The Englishman Memoirs of a Psychobiologist
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The Englishman Memoirs of a Psychobiologist by John Staddon DRAFT (The University of Buckingham Press, 2016) Contents Preface ......................................................................................................... i Chapter 1: War Toddler .............................................................................. 1 Chapter 2: The Philological School .......................................................... 30 Chapter 3: College Daze ........................................................................... 47 Chapter 4: Fort Rosebery .......................................................................... 66 Chapter 5: Roanoke, VA .......................................................................... 91 Chapter 6: Cambridge, MA .................................................................... 101 Chapter 7: Time and Cognition .............................................................. 126 Chapter 8: Oh, Canada! .......................................................................... 143 Chapter 9: North Carolina and ‘Superstition’ ......................................... 157 Chapter 10: Time and Memory .............................................................. 173 Chapter 11: Bird song, evolution and analogy ....................................... 191 Chapter 12: Benedictus benedicat .......................................................... 204 Chapter 13: Nuoro .................................................................................. 228 Chapter 14: Dahlem ................................................................................ 234 Chapter 15: Mexico, Ribeirão Preto ....................................................... 249 Chapter 16: Shiraishi .............................................................................. 261 Chapter 17: Administration .................................................................... 266 Chapter 18: ‘Possum’ ............................................................................. 276 Epilogue .................................................................................................. 294 DEDICATION To my Mother, Father and Grandmother for love, laughter and putting up with much nonsense. Preface When I retired from Duke University a few years ago I donated most of my files to the Archives of Psychology at the University of Akron. I had no idea that I might need them – to help me write a memoir, for example. But perhaps it was just as well. To include everything in a life would surely exhaust the writer, bore the reader and miss the whole point. Which is not to document every detail, but to try to show the pattern, to involve and perhaps even to entertain. A pudding may lack, as Winston Churchill once complained, a theme, but a life should have at least one or two. Although I have been an academic for most of my life, the way I got there has taken some surprising turns. The first four chapters of this memoir describe what I can remember and discover about my early life: an unsuspected ancestry, fun in WW2 London, comical schooldays, and a spell in colonial Africa interrupting a wobbly college career at the end of which I left England for America. In the U.S. I followed again a slightly erratic graduate-school trajectory that ended up in a Harvard basement. The main part of the book is about science, my efforts to understand the world opened up for me by biology, Darwin, the evolving cybernetic revolution and the experimental methods of influential and opinionated behaviorist B. F. Skinner. I have tried to make this part as simple and nontechnical as possible, although a couple of graphs have intruded. My work has gone in several directions. First, study of the origins of learned behavior, behavioral variation. That part owes a debt both to Darwin, for the concepts, and Skinner for the experimental method. Second, study of animals’ striking ability to tell time. How does it work? Is there a ‘clock’? Does it involve – as I was to conclude – processes of memory? Third, the dynamics of reward schedules. Animals and people settle down to extraordinarily orderly patterns of behavior under such schedules. Laws can be derived. What do they mean? Most importantly: what do they tell us about the processes going on in individual organisms? (Surprisingly little, it turns out.) And finally, the similarities between behavioral ecology, learning psychology and economics. All try to understand their subject matter through the lens of rationality: does the species/pigeon/consumer act so as to maximize payoff? Maximization – rational behavior, Darwinian fitness – is a unifying idea, but in the end its failures are more scientifically interesting than its successes. An academic career often involves travel. Although I never sought travel for its own sake, in fact I have spent much time working in more or less exotic, or at least remote, locations: Oxford (which can seem exotic), Australia, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Japan – and Canada. The next few chapters are about some of those experiences. The i book ends with a dip into academic politics and some satirical reactions to it published in a now-notorious Duke University faculty newsletter. This is not a tell-all biography. I have been married twice. My first marriage had its good parts – my two children, certainly, and mutual support at the stressful early stage of my career. But in the end the stresses proved too much. My second, although not without emergencies, has sustained two people happily through all our travels and travails. I owe my wife the greatest of debts for that. But few titillating details will be found in these pages. I hope that their absence will not disappoint too many readers. ii Chapter 1: War Toddler No child’s home seems strange to him. Yet mine was much stranger than I knew. I was born in 1937 in Lavender Cottage, a small house in the village of Grayshott, on the Hampshire-Surrey border. The house had been rented by my mother’s brother, Eric Rayner, when he came to England in around 1933 from Calcutta (now Kolkata), India, where he had been working as a journalist – for a publication with the wonderfully Kiplingesque name of The Englishman. Eric came to England first. My mother, Dulce Norine, and widowed grandmother, Irene Florence Rayner, came later, from Rangoon, Burma, where they had been living in a flat at 97 Sandwith Road with Ram Saing, their longtime servant, and my grandmother’s two beloved cocker spaniels, Toots and Brownie. In Rangoon, my mother had been secretary to the head of the Burmah Oil Company, Sir Kenneth Harper. In any event by the end of 1936, mother and grandmother were in Lavender Cottage. Very fortunately for them, as most of my mother’s friends who remained in Burma died a few years later during the Japanese invasion. My father, Leonard John “Jack” Staddon, was away, in the army, still in Rangoon, but returned to England late in 1937. Mother, father and grandmother moved to London after a year or so. First to Barons Court, Kingsbury, and then briefly to a flat in Wembley. In 1941 we moved to a rather drab, lower-middle-class area of north-west London called Cricklewood1, a location then relatively cheap because quite inconvenient for getting into the center of the city. My mother had to take a bus and then the tube – underground – from Kilburn, to get to her job in Baker Street. Once a village, Cricklewood’s axis is the Edgware Road, which runs straight as a die NW from Marble Arch along the route of the old Roman road Watling Street. In the early 1940s, like its neighboring districts of Kilburn, Willesden, Harlesden, Neasden and Dollis Hill, Cricklewood consisted largely of street after street of late Victorian row houses with a few more spacious streets lined with detached and semi-detached houses. We wound up in the poorer side. The area was mostly Irish − pretty girls and rough boys. Cricklewood was in fact a kind of entrepôt for Irish immigrants. Their entertainment was provided by many pubs and the famous Galtymore Dance Club on Cricklewood Broadway. I remember Jimmy Shand and his band (Scottish, but hey, all Celts together!). I heard recordings when I learned to roller-skate there in the daytime. Their music seemed to jingle along in hypnotically repeating circles of sound. The band 1 There is an excellent Wikipedia entry for Cricklewood: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cricklewood 1 The Englishman: Memoirs of a Psychobiologist members did manage to all stop at the same time, but I could never figure out how. Alas, the Galtymore closed in 2008, the current residents of Cricklewood having very different musical tastes. Check out Zadie Smith’s novel White Teeth for the current multicultural state of play in Cricklewood. My grandmother Irene Florence Rayner in Mandalay in 1919 The middle class, mostly Jewish, lived in the larger houses to the South. All the houses had gardens, some quite spacious, which offered lawn- mowing work to young boys like me (with tiny barrel-type push mowers; power mowers were unheard of in those days). I found later that famed neurologist-writer Oliver Sacks grew up in a grand house on Mapesbury Road not far away from us, but I never met him – although I might have mowed his parents’ lawn. We were not Irish or Jewish. We were in fact very much the odd family out, although I was not aware of it at the time. Originally, we – my mother, father, grandmother and, after 1942, little sister, Judy – just rented. First, briefly, in Heber Road, and then, our longtime home, the ground floor