One evening, Mrs. Gribbin gave her cat, Schrödinger, what seemed to me an outrageously succulent crayfish (she called it a crawdad), imported specially for him, not me, from Louisiana (the old lady was concerned that his appetite had seemed a little off). As was his wont, Schrödinger attacked the morsel with great gusto and many disgusting noises, soon licking his platter clean. And then he barfed unceremoniously in various poorly chosen places. He has since absolutely refused to eat anything that smells of crawdad. His was an example of one-trial taste aversion learning, a phenomenon that, along with latent inhibition, blocking, autoshaping, instinctive drift, and other instances of biological predispositions and constraints, presents serious problems for traditional conditioning explanations of learning. There are inherited biological reasons for many of these phenomena, claim evolutionary psychologists. This chapter examines these biological reasons, looking closely at the different structures and functions of the brain. It examines the role of experience in brain development and describes various applications of information about biological functioning (biofeedback and neurofeedback) in therapy and education.

The second chapter begins by looking at the early roots of theories of human learning: the introspection-based efforts of philosophers and psychologists like Descartes, William James, Wundt, and Titchener in their quest to understand reality and the nature of human consciousness and thought. It then examines Pavlovian conditioning, Watson’s extreme behavioristic environmentalism, and Guthrie’s intriguing theory of one-shot learning, illustrating each of these positions with simple, applied examples. Coverage of all theories described in the text includes a detailed evaluation based on the criteria of good theories introduced in Chapter 1 and a look at practical applications. The chapter makes the point that these early explanations of learning provide valuable insights into human and animal functioning, and should not be dismissed because of their failure to explain phenomena that are more easily explained by more recent theories.

“I visualize a time when we will be to robots what dogs are to humans, and I’m rooting for the machines,” says Claude Shannon. Old Lady Gribbin chuckled when she started the eleventh chapter with this quotation. Later in the chapter, she expounds on the relationships between people and machines, on the newer connectionist (neural network) models of human intellectual activity that have led to the invention of machines apparently capable not only of learning on their own, but also of passing a simple machine intelligence test, the Turing test. These machines are intelligent, says Mrs. Gribbin. But then, in one of her footnoted asides, she suggests that maybe truly intelligent machines are fictions, and will always be fictions. She says they have no emotions or personalities – only machinalities. Still, many of them are now better at recognition tasks than any human; and they can beat the pants off any chess master. Mrs. Gribbin points out that, as far back as 1820, Blaise Pascal had noted that although some advanced arithmetic machines could do anything that animals can do, none of these machines had willfulness. That was 1820. Will today’s, or tomorrow’s, machines decide to make dogs of us before they are done?

The opening chapter introduces the narrator, Mrs. Gribbin, who brings the revised manuscript with her and who, throughout the book, makes possible a level of commentary that would not otherwise be possible. Key terms and concepts – such as learning, theories, science, folk beliefs and naïve psychology, pop psychology, and approaches to gathering and evaluating psychological information – are introduced and clarified at the outset. The chapter makes the point that good theories are evaluated not so much in terms of whether they are right or wrong but more in light of how useful they are. Their usefulness is reflected in how well they summarize important facts, how clear and understandable they are, how thought-provoking, how valuable for predicting as well as explaining, and how practical they are in the real world. The chapter concludes with brief previews of each of the next 11 chapters. Mrs. Gribbin describes these previews as hors d’oeuvres, brief appetizers that not only provide a hint of what is to come, but that each include an intriguing question that the reader will be able to answer after having read the chapter.

There are things we know implicitly but cannot put into words, Chapter 8 explains, like how to ride a unicycle but being unable to tell someone else how to do so. Other memories are more explicit, like Mrs. Gribbin knowing that Schrödinger is her cat’s name and that she and John Gribbin have a link (she won’t say but I suspect it relates to the mysterious Schrödinger). Some memories are exceptional; most are ordinary and often subject to distortions and unintentional falsehoods, which is a problem for courts of law. This chapter looks at how we study and classify memory, and at how new brain-imaging technologies allow researchers to identify neural activity associated with specific recollections. Researchers have even detected activity in single, microscopic neurons, one of which was named the Jennifer Aniston neuron, her image having evoked its electrical discharge. The chapter notes that there are many different explanations for forgetting, and that one of the main roles of education is to teach for stable, long-term retention. Accordingly, it concludes with a detailed review of what scientific research has found to be the most effective strategies for learning and remembering.

Before narrating this tenth chapter, Mrs. Gribbin scarfed down a plateful of beans in a revolting display of disgusting manners, stuffing her mouth with both hands, belching and grunting, slopping bean juice all over my table, and performing many other unmentionable acts. Later she explained that this had simply been to illustrate that social behaviors are acceptable, or not, for purely cultural reasons. Her narration goes on to describe how Bandura’s social/cognitive theory of observational learning provides a widely accepted explanation for social learning. The theory explains how some behaviors are controlled by stimuli, more are influenced of their outcomes, but the most important are those that are under symbolic control. Symbolic control processes have to do with our ability to anticipate the consequences of our actions and to control them. We are agents of our own behaviors, says Bandura. True, we are affected by our environments, by our own actions, and by personal factors such as mood or knowledge or intelligence. But each of these three factors affects the others in a sort of triadic reciprocal determinism. Do we really have free will, asks Mrs. Gribbin in one of her asides. Her answer: Do some research; think about it.

Chapter 4 introduces the twentieth century’s most radical behaviorist: Burrhus Frederic Skinner. “We always called him Fred,” said Mrs. Gribbin, who apparently knew him well, explaining that his was a radical behaviorism not because he campaigned vigorously against established psychological orthodoxies, but because Skinner sought to get at the very roots of the discipline: The word radical has to do with the basic, fundamental nature of a thing. Skinner believed that to be a truly reliable science, psychology had to abandon its preoccupation with private mental events and concentrate instead on public events such as observable behaviors and their consequences. The chapter presents a detailed explanation of Skinner’s operant conditioning accompanied by illustrations of how Skinnerian findings relating to different types of reinforcers, schedules of reinforcement, aversive behavioral contingencies such as negative reinforcement and punishment, shaping, chaining, generalization, and discrimination are being applied in business, education, and day-to-day life. Mrs. Gribbin points out that Skinner is second only to Freud in terms of current recognition as a psychologist.