What You Can Change . . . And What You Can't*: The Complete Guide to Successful Self-Improvement (13 page)

So both the bright noise and the saccharin were noticeable, but only the taste became aversive when the rats became nauseated, and only the bright noise became aversive when the rats suffered pain. How could this be? Both the Garcia findings and the
sauce béarnaise
aversion looked like Pavlovian conditioning. But they did not fit the laws of conditioning. There were five problems:
³

First, Pavlovian conditioning is not selective: Any CS that is present when any UR occurs should get conditioned. Pavlov was there when the dogs were fed, and so he became exciting (so, presumably, did his voice, his after-shave lotion, and his white coat). But this didn’t work for Garcia’s rats. Only the saccharin became aversive with stomach illness, and only the bright noise became aversive with pain.

Similarly with
sauce béarnaise;
it had selectively absorbed the badness of the incident—at the expense of other potential CSs. The
sauce béarnaise
, and nothing else, became nauseating. There were plenty of other stimuli present that should have been conditioned, since conditioning works by sheer contiguity between co-occurring events. But no other stimulus became aversive. I still liked beef. I still liked my wife, who was there the whole time. The white plates I ate the sauce off and the Danish stainless-steel silverware still looked okay to me, though they were paired with illness. So, too, was the toilet bowl I threw up into, and it didn’t look unusually noxious to me afterward, either.

The second violation of known laws was that Pavlovian conditioning bridges only very short time gaps. If you hear a burst of noise and an electric shock follows it by one second, you will become afraid of the noise. If the shock doesn’t happen until a minute later, however, you will not become afraid of the noise. A single minute’s delay between CS and US is too long for conditioning to bridge. The delay between the saccharin and the radiation sickness was much longer, just as was the delay between tasting the
sauce béarnaise
and getting sick: not seconds, but hours—hundreds of times longer than in any successful conditioning experiment.

The third problem was that Garcia’s rats hated saccharin after just one dose of X rays, and I came to dislike
sauce béarnaise
with just a single experience. Normal Pavlovian conditioning almost never takes in just one trial. It took Pavlov repeated feeding of his dogs to get them to salivate to his presence. It takes about five noise-shock pairings to get someone sweating over noise. This is true even when the shock is very painful.

The fourth problem was that ordinary Pavlovian conditioning is rational: Its laws follow the growth and decline of conscious expectations. Pavlov’s dogs learned to expect food when Pavlov showed up, and so they salivated. Once Pavlov stopped feeding them, they stopped salivating when they saw him—this is called
extinction. Sauce béarnaise
didn’t work this way, however. The day after I got sick, I called my closest collaborator to apologize for not showing up at the lab. He asked me if I had come down with the stomach flu that was sweeping the department. After that I “knew” that the sauce was innocent; the stomach flu, not the sauce, had caused the illness. I did not expect that I would throw up if I were to eat
sauce béarnaise
once more. But knowledge didn’t help;
sauce béarnaise
still tasted bad.

The same irrationality is true of Garcia’s phenomenon. Consciousness, the whole elaborate apparatus that dominates much of our life, is irrelevant to learning a taste aversion. In one experiment, rats tasted saccharin and were then made unconscious with anesthesia. While asleep, brief stomach illness was induced. After the rats woke up, they hated saccharin.
⁴

The last problem was that Pavlovian conditioning extinguishes easily, a side effect of its being a conscious expectation. All Pavlov had to do was show up but not feed his dogs a few times, and they stopped salivating when they saw him. But my dislike of
sauce béarnaise
lasted a decade, and remained alive through a dozen dinner parties in which skeptical psychologists gave me
sauce béarnaise
to sample. I can eat it now, twenty-five years later, but still, I had to change from Craig Claiborne’s recipe to Julia Child’s.

The message from Garcia
. All these problems
can
be reconciled with Pavlovian conditioning, because evolution is at work. For millions of years our ancestors repeatedly encountered, among their other woes, stomach illness. Plants and animals they ate sometimes contained poison, their food sometimes spoiled, the streams they drank out of sometimes carried germs. Each of these challenges could have killed them; but if they got sick and survived, they had to learn to avoid the toxin in the future.

The problem is: What to avoid? Toxins in nature are avoidable only because they have distinctive tastes, as do the foods that carry them. Those of our ancestors who after stomach illness learned rapidly and well to hate the most distinctive taste that accompanied sickness passed on their genes. Those who didn’t died out.

We are
prepared
by our evolutionary history to learn some things well. We learn, as I did, that
sauce béarnaise
goes with illness—in one trial and across long delays. This learning occurs at levels deeper and less fallible than rationality, is very strong, and is illogical. It took years for me to start liking
sauce béarnaise
again.

We do not “know” any of these things when we are born—they are not “instinctive.” Garcia’s rats loved saccharin, and I loved
sauce béarnaise
the first time I tasted it. If we have but a single aversive experience with prepared associations, however, we absorb it immediately and will not easily let it go. Evolution has shaped our sensory apparatus, and it has shaped our response system. A keen sense of taste and the response of retching are both the product of natural selection. We have known this ever since Darwin. What Garcia told us that was new is that how quickly we learn something or how slowly we learn it—or whether we learn it at all—is subject to natural selection. Learnability itself is shaped by evolution.

In response to Garcia’s findings, a long and bitter quarrel ensued in the journals, perhaps the bitterest in the history of learning theory. It is still not over. Most psychologists now accept the idea that our genes constrain learning, but for the staunch hard core, this is still heresy, for two reasons: The first is a special-interest-group concern, and the second is a fundamental concern.

The guild of behaviorists had by 1965 painted itself into a corner. We did experiments on pigeons pecking disks for grain, on rats pressing bars for Purina pellets, on rats becoming afraid of tones, and very little else. But we dubbed our findings, grandly, “the laws of learning”—not “the laws of hungry pigeon learning” or “the laws of rat learning.” We declared our laws to be as universal as Newton’s gravity. Garcia, very much not a member of the guild, told us that the kind of stimulus (taste) and its evolutionary relation to the response (stomach illness) mattered a lot. This, he contended, produced a violation of the laws: one trial learning over long delays. This meant that all the years that B. F. Skinner, Clark Hull, Ivan Pavlov, and their followers had put in on rats, pigeons, and dogs might have yielded mere laboratory curiosities—not general laws. All the work of the guild might be unimportant.

But the real reason the rest of psychology was glued to this controversy was more basic. American psychology as a whole is militantly environmentalistic, and Garcia challenged this premise. The underpinnings of American environmentalism are very deep, both intellectually and politically.

John Locke, David Hume, and the British empiricists began this tradition by arguing that all knowledge comes through the senses. These sensations are tied together by associations, they averred, and so everything we know, everything a human being is, is simply the buildup of associations. If you want to understand a person, all you need know is the details of his upbringing. Behaviorism generally, and Pavlovian conditioning in particular, captured the imagination of American psychology because it was a testable version of Locke’s environmentalism. Environmentalism is not just at the heart of behaviorism; it is the core of the dogma of human plasticity.

And make no mistake about the political side. It is no coincidence that Locke fathered both the idea that all knowledge is associations and the idea that all men are created equal. The behaviorists, scientific Lockeans all, dominated academic psychology from the end of World War I to the Vietnam era. John Watson began the behaviorist movement in the era of the melting pot. His popularity was in part the result of his covert message: The new immigrants were not inferior to the people already in America; they could be molded into the same high-quality stuff that the WASPs already were. The defeat of Hitler added fuel to American environmentalism: The genocide of the concentration camps filled my generation with determination never again to countenance genetic explanations of human psychology.

We may have been working on rats and pigeons, but in doing so we were trying to show that human beings were the product of their upbringing and their culture, not of their race. The civil rights movement, feminism, the anti-Vietnam War protests (white people killing yellow people), all fed into and fed on this sacred, covert premise of American psychology.

Militant environmentalism allowed behaviorism to dominate American academic psychology. Garcia denied its most basic premise: that we are wholly the creation of our environment, not of our genes. Viewed from afar, the message from Garcia does not seem very earthshaking. He did not claim that we are a product of our genes or that our upbringing was unimportant. He claimed only genetic
predisposition
. He claimed that our genes
limited
what we could learn. But this opened—just a crack—the door that environmentalists wanted shut forever. The door has stayed open, and it has provided a fresh way to look at the many things that are learned, among them birdsong, aggression, language, imprinting, sexual-object choice, and, not the least, phobias.

Phobia and Fears

A phobia is an intense fear that is out of proportion to the real danger of the object that causes it. In its milder form, phobia is common, afflicting about 10 percent of the adult population. In its extreme form, so intense as to keep sufferers housebound, it is rarer—well under 1 percent of adults.
⁵
The most common kinds of phobias are agoraphobia (literally, fear of the marketplace), which is the fear of crowded places, open spaces, and travel; social phobia, the fear of humiliation and embarrassment while being observed by other people; and nosophobia, the fear of a specific illness, like AIDS or breast cancer. Also common are the object phobias, which include the fear of animals, insects, heights, airplanes, enclosure, or bad weather. There are rare phobias, like fear of thirteens (triskaidekaphobia) or snow, and I even once came across a patient who had trouble dealing with exhaust pipes (mufflerophobia).

About half of the cases of phobia begin with a traumatic incident, usually in childhood. Susan’s severe fear of cats began with a trauma.

“Don’t let Boycat in!” Susan, four years old, shrieked to her mother, pointing to the kitchen door. Outside sat the proud family cat, covered in rabbit blood and gnawing a partly eaten bunny. Susan cried hysterically for an hour. After this she would never again stay in the same room with Boycat or any other feline
.

As she grew up, her aversion to cats intensified. But this fall, at age thirty-one, it climaxed. She can’t leave the house. The house next door was vacant for the summer, and Susan glimpsed a cat in the unmown grass. She now fears that if she goes out, she will be attacked and mauled by a cat. Her first thought on waking is of what cats she might meet today. Every sudden noise and movement in the house startles her
—
it might be a cat. Her last thought as she falls asleep, exhausted, is dread
—
of the cats she will meet in her nightmares
.

Successful therapy
. It is normal for four-and five-year-old children to “break out” in strong object fears, particularly of animals. Ninety-five percent of these fears simply disappear as the child grows up. A few, like Susan’s, persist into adulthood, and when they do, they are unremitting and will not wane of their own accord. But there is one brand of therapy for phobias that works reliably: behavior therapy. Here is the theory of why it works:

A phobia is an instance of ordinary conditioning with a particularly traumatic UR (unconditional response). Some neutral object, like a cat, happens to be around when a trauma, like Susan’s terror on seeing a mangled bunny, occurs. The cat is the CS (conditional stimulus), and Susan’s trauma is the UR. By virtue of this pairing, the CS becomes terrifying.

If phobias are simply Pavlovian conditioning, it should be easy to eliminate them. Therapy needs only to accomplish Pavlovian extinction—by getting the patient to stay in the presence of the CS, but arranging to have no UR occur. Until Joseph Wolpe came along in the 1950s, no one had ever tried this straightforward approach. Psychotherapy at that time was dominated by psychoanalysis, whose practitioners tried, without success, to get phobics to gain insight into the sexual and aggressive conflicts that allegedly caused their phobias. By the mid-1960s, however, psychoanalysts knew that insight therapy on phobias was “never easy.”
⁶

Two behavior therapies, both of which are forms of extinction, are now used with success on phobias.