Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century

Chapter 9, entitled “Memory, Inc.: Eric Kandel’s Sea Slug Experiment,” covers the work of Eric Kandel. Kandel built upon Elizabeth Loftus’s work on human memory by trying to locate the biological basis of memory. He “set out on a journey to discover the actual workings of memory, its intricate cellular mechanisms” (204). Kandel was able to do this largely through experimentation and research on sea slugs. Chapter 9 is divided into three parts: “Part One” details the experience of a patient identified by the initials “H.M.,” who in 1953 underwent brain surgery for epilepsy and inadvertently led to a major scientific discovery about the hippocampus’s effect on memory. “Part Two” explains how scientist Brenda Milner’s research on H.M. furthered the study of memory. “Part Three” describes Eric Kandel’s work on memory, specifically his discovery of CREB, a biological molecule that can be considered, in many ways, as the basis of long-term memory.

In 1953, a young man in Hartford, Connecticut, suffered from severe epilepsy. His fits were so frequent that his parents sought out the assistance of Dr. Scoville at Hartford Hospital, who offered the family an experimental cure: a lobotomy: “[Dr. Scoville] suspected Henry’s seizures might be kindling deep in the wetlands of the temporal lobes […] Scoville offered to excise Henry’s hippocampus” (205). After the surgery was performed, Henry’s epileptic seizures lessened, but he was unable to retain any memories: “A few weeks after Henry’s surgery, when his mental confusion did not clear up, Dr. Scoville realized he had inadvertently amputated the mill of memory, as well as the seizure’s starting point” (207). He inadvertently discovered that the hippocampus was hugely important to memory formation. 

Brenda Milner was a scientific researcher who studied Henry—who goes by the initials “H.M.”—after his lobotomy. Milner had been studying memory with a renowned physician Wilder Penfield when she first heard of H.M.’s case: “[Milner] had seen memory loss before, but H.M. offered her the chance to study the purest form of amnesia known to humankind” (208). Milner observed that while H.M. was unable to retain a conversation he had five minutes prior, he was able to walk, talk, and perform basic life functions—meaning, the long-term memory of how to perform these actions had been retained: “H.M. did not know, upon getting up in the morning, that he was supposed to brush his teeth, but once a toothbrush was placed in his hand, his hand took over” (208).

Milner deduced that the hippocampus “is clearly essential for memory of explicit, autobiographical detail—one might call it the core of consciousness itself—but there is another memory system located in a whole other place in the brain,” which Milner dubbed the “procedural memory” or “unconscious memory” (209). Milner’s discovery was critical in proving that memory functions on two levels, in separate systems of our brain.

Eric Kandel was a Harvard-educated scientific researcher who studied the cellular, biological basis of memory with the National Institute of Health. In an attempt to “elucidate the biology of memory,” Kandel worked extensively with sea slugs. He chose sea slug, specifically the breed aplysia, because they were easier to work with than the human hippocampus but contain the same kind of memory-functions that Kandel wished to study:

Aplysia has only twenty thousand neurons, many of them visible to the eye. Here would be an animal at once simpler to study, but still relevant to human beings because, as Kandel says, our nervous systems are the same, straight down to the food chain (211).

In his experiment, Kandel trained sea slugs to perform basic tasks and then studied the sea slug’s neurons as they learned a new task. Kandel learned that the links between neurons got stronger every time the slugs performed the same task, therefore engraining the behavior in their brains. In doing so, Kandel became “one of the first to actually provide a molecular model of primitive memory” (213).

Kandel’s next phase of research studied how short-term memory converted into long-term memory—i.e., what actually happens in the brain as behaviors are engrained into one’s long-term memory. Slater frames Kandel’s research as it relates to H.M.: “The fact that H.M. was able to remember the face of his mother even without a hippocampus suggests that the hippocampus is the binding site where memories go, to be wrapped in the cortex” (213). Kandel eventually discovered that a molecule called CREB is largely responsible for this conversion. In plain terms, the molecule CREB “dwells in the nucleus of a brain cell, and its purpose is to switch on the genes needed to produce the proteins that groove permanent connections between the cells” (214). Later, Kandel developed the Memory Pharmaceuticals company to create products to stop or reverse “the haze of age-related memory loss” (217).

As she ruminates on the ethical implications of memory-enhancing drugs, Slater considers the benefits of forgetting and the “dangers associated with too much memory” (218). Slater discusses an autistic patient who was not able to function in society but possessed an incredibly capable memory: “Show him The Odyssey and he could recite the thousand-page tome back to you after six minutes of staring, but he had no idea what it meant” (219). Slater also considers how it would benefit war veterans if we were able to produce drugs that could aid in forgetting. Slater concludes saying that, despite the ethical concerns, Kandel’s memory-enhancing drugs could prove beneficial to society overall: “Let us take Kandel’s medicine, if it comes to us, and return to people who have lost them their lives, pulling them out of the gap of forgetting that is wait for us all, if we live long enough” (222).

Chapter 10, titled “Chipped: This Century’s Most Radical Mind Cures,” explores the history of the lobotomy and psychosurgery in general. The chapter is divided into two parts: “Part One” describes the origin of the surgery in 1949 by António Egas Moniz in Portugal; “Part Two” examines a modern lobotomy case.

The founder of the lobotomy, António Egas Moniz, was born in 1874 in a small coastal village in Portugal. He went to college in Lisbon, where he studied neurology. One of his main goals was to discover a way to view the brain: “Back in Portugal, [Moniz] wondered how one might visualize the brain. This all-important organ lay out of reach, encased in a cage of bone. If one could see the brain, one might be able to see the illnesses affecting it” (225). Moniz then developed a special dye that could be injected into a vein in the neck and, under X-ray, would illuminate the structures of the brain. This diagnostic tool was essential in Moniz’s next phase of research on the brain, one that would lead him to discover the lobotomy procedure.

Moniz first presented his idea that a lobotomy could heal psychological pain to a group of neurologists in 1935. Moniz was in London for a neurology conference, and other neurologists received Moniz’s concept of relieving anxiety and mental disorders by surgical means with disbelief: “History has it that everyone was startled, if not shocked by Moniz’s suggestion, the man maybe blinking and swiveling to see just who had spoken” (227). When Moniz returned to Portugal, he began practicing on cadavers. The first patient to undergo the procedure is known only as “Mrs. M.,” a 63-year-old woman who was severely depressed, anxious, and held the paranoid delusion that the police were attempting to poison her. Rather than using a knife to excise a portion of the brain, the first lobotomy was conducted by drilling “point-sized holes” on either side of Mrs. M’s skull, and then inserting an alcohol-filled syringe into her brain. The procedure was reportedly a success because weeks later Mrs. M began behaving normally, and her paranoid delusions were gone.

However, as Slater points out, there is no long-term follow-up on Mrs. M. (or any of Moniz’s other lobotomy patients), so it is unclear if the improvement was lasting or if there were any other side effects. According to the limited records that exist on Moniz’s first lobotomy patients, the procedure was a success: “Of the twenty original cases, Moniz claimed a complete cure for seven of them, a partial cure for another seven, and six who were unhelped” (232). The lobotomy was first introduced to American physicians in 1937, when Moniz published his findings on the lobotomy in the American Journal of Psychiatry. Two U.S.-based surgeons by the name of Walter Freeman and James Watts put their own spin on the procedure, which differed mainly in how they accessed the brain: While Moniz went through an incision at the hairline, Freeman and Watts went through the eye socket. This method was called a “transorbital lobotomy” (232). As in Portugal, the lobotomy was a reported success with patients in the U.S.

By 1949, Moniz had been awarded a Nobel Prize for the discovery of this procedure and, in the U.S. alone, it is estimated that 20,000 lobotomies were performed each year. Given its success, Slater wonders, then, why does the lobotomy have such a dark, sordid reputation. The main criticism is that it is barbaric, irreversible, and that it removes an indefinable human “vital spark.”

In “Part Two,” Slater examines the modern-day lobotomy:

A combination of lack of consensus in the field and its history of controversial characters has kept modern-day lobotomies, dressed up in different names, a last-ditch option for only the sickest among us, a procedure shrouded in secrecy and shame (239).

In the U.S., psychosurgery is completely outlawed in California and Oregon, and in many other states it is very difficult to get the medical approval needed in order to have a lobotomy performed. Slater, nonetheless, manages to find a man who is approved for the procedure: Charlie Newitz, a 40-year-old man in Austin, Texas, who suffers from lifelong “incapacitating” obsessive-compulsive disorder. Charlie has had numerous rounds of shock treatment therapy and tried 23 different kinds of psychiatric medications.

Slater joins Charlie on the day of his procedure in December of 1999. When Charlie’s surgery is complete, he immediately finds that his obsessive-compulsive disorder is completely gone. A week later, when Slater follows up, Charlie reports that the obsessive-compulsive disorder is still gone, but he is feeling “a little low” (247). When Slater asks if he was happy that he went through with the surgery, he responds with a resounding yes, and reports that he would do it again in a second. In fact, he wants to undergo another one, to see if that will completely alleviate his depressive symptoms. Slater concludes the chapter by noting that the controversy surrounding the lobotomy points to the fact that, for humanity, the brain is sacred:

No matter what the facts show, no matter how persistently the information points to the possible efficacy of psychosurgery and the inefficacy of medication, there is still something holy about that three-pound wrinkled walnut with a sheen (247).

In the Conclusion, Slater writes that the mythology surrounding Deborah Skinner and her reported suicide was what inspired her to write Opening Skinner’s Box. Over the course of the book, however, Slater’s questions about psychology only deepen: “I wanted to, when I came to the end of this book, to offer up and answer, a conclusion, but as oftentimes happens in experiments, which this book ultimately is, the data yields only new domains for further exploration” (248).

Slater sees philosophical questions as the common thread among all the experiments she studied. Psychology deals with metaphysical issues:

Over and over again arise issues of free will (Skinner, Alexander, Loftus, Moniz), conformity/obedience (Milgram, Darley and Latané, Festinger, Rosenhan), and the ethics of experimentation itself on living beings (Harlow, Skinner, Milgram, Moniz). Even the most technically proficient experiments, like Kandel’s, ultimately concern themselves not with the value-free questions we traditionally associate with ‘science,’ of which psychology insists it is a part, but with the kinds of ethical and existential questions we associate with philosophy (249).

Many scientists have hesitated to classify psychology as a “true” science, due to the fact that many of the philosophical issues psychology aims to explore defy the usual categories of measurement required for scientific inquiry. Still, Slater sees usefulness in experimental psychology, despite the criticisms. She believes that, even as science advances and evolves, there will always be the desire to pursue the kind of philosophical questions explored in psychology:

But of course, there will always be new questions, if only the question about having no questions and what that means, and here we are, back to philosophy again. It seems we can’t escape. No matter how technologically proficient our newest experiments, we cannot escape the residue of mystery and muck, so we carry the residue with us (254).