The Act of Creation (84 page)

There is a rather striking parallel between the present interpretation
of discovery as a bisociative process, and the conclusions which Hebb
reached regarding the sudden appearance of new insights:*

The sudden activation of an effective link between two concepts or
percepts, at first unrelated, is a simple case of 'insight' . . . [33]
Insight, as a sudden perception of new relationships, can result
from the simultaneous activity of two conceptual cycles in adult
learning. [34]
The insightful act is an excellent example of something that is
not learned, but still depends on learning. It is not learned,
since it can be adequately performed on its first occurrence; it
is not perfected through practice in the first place, but appears
all at once in recognizable form (further practice, however, may
still improve it). On the other hand, the situation must not be
completely strange; the animal must have had prior experience with
the component parts of the situation, or with other situations that
have some similarity to it. . . . All our evidence thus points to
the conclusion that a new insight consists of a recombination of
pre-existent mediating processes, not the sudden appearance of a
wholly new process. [Hebb's italics]
Such recombinations must be frequent in man's everyday living, and
in a theoretical framework we must consider them to be original and
creative. . . . [35]

Hilgard (1958) came to similar conclusions: 'Because all learning is
to some extent cognitively controlled, the distinction between blind
learning and learning with understanding becomes one of degree.' [36]
NOTES
To
p. 581
. Köhler made a distinction
between one-box experiments and the building of two- or three-storey
structures. In the latter additional difficulties arise from what he
called the chimp's 'lack of a feeling for statics'. This handicap no doubt
adds to the anlmal's perplexity; but Koko's and Sultan's behaviour in
experiments of this kind (cf. pp. 47, 118, 122 ff) indicates that not
only the problem of balance, but the whole box-building business goes
against the chimpanzee's grain.

 

 

To
p. 585
. The importance of visual clues
varies of course with different species. Adams' cat immediately saw
that the piece of liver can be hauled up by the string to which it was
attached. Köhler tried a similar experiment with his dog: a basket,
conraining food, was suspended from a rope outside the barred window of
the room so that the dog could easily have hoisted it up with her teeth
or paws. But she 'did not even attempt this simple method of self-help,
and paid no attention to the string which was lying just under her
nose -- whilst at the same time she showed the liveIiest interest in
the distant basket. Dogs, and probably, for instance, horses as well
. . . might easily starve to death in these circumstances which offer
hardly any difficulty to human beings -- or to chimpanzees' (Köhler,
1957, p. 31). Far be it from me to suggest that cats are more intelligent
than dogs; what the experiment shows is that cats are phylogenetically
more ripe for this type of perceptual and manipulative skill than dogs.

 

 

To
p. 589
. Hebb's
Organization of Behaviour
was published in the same year as
Insight and Outlook
; his
A
Textbook of Psychology
in 1958.

 

 

 

 

 

XIV

 

 

LEARNING TO SPEAK
Intending and Saying
Preparing to say something, whether it is a single sentence or a public
lecture, is to set a hierarchy in motion.
' . . . And has the reader never asked himself', William James wrote
in 1890, 'what kind of a mental fact is his
intention of saying a
thing
before he has said it? It is an entirely definite intention,
distinct from all other intentions, an absolutely distinct state of
consciousness, therefore; and yet how much of it consists of definite
sensorial images, either of words or of things? Hardly anything! Linger,
and the words and things come into the mind; the anticipatory intention,
the divination is there no more . . . [The intention] has therefore a
nature of its own of the most positive sort, and yet what can we say
about it without using words that belong to the later mental facts that
replace it? The intention
to say so and so
is the only name it
can receive. One may admit that a good third of our psychic life consists
in these rapid premonitory perspective views of schemes of thought not
yet articulate.' [1]
In other words, before the verbal hierarchy is set into motion, there
is an ideational process of a highly conscious character, an intention
or active expectation, which itself is not yet verbalized. Consider what
is involved in preparing an ex-tempore lecture. The first step is to jot
down the principal arguments or themes in key-words -- in 'symbols of the
second remove' so to speak. Each theme is then treated as a sub-whole,
a flexible matrix of ideas with an invariant code: the logic of the
argument to be conveyed. But the ways of putting it across are many:
factually, whimsically, by concrete examples. My strategical choice is
governed by the lie of the land: the character of the audience; and by
feedback from implicit tries: their anticipated reactions. If I have
decided on concrete examples, I must search for them in my memory, and
then again make strategical choices. The next question is where to start,
to decide on the sequential order, and the approximate time allotted
to each of the various subjects so as to make a balanced whole. In
this quasi-architectural planning, the arguments are still treated as
sub-wholes or building blocks, whose 'contents are known but are present
without adequate verbal designation'. [2] All this is still a long way
from the choice of actual words; in fact the hazy intentional situation
described by James repeats itself on several levels.
But as we approach the actual formation of sentences, automatisms begin
to intrude, indicating that we are nearing the bottom of the hierarchy --
the consummatory acts of language which terminate the appetive behaviour
of thought. The sub-codes of grammar and syntax, which now enter into
action, are almost wholly automatized; and when we finally arrive at the
formation or syntactic units -- individual words patterned into phrases
-- there is a good chance that these will be 'fixed action-patterns' --
verbal formulae, clichés, mannerisms, stereotyped turns of phrase,
which remind one of the fighting rituals of the stickleback (e.g. 'the
evidence tends to show', 'as we have seen before', 'we must bear in
mind, however', etc.). Technical papers and bureaucratic utterances
are conspicuous by their narrowness of vocabulary and rigidity of
phrasing. Fortunately, there exist non-abstractive hierarchies whose
criteria of relevance are aesthetic or emotional, which co-determine
the tactics of verbal choices and counteract the tendency towards
automatization.
Having gone through all these implicit motions, we end up by spelling out
the actual sounds or ink marks, vocal patterns or typewritten letters.
Yet even on this automated level, hierarchic organization prevails; the
phonetic sequences or manual patterns are triggered off as wholes and
perceived as wholes; nowhere, in the course of our descent through the
hierarchy, do we strike rock-bottom, made of hard 'atoms of behaviour'.
Thus 'verbal behaviour' is initiated by unverbalized intentions at
the top of the language hierarchy, and terminates in deverbalized
sensory-motor activities; at each level it is governed by rules which
elude verbal definition, and modified by extraneous factors acting on the
plastic matrices of language. Each time we slice behaviour 'vertically'
-- instead of horizontally on a single level -- we arrive at a series
which at the top recedes into an elusive blur and at its base vanishes
in the twilight of awareness.
The above description may have seemed unnecessarily verbose, since
the hierarchic structure of language is so obvious that it need not
be stressed. After all, nearly half a century has passed since Watson
proclaimed that speech consists in the manipulation of words, and thinking
in the sub-vocal manipulation of words. However, if the reader thinks
that the cruder forms of Paleo-Behaviourism are a matter of the past,
he should turn to the
first Note
* at the end
of this chapter (which will also provide some light relief). It is an
excerpt from a textbook for College students, published in 1961, which
starts with the sentence: 'For many of you, this is your first encounter
with psychology as a science.' One wonders what this first encounter will
do to the mind of the trusting student who is here quite literally led
to believe that human discourse consists in the chaining of S.-R. units
which are best studied by bar-pressing experiments 'under the more ideal
conditions in the laboratory'.

 

 

 

The Dawn of Symbol Consciousness

 

 

The previous section referred to speech as a performance. Learning
to speak proceeds more or less in the opposite direction -- from the
bottom to the top of the hierarchy. But only 'more or less', because
bit-learning plays here a much lesser part than in the acquisition
of mechanical skills like typing. Let us take a closer look at a few
characteristic aspects of the process.

 

 

The first vocal ventures of the child confirm the now-familiar principle
(cf.
Chapter II
) that spontaneous motor activity
precedes sensory control. The child, too, 'acts on the environment
before it reacts to it' -- as parents must learn in sleepless nights;
cooing and babbling are spontaneous expressions of
joie de vivre
,
in which a surplus of energy is discharged, as in the waving of arms
and wriggling of toes.

 

 

At the early stages these spontaneous babbling sounds are the same
whether they are produced by an American white or a Negro baby (i.e. the
frequency spectra of the phonemes are practically identical). [3] At
five to six months, however, when syllabic, speech-like sounds become
increasingly frequent, the spectrum shifts noticeably towards the
sound patterns produced by the adults in the child's environment; and
at twenty-four months the resemblance is close. Thus the originally
undistinguishable phonetic matrices of infants from different
language-groups become differentiated by the imitative repetition of
adult sound-patterns. Imitation is at first probably automatic, the
auditory-vocal feedback apparatus being excited by the input as in the
young singing bird; then shades into a more or less conscious response --
from 'echolalia' to 'metalalia'.

 

 

The first correlations between a sound pattern and an object or person
are probably 'stamped in' by the parents at an age when the child's
nervous system is not yet mature for them. In Book One (pp.
220-3
) I have mentioned two examples at opposite
extremes: Watson conditioning an infant less than six months old --
i.e. much too early -- to say
da
each time it was given the bottle;
and Helen Keller's sudden and dramatic discovery, at the age of seven --
i.e. when she was overripe for it -- that 'everything had a name and each
name gave birth to a new thought'. In the average, normal child the dawn
of symbol consciousness seems to be a gradual, cumulative process. From
approximately the eighteenth month onward there is a sharp increase
in the child's vocabulary (Book One,
p. 221
)
and somewhere around that time it makes that 'most important discovery
of its life', that verbal labels can be attached not only to particular
things and events, but that everything under the sun has a name. The
universe of words, and the universe of things, have become integrated
and will remain inseparable. Henceforth, every word
must
mean
something and everything
must
have a name.

 

 

With the emergence of language, we have attained a new level of the
cognitive hierarchy, which represents a sharp break in the continuity
of learning processes in animals and man. Homologue laws still operate:
'All things have names' may be regarded as yet another case of empirical
induction which we have seen operating on all levels; and verbal symbolism
may be regarded as an extension of sign situations. Dolphins can be taught
to respond to verbal or visual commands; dogs and chimps can make their
wishes be known to their masters; cats will learn that bolts and loops
mean escape; bees can communicate their experiences by dancing. But such
communication by signs extends only to a few particular situations; it
is generalized to some extent in the laboratory situation, when it seems
to dawn on the cat that 'all these contraptions are means of escape',
as it dawns on the child that 'all these words are means of getting one's
way'. But at this point the cat has reached the limit of its abstractive
capabilities, whereas the child has only got to its first inkling of
what words can do for you.*
Their first, obvious advantages to the child are that they can be utilized
both as labels, and as levers which make things happen, that they serve
both the progressive socialization and internalization of behaviour --
communication and inner discourse. This is well-covered ground which
needs no further labouring. But another phenomenon of early language
behaviour is rarely emphasized: the appearance of the naming question
or 'naming mania'. The child points at anything it sees, asks 'This --
?' or 'What that?', and is visibly satisfied to learn the answer, without
any utilitarian reward. Alternatively, it points at things, calls out
their name or, if it has forgotten it, invents a new one. Here is a true
paradigm of latent learning, of the exploratory drive, or of
l'art pour
l'art
behaviour -- whatever one wants to call it. To quote Piaget:
'It is . . . no exaggeration to say that sensory-motor intelligence is
limited to desiring success or practical adaptation, whereas the function
of verbal or conceptual thought is to know and state truth.' [4]
But there is another aspect to the 'name-expectation': henceforth the
child's concept of a thing or event will be experienced by it as
incomplete
if there is no verbal label attached to it. The concept
will behave like a molecule with a free valency, as it were. We can
perhaps recapture an echo of this when we hunt for the forgotten name of a
person. Also, when we learn a new language, we suddenly have a whole class
of free valencies: we feel actually frustrated when we discover that the
French have no word for 'snobbery' or 'understatement', and are tempted
to exclaim like a child: 'But surely they
must
have a name for it?'
The behaviour of the rat exploring a maze or of the monkey fearfully
peeping into the box with the snake, could be described as interrogatory,
and the same description could be applied to the puzzled expressions and
actions of a small child before it has learned to speak. But its first
explicit
, verbal questions refer to the
names
of things,
prompted by the need to 'saturate' the free valencies in its pre-verbal
object-concepts. Is it too speculative to assume that this origin of
the questioning habit must influence the whole later development of
thought? The fact that each naming question can be readily answered by
adults, may implant the implicit belief into the child that
all
questions are both meaningful and answerable; that the nature of
explanation is based on the same kind of simple and direct connections
as that between 'thing' and 'name'. This implicit belief seems to have
been one of the factors responsible for the aberrations of human thought.
Concepts and Labels
I have talked of (pre-verbal) 'concepts' to which the verbal label becomes
attached. The
Concise Oxford Dictionary
defines a concept as an
'idea of a class of objects; general notion'; Webster as 'a mental image
of a thing formed by generalization from particulars'; Hilgard: 'When a
symbol stands for a class of objects or events with common properties,
we say that it refers to a
concept
' [5]; Piaget [6] regards the
development of 'object concepts' as one of the principal achievements
of the 'sensory-motor intelligence' which precedes the rise of verbal
intelligence in the child's first two years. He distinguishes six stages
in the attainment of stable object-concepts, which he defines as 'a system
of perceptual images endowed with a constant spatial form throughout its
sequential displacements and constituting an item which can be isolated in
the causal series unfolding in time.'[7] It is interesting to compare
Piaget's rather abstract formulations with the lurid 'incisiveness'
of Wilder Penfield -- a neuro-surgeon. He too starts by securing his
flanks with quotes from Webster and Oxford; then he goes on:

The concept may be a butterfly. It may be a person he has known. It
may be an animal, a city, a type of action, or a quality. Each concept
calls for a name. These names are wanted for what may be a noun or
a verb, an adjective or an adverb. Concepts of this type have been
formed gradually over the years from childhood on. Each time a thing
is seen or heard or experienced, the individual has a perception
of it. A part of that perception comes from his own concommittant
interpretation. Each successive perception forms and probably alters the
permanent concept. And words are acquired gradually, also, and deposited
somehow in the treasure-house of word memory -- the cortico-thalamic
speech mechanisms. Words are often acquired simultaneously with the
concepts. . . . A little boy may first see a butterfly fluttering
from flower to flower in a meadow. Later he sees them on the wing or
in pictures, many times. On each occasion he adds to his conception
of butterfly.
It becomes a generalization from many particulars. He builds up a
concept of a butterfly which he can remember and summon at will,
although when he comes to manhood, perhaps, he can recollect none of
the particular butterflies of past experience.
The same is true of the sequence of sound that makes up a melody. He
remembers it after he has forgotten each of the many times he
heard or perhaps sang or played it. The same is true of colours. He
acquires, quite quickly, the concept of lavender, although all the
objects of which he saw the colour have faded beyond the frontier of
voluntary recall. The same is true of the generalization he forms of
an acquaintance. Later on he can summon his concept of the individual
without recalling their many meetings. [8]

Thus the pre-verbal concepts of the child are formed by a series of
operations continuous with those described in previous chapters: the
de-particularization, filtering, and coding of percepts according to
those of their common features which are relevant to a given conceptual
hierarchy; the formation of colour- shape- and object-constancies; the
development of sensory-motor skills such as the grasping of objects,
bringing them close to the eye, visual and tactile exploration, etc.;
lastly, according to Piaget's schema, the 'objectification' of space
and time, the gradual separation of the self from the non-self, and the
beginnings of the transition from magical to more objectified kinds of
implied causality. Most of these processes can be found, to a greater
or lesser degree, in animal learning; but with the addition of a verbal
label, the concept acquires a new dimension as it were, and the continuity
of the series of learning processes in animal and man is broken. No
extrapolation is possible from the behaviour of the rat to that of man.
This can be demonstrated even in maze-learning experiments with humans,
where the advantages of verbalization are not at once obvious. In a
famous experiment by Warden [9] forty subjects were seated in front of a
table with a grooved maze on it. The maze was of the same type as in rat
experiments, with various cul-de-sacs; the subject had to thread his way
through it with a stylus in his hand, by purely tactile guidance, for the
maze was hidden from his view by a screen. The number of trials required
until the maze was completely learned varied, according to subject,
between 16 and 195 (!). At the end of the experiment each subject had
to report whether he had memorized the maze by the 'feel' of it, that
is by motor-kinesthetic imagery; or by making a 'visual map'; or by a
verbal formula -- e.g. 'first left, third right, first right', etc.
The results were as follows: out of 60 subjects, 17 adopted the 'motor'
method. These needed an average of 124 trials (ranging from 72 to 195
according to subject) to learn the maze. Eighteen adopted the 'visual'
method; average trials: 68, ranging from 41 to 104. Twenty-five adopted
the 'verbal' formula; average trials: 32, range: 16 to 62. Thus, in
round figures, the visualizers learned twice as fast, the verbalizers
four times as fast as the motor learners.
This reminds one of Otto Koehler's experiments (mentioned on