When William James Got Hungry by Martin E

In an excerpt from his new autobiography, Penn psychology professor Martin Seligman tells the little-known story of the American Psychological Association’s annual meeting in 1904, held at Penn. Its reverberations were profound—for Penn psychology professor Edwin Twitmyer and for American psychology. When William James Got Hungry By Martin E. P. Seligman For much of his 50-plus-year career, Martin E. P. Seligman the room that housed my desk in graduate school, one of the great Gr’67, the Zellerbach Family Professor of Psychology and director fiascos of science had taken place of Penn’s Positive Psychology Center, has been one of the In 60 years before: Edwin Burket towering figures of psychology. His career took off early with Twitmyer Gr1902’s announcement of his momentous discovery to the psycho- his groundbreaking theory of Learned Helplessness, which logical world. It was not auspicious that grew directly out of his doctoral work at Penn. Along with his my desk sat exactly there. academic work—he is among the most cited psychologists in On the morning of December 29, 1904, the nation—he served as a transformational president of the the leading lights of American psychology assembled to listen to each other’s papers. American Psychological Association, and played a central role The occasion was the 13th annual meeting in founding the field of Positive Psychology. He has been at of the American Psychological Association times a controversial figure, befitting a man who decided early (APA), held appropriately enough on the West Philadelphia campus of the Univer- on that he had no interest in being boring. sity of Pennsylvania. Penn was home to the In The Hope Circuit: A Psychologist’s Journey from Helplessness very first department of psychology in to Optimism (published in April by PublicAffairs), Seligman America, established in 1887. Its founders had taken inspiration from tells the story of his life and career—including his youthful Leipzig’s Wilhelm Wundt and his brave days in Albany, his education at Princeton and Penn, and the band of breakaway German-speaking multifarious roles he has played in his field. scientists—brave because they sought The following excerpt turns on a deceptively quiet moment nothing less than a science of mental states, a science of psychology. College in the clash between mentalism and behaviorism. Put simply: Hall, a Victorian pile of green and brown If William James hadn’t been hungry that day, “Twitmyer’s Knee” stone, sat in the center of the few build- could have been as famous as “Pavlov’s Dog.” ings that constituted the University of Pennsylvania. To attend the paper reading, these professors, the men wearing 56 THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE May|Jun 2018 ILLUSTRATION BY DAVID HOLLENBACH May|Jun 2018 THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE 57 heavy dark suits, white shirts with round- learning objectively and get on its way ed collars, and colorless ties, trudged up to unraveling the mysteries of all knowl- the 12 concrete steps and through the edge. The scientist who discovered how heavy double doors. It is noteworthy that to do this would achieve immortality. the assemblage was not solely male since Twitmyer believed he had done it. When the next APA president, Mary Whiton the human kneecap is struck—just right— Calkins, was among them. They turned with a rubber hammer, a large kick en- right, strode the length of the wide cor- sues. This is called the patellar reflex. ridor with its 15-foot ceiling, and entered Reflexes are not learned; they are the the large classroom. nervous system’s inevitable and uncon- On the dais sat William James himself, scious reaction to a stimulus. Twitmyer, the newly inaugurated president of the ingeniously, rang a bell half a second be- APA, holding that post for the second fore each hammer blow. Sure enough time. James was a founder of American after 150 or more pairings, the bell itself psychology, having established the first was followed by the kick—even before the American “psychological laboratory” at hammer blow. This worked for every one Harvard in 1875, even while teaching William James, ca. 1903. of Twitmyer’s six subjects. physiology. His was an awe-inspiring This should all sound familiar, because presence. Erect and wiry, with striking in Saint Petersburg at just the same time blue eyes, his light beard now mostly At least one person in the audience and for similar reasons, Ivan Petrovich gray, James was an affable and witty con- was terrifically excited, barely able to Pavlov was doing essentially the same versationalist. Like his dour brother, contain himself. Thirty-one-year-old thing—independently. Pavlov paired the novelist Henry James, William was quite Edwin B. Twitmyer was about to report clicking of a metronome with food pow- fragile, having suffered at least two “ner- on his 1902 doctoral dissertation. He der injected into the mouths of dogs and vous breakdowns,” and he was a prolific suspected that he had captured the most found that the clicks alone came to elicit but much less fusty a writer than Henry. fundamental particle of learning. salivation. Pavlov added an important His acclaimed 1,200- page Principles of This was a grand venture with a vener- wrinkle: digestive surgeon that he was— Psychology was already the classic text- able provenance. David Hume (1711– not a psychologist—he extruded the sali- book, and his influential essay “Does 1776), the founder of “associationism,” vary gland of the dog, and so he could Consciousness Exist?” had just come out. claimed that we could never observe count precisely the number of drops of James called the morning session to cause directly; rather we could only ob- saliva elicited by the clicks, rather than order, and the reading of papers began. serve the contiguity in time between two just weighing some mushy food. Pavlov, You, my reader, and even I would have events. The red billiard ball strikes the already renowned for his work on diges- found the session dull—our knowledge white ball, and the white ball shoots off tion for which he got the Nobel Prize in of what was about to happen notwith- into the pocket. We infer that the motion 1904, trumpeted these results in Madrid standing—and we would have spent our of the red ball caused the white ball’s in 1903 in his Nobel acceptance speech. time gazing out the 12-foot windows onto motion, but we only ever see an associa- Pavlov achieved immortality for discover- the green fields. R. S. Woodworth report- tion in time. Such associations are the ing this, the “conditional reflex.” ed a high correlation between the strength fundamental building blocks of all learn- Twitmyer did not achieve immortality. of the right hand and the left. Margaret ing, since for the British empiricists, of For at the close of his paper, James said, Washburn discoursed on the difference whom Hume was the leading light, the “Just in time for lunch. I guess there between a “feeling” and a “sensation.” mind is but a blank slate that experience won’t be any discussion of this paper. Hugo Muensterberg somehow united the writes on. And what does experience Let’s go eat.” truth of arithmetic with the values of mo- write on the blank slate? Only these as- Why didn’t Twitmyer get any credit at rality and religion. Lightner Witmer sociations, and so all that we learn, all all for this important discovery? For one C1888, director of the psychological clin- that we know, is merely the combination thing Twitmyer’s 1902 dissertation was ic of the Penn department, reported on of countless pairings. privately printed and so inaccessible, the accuracy of guesses about the heavi- This became a program for scientific while Pavlov—already an international ness of very similar weights. A polite, low- psychology. If science could isolate and icon—was able to spread the word of his key discussion lasting about 10 minutes measure such associations in the labora- latest discovery in his Nobel acceptance followed each paper. tory, science would be able to measure speech. Twitmyer, in contrast, was a 58 THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE May|Jun 2018 Photo courtesy Houghton Library, Harvard University Kneecapped, Twitmyer dropped newbie and seems to have shyly avoided anything that smacked of self-promo- his conditioning work and turned tion. For another, American psychologists at this time focused on consciousness, whereas a reflex was merely phys- his attention to speech defects ical and mechanical, hardly the key that would unlock the mind. But it is also a in children. sad fact that William James was bored and hungry. Kneecapped, Twitmyer dropped his conditioning work and turned his atten- in learning theory—trends Frank was tion to his wife’s specialty, speech defects deeply skeptical about. He did not be- in children. lieve in stimulus-response-reinforce- Sixty years later this wound to the col- ment theory, which held a monopoly in lective psyche of Penn’s proud depart- the field of learning. ment still festered, and I could sense it Frank came to maturity as this mo- as Professor Francis W. Irwin C’26 G’28 nopoly grew. To appreciate why behav- Gr’31 related the Twitmyer story to us. iorism came to exert over the world of Frank had been at the center of the only psychology a hold so strong that Frank psychology coup d’état of the last cen- spent his entire career fighting it, let’s tury. Since Twitmyer’s time Penn’s de- return to William James’s shooing ev- partment had gotten sleepier and sleep- eryone out to lunch.

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