§2-5. Learning and pleasure

When Carol was trying to fill her pail, she had to try several experiments before she succeeded by using her spoon. When she recognized that her goal was achieved, she felt satisfaction and a sense of reward—and then those pleasant feelings somehow helped her to learn and remember. So this process involved a good many steps:

Carol filled the pail with her spoon. She recognized that her goal was achieved. Then she felt pleased with her success. Then, somehow, that pleasure helped her to remember.

Now we’re glad that she felt gratified—but what functions did all those feelings serve, and why should that process take so many steps? What sort of role might pleasure play in how we construct our memories? Why couldn't Carol just simply remember which methods worked and which ones failed?

The answer is that ‘remembering’ is not simple at all. On the surface, it might seem easy enough—like dropping a note into a box, and then taking it out when you need it. But when we look more closely at this, we see that it involves a good many steps: You first must select which items that note should contain, and find adequate ways to represent them—and then you must give them some set of connections, so that after you store those parts away, you’ll be able to reassemble them.

Citizen: Some say that our brains remember everything so, that if you cannot recall some event, some part of your brain must be suppressing it.

This ‘photographic memory’ myth is not supported by evidence; the consensus from many experiments is that we don’t remember nearly so much. [See §6-2]

Student: What about the old idea that, for each of our accomplishments, we just ‘reinforce’ our successful reactions? In other words, we simply connect the problem we faced to the actions that led to our solving it.

That is a simplistic way to describe how learning might work, when seen from outside—but it doesn’t explain what might happen inside. For, neither ‘the problem we faced ‘ nor ‘the actions we took’ are simple units that we can connect—so, first you must choose some way to describe both the ‘If’ and the ‘Then’ of that pair of events. Then, the quality of what you learn will depend on the natures of both those descriptions.

Thus, for Carol to learn, her brain must construct some descriptions of which methods worked—as well as, perhaps, of which methods failed. But after her struggle to fill her cup, which of all the things she did should get credit for her final success? Should Carol attribute her success to which pair of shoes she was wearing then, or the place in which that event occurred, or whether the weather was cloudy or clear? What if she smiled while using that fork, but happened to frown when using that spoon; what keeps her from learning irrelevant rules like, “To fill a cup, it helps to frown?”

In other words, when humans learn, it is not just a matter of making connections but of constructing the structures that those connections connect—and no theory of learning can be complete unless it also accounts for this. Furthermore, we may need to represent not only those external events, but also some relevant mental events. Thus Carol will need some machinery to decide which of the thoughts she was thinking then should be represented in what she remembers. And she will need some ways to store those records so that she can recollect when she needs them.

Student: You still haven’t explained where feelings come in, such as the pleasure that comes from Carol’s success.

In everyday life it’s convenient to use terms like suffering, pleasure, joy, and grief as though those words referred to mental states that all our acquaintances are familiar with. But when asked to describe those states of mind, we usually find ourselves lost for words because the mental conditions that we call feelings are such complex cascades of processes. For example, it would seem that we speak about pleasure when certain resources recognize some processes that help us identify which of our recent activities should get credit for some recent success. Near the end of the book we’ll return to these questions about how we make those ‘Credit Assignments’ and what are the effects of the feelings called pleasure.