• Yeah, um… well…

    “I don’t expect to find anything, but I’d like to have this test done just in case.”

    How many times has your doctor dropped this little number on you? I’ve gotten it lots of times, and it never used to bother me. Then one day a test came back and I was summoned to the office… sooner than previously arranged.

    Those of you who have studied behavioral psychology might be familiar with variable reinforcement schedules. In a nut shell, it’s one of the best ways to teach a lab rat to perform, even when the little guy doesn’t get rewarded every time. If you reward him every time he does something you want him to do, he’ll stop shortly after the rewards stop… something my professors referred to as “extinction” (of the behavior). If you don’t reward him every time, but there’s a pattern to the rewards, he’ll stop shortly after you break the pattern. Ah, but the variable schedule produces uncertainty. He never knows when the reward’s coming, so it takes longer for him to realize when it’s stopped, and wha-la! Behavior that’s less prone to extinction.

    If I recall, the Skinner folk will tell you that punishment is not as effective a tool for behavior modification as reinforcement, but we’ll set that aside for now. It’s a rather inconvenient fact for this entry, so I’d just as soon you forget about it.

    For the purposes of this entry, I’m the lab rat, anxiety is the desired response, and a positive test result is the “reward” designed to encourage this response.

    So a week ago my doctor wanted me to have a CAT scan done on my brain, due to all the headaches I’ve been having. “I don’t expect to find anything, but I’d like to have this test done just in case.” So sayeth the good doc.

    Do you suppose this made me feel better?

    Yeah, it really didn’t.

    However, the test came back negative, so the trained response is one step closer to extinction. Woo-hoo!

    Author’s note: if I’ve gotten any of the principles of behavioral psychology wrong, gimmie a break. I didn’t much care for the folks in that department, and it’s been 15 years for crying out loud!

  • All right little man

    “What do you want for Christmas, Adam?” Cheryl asked.

    “I want a compooter just like daddy.”

  • How young is too young to commit?

    How many of you started reading this post thinking it was criminal justice related? Come on, give it up. You thought this was another political rant, didn’t you?

    No friends, this one’s just fluff… a cotton-candy piece, if you will.

    What I really want to know is this: has the wiring of the brain of a three-year-old boy gelled enough to pick his own paint color for his room? I ask this because we let him pick, and he picked navy blue… a really dark, navy blue. The color swatch at the hardware store called it “Decadent Blue,” but I call it “an hour after sunset.” Does the boy understand how dark his room’s going to be, and if not – how’s this going to affect our electricity bills?

    Well, we actually bought the stuff, and we’ve even put up three coats. And no, we’re still not done. We wanted to paint his room because it was white, and somehow it just seems wrong to leave walls white these days. You might think white is pretty inoffensive, but over time it feels like an emotion retardant. Of course now we’re painting a REALLY dark color over the supreme ruler of all light colors. In every other room we’ve been done after three coats. Hell, some only required two.

    I put up number four on a small wall this evening, and I can already see spots that are going to need five.

    Oh man is it dark. I just know I’m going to be laying five layers of the lighter stuff any day now.