these they prepared a group psychological profile of science fiction writers.

They compared it with a similar group profile for some other kind of writers and for a third group of people. They found out that the science fiction writers were in many ways similar to most human beings! There were a couple of differences, and one was in what is called “aggressive” versus “withdrawn” “cyclothymia.”

Bester: What is “cyclothymia”?

Pohl: It’s a kind of lunacy. [Editor's note: Cycling mood swings, but short of actual bipolar affective disorder.] But the question was not whether you had it, but if you had it which way you would go. Withdrawn cyclothymic people are more or less passive and tend to let things go; they overlook something that is wrong. The people who tend the other way are stubborn and won’t take nothing from nobody, and have their own opinions which you’re not going to change with an ax!

And science fiction writers were like that — the stubbornest, most difficult human beings alive!

Audience: How do writers get along with their readerships?

Bester: Fine, splendid. People ask me questions, and I answer them. People ask for autographs and I sign them. People want to talk to me. They’d like to be writers, so l try to help as hard as l can. I get along fine with readers.

Fred, have you ever been attacked by a reader?

Pohl: Not physically, no! But I went to a meeting in Boston some years ago; it was a Mensa meeting, and I was supposed to talk about science fiction and discuss it with somebody else, and this person came up to me and handed me a copy of one of my books.

I said, “Oh, you want my autograph.”

And he said, “No, I want to give it back to you. I hate it. I don’t want it in my possession.” And that’s the closest I ever came to being attacked. Of course, I started out as a fan.

Bester: So did I. I read what’s his name’s Amazing Stories when I was only that high. I couldn’t even afford to buy any. I used to read it on the newsstand. Until they chased me, and I’d come back five minutes later and I’d finish the story.

Pohl: Well, I didn’t do that. I bought them in secondhand stores and got them for a nickel. I identify more closely with readers than I do with most writers. I still read science fiction for pleasure. Not all of it, because who can? 1,200 books a year is more than I can handle. But when I have finished reading what I have to read professionally in science fiction, I read some just for fun.

Bester: Fortunately I don’t have to read it professionally. I read it just for fun, and I do read science fiction regularly.

Alas, there is not as much fun for me today because now that I’m a professional writer, always in the back of the mind is the critical writer, saying “Oh man, you loused that scene, you could have done it better.” That kind of thing kills a lot of stories for me. But occasionally a beaut comes along.

Continue reading ‘Me and Alfie, Part 7: Cyclothymia’ »

 
I admit I do, and as a matter of fact have since I was twelve years old, although my reasons changed as the years piled up. Of course the first draw was the plentiful and profusely illustrated ads that made me first to grab that section on Sunday mornings: What twelve-year-old boy doesn’t enjoy photos of pretty young girls in their underwear? Then it was the twin pull of the Sunday crossword puzzle and the cooking page.. I never tasted a single one of those dishes except in imagination, but in that form every one was delicious. And, of course, for decades on end doing that huge Sunday crossword puzzle was a ritual for half the families in America.

But the Times still holds me. It’s one of my greatest extravagances, by which I don’t mean its dollars and cents cost but its exorbitant price in hours and minutes. By the time I get through the world news section and the national, and Books, Travel, The Week in Review and the Magazine, the day is pretty well shot, and I haven’t even opened Business, Sports or any of the eight or ten other sections that come tumbling out of their plastic sheath.

But I’m fond of the ones I do read. Unfailingly they provide me with little nuggets of knowledge I might not otherwise possess. In one issue of the Magazine, for instance, I learned that if I have a little naturally occurring lithium in my tap water the chance of my committing suicide is lessened — so reported the neuropsychiatrist Takeshi Terao, after a study of communities in Japan’s Oita Prefecture. And if you pull out those old sixth-grade snapshots of yourself and study them, are you smiling? Psychologist Matthew Hertenstein reported that when he compared the top ten percent of childhood smilers with the bottom, the nonsmiling kids grew up to have five times as many divorces.

In that same issue of the Magazine, I learned that we now have a third option for what to do with our corpses when we’re through with them in addition to the old standbys.of burial or cremation. It’s called resomation, and it’s ecologically sound, neither increasing the carbon burden nor taking priceless land out of productive use. It was pioneered by the Mayo Clinic as a means of disposing of donated cadavers when no longer needed, and is now beginning to become available to commercial undertakers in a few states. In resomation, the corpse is heated in a potassium hydroxide solution for three hours, after which all that’s left is a soft, white cremation-like ash, plus shiny dental fillings and surgical implants, if any existed, and a brownish liquid which, being 100-percent sterile, can be poured away with waste waters.

     Leslyn Heinlein, ca. 1933.

As I understand it (my information on this point is a little iffy), Robert A. Heinlein was married at least three times, maybe more. The only early wife I know anything about, though, was the one just before Ginny. Her name was Leslyn.

What I know about Leslyn is really just two things. First, she must have been a pretty nice person, because John Campbell and his then wife Dona named one of their daughters after her. Second, a few years after Robert had divorced Leslyn and married Ginny, I began to receive sad, wistful, lonesome letters from Leslyn reminding me over and over of the wonderful times she and Bob and I and other local science-fiction writers and fans had had sitting around her kitchen table in the old days.

This worried me. You see, it had never happened. I had never been in her kitchen, nor indeed had I met Leslyn anywhere else, either. The woman clearly was not in close touch with reality. I could think of nothing to do about it other than to reply to her letters as pleasantly and noncommittally — and briefly — as I could.

But I did, and still do, wonder what it did to a person with as hypertrophied a sense of duty as Heinlein’s to have been unable to save the woman he had vowed to love and protect.

 
To be continued. . . .

 
Related posts:

• The Wives (and Drives) of Robert A. Heinlein, Part 1
• The Wives (and Drives) of Robert A. Heinlein: Ginny
• Robert A. Heinlein, Algis Budrys and Me
• Working with Robert A. Heinlein
• Working with Robert A. Heinlein, Part 2
• Greetings from S17° 32.18′ W149° 34.17′

IQ, Do U?

Lewis Terman

Remember the Terman kids? The high-IQ teenagers Lewis Terman collected in the 1920s to follow through their adult lives to see whether getting high marks on the test (their average IQ was 150) really did mean intellectual success as a grownup? In the end, two of his candidates wound up as Nobel laureates, but they didn’t show up on his results. Terman had dropped them from his study. Their IQs weren’t high enough.

 
If It Hurts, Talk Dirty

Psychologist Richard Stephens (UK’s Keele University), working with volunteers, applied pain stimuli to them and told them their audible response would be recorded. He instructed some, randomly selected, to avoid bad language while the rest were permitted to let the censorable words rip. On analysis of the results, the foul-mouthed sufferers turned out to be able to handle pain better than the prissy ones.

 
‘Stocks That Win If the Health Protestors Win’

That was a headline on Fox for one of its financial-advice guys the other day — for which I have to say:

Thank you, Fox! You’ve finally come clean! As was true all along. those “spontaneous” demonstrations of screaming or bellowing demonstrators, which have made it just about impossible to have a meaningful public discussion — the ones that you and all the other right-wing wheeler-dealers have been so assiduously nursing along — have just one real purpose: to prevent the passing of laws that would threaten the exorbitant profits of the giant so-called “health” providers.

Related post: More Little Known Fun Facts

I don’t want to give you the impression that all my lecture subjects came from computer-geeks in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Far from it. My net was spread far wider than that, and my number-one crowd-pleaser in those early days had nothing to do with computers or any other manifestation of inorganic hard science. It was, in fact, a bunch of worms.

James V. McConnell

The planarian worms were the province of Dr. James V. McConnell of the psychology department of the University of Michigan. They weren’t much to look at — tiny, thin, the color of milk — but the important thing about planarians (about Dugesia dorotocephala, if you’d like a formal introduction) was that, although they were pretty dumb even as worms in general go, they were not totally ineducable.

Given an experimenter with a significant amount of patience they could be trained to acquire a Pavlovian conditioned reflex to certain kinds of stimuli, and Jim McConnell had that patience. Other factors that made planarians attractive research animals included the facts that they were easy to raise and not at all cuddly, so they didn’t have the legions of defenders of, say, gerbils or bunnies. They were also pretty cheap, all of which qualities added up to the fact that McConnell had large quantities of the creatures to experiment on.

And he did in fact experiment, in many ways, employing large numbers of planarians. One series of experiments — don’t ask me how he got on to this train of thought, because I don’t know — produced some quite curious results. It goes like this:

Planarians

Suppose you take a batch of planarians and divide it into three parts. The first group, for reasons we will come to in a moment, we will name LUNCH, the second WELL-FED and the third simply CONTROL. The LUNCH group goes to school. That is, you do the Pavlov conditioning thing with them, repeating a given stimulus that naturally causes the worms to twitch (perhaps a flash of light) along with a second (maybe a mild electric shock) that doesn’t until the worms now twitch at the shock alone. This is the definition of a conditioned reflex, but when they have attained it you don’t give the LUNCH group caps to throw in the air. Instead their graduation ceremony amounts only to being chopped up into small pieces and fed to the second, or WELL-FED, group.

You might imagine that even a planarian worm could have objections to cannibalism. They don’t, though. WELL-FEDs will gobble LUNCH planarians down as enthusiastically as any other part of their diet. Then, while the WELL-FEDs are chowing down you start a new series of Pavlovian flinch lessons for them and the CONTROLs, and this is where Dr. McConnell found a quite unanticipated result.

Both WELL-FEDs and CONTROLs learned to do their assigned reflexes as they were supposed to, but there was a difference. The WELL-FEDs learned faster. They acquired their new reflexes after significantly fewer repetitions than the CONTROLs. To Dr. McConnell that could mean only one thing. Some learning was being passed along through the digestive system. Part of what the WELL-FEDs “knew” came not from what they had been taught but from what they had had to eat.

As you can imagine, I had a lot of fun with that idea, particularly with college audiences and especially when senior members of the faculty were right there in the room — and in particular when they were old friends like Tom Clareson or Jack Williamson. I got a lot of mileage out of those dim-witted little creatures. (By which, of course, I mean to refer to the planarian worms.) Sadly it has begun to seem that the effects McConnell (and I) described may have been illusory, because when other experimenters tried to replicate his results they failed.

That’s not to say that no one took McConnell’s work seriously, though. There was at least one person who evidently did, and that was a troubled recluse by the name of Theodore Kaczynski, better known to American history as the “Unabomber.” Apparently Kaczynski didn’t care for what McConnell was doing with the planarians, because he sent one of his bombs McConnell’s way. It didn’t kill anyone, but the noise of the explosion left McConnell partially deaf for the rest of his life,

But by then I had moved on to other subjects anyway, because a generous Providence had dropped in my lap a whole new comedic (and serious) topic to talk about.