Clicker training

In Karen Pryor's latest book,

Reaching The Animal Mind,

she tells about her life as a trainer of animals and humans, and elaborates further on the ideas of the "clicker training" that she helped develop. The first half of the book held my attention steadily, and I ploughed through the pages at a steady pace.

It was in the the second half that I began to take notes, when I realized that she was drawing lines between operant conditioning on the one hand, and what Temple called the "Blue Ribbon Emotions" on the other. This helps explain more of what I called in an earlier post the difference between "training" and "learning".


* Opererant conditioning ("training") is fast because it bypasses the Cortex. It addresses the primitive parts of the brain directly. The signal hardly has to be modulated or interpreted at all.

* The effects of operant conditioning lasts for a long time, because operant conditioning establishes an extremely short and simple link between information and its usefulness. The brain seems to be "wired" to keep information longer in memory, the more useful it appears to be.

* The effects of operant conditioning can be hard to undo through "teaching", because the traffic from the primitive parts of the brain (like the Amygdala, which controls fear responses) is largely one-way. The Amygdala knows how to talk to the Neocortex, but the Neocortex has practically no way to talk to the Amygdala. Or so Karen Proyr says.

This is bad news if you've been accidentally conditioned to have an aversive reaction to stuff like homework, and are trying to reason your way out of it.  In fact, the only way to undo the damage, seems to be through new operant conditioning.

* Mixing sticks and carrots (rewards and punishments) is worse than we tend to think, because the two are handled by different parts of the brain. Fear responses are handled by the Amygdala, while the positive reinforcement is handled by the Hypothalamus. Activating both centres of the brain at the same time, does not improve the efficiency of the training.

* Operant conditioning can be great fun because it stimulates the SEEKING system in the primitive brain. This is the primary emotion that drives us to go out window-shopping, travelling, exploring, etc. Getting a good chance to explore something can be extremely rewarding ...


... which may be why I have enjoyed this book so much
(along with her previous book "Don't Shoot the Dog", which is an excellent textbook on operant conditioning).




PS: An afterthought: Could it be that the SEEKING emotion is the reason why we get addicted to computer games? Could it be because these games offer us a constant barrage of opportunities to find out "WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?"