354 Information Storage and Neural Control 



lems that started pretty clearly as biological ones have now 

 become of interest almost entirely at the level of pure chemistry. 

 The problems here are very sharp and, therefore, will very soon 

 become dull; because, when it is possible to formulate the issues 

 as clearly as it now is, getting the answers is a matter of hard work 

 but often lacks major intellectual excitement. I think the great 

 epoch of the nucleotides is rapidly drawing to a close, although 

 several Nobel prizes are still lurking there; I am not denigrating 

 it, I assure you. I think the most exciting area for the future is 

 rather in reducing behavior to neurophysiology. The questions 

 here are still fuzzy enough so that almost any kind of answer is 

 likely to be exciting. 



Going on with the group, Bateson gave us his charming presen- 

 tation as raconteur and experimenter. He exemplified beautifully 

 the story that psychologists love to pass around: One rat says to 

 another, "By golly, I've got my experimenter trained now! Every 

 time I push the lever, he feeds me." He discussed the fact that one 

 deals with metasignals for information as to the kind of world 

 one is facing, and, in this connection, there are several points 

 that I cannot resist making. 



There is an obvious experimental prediction, which perhaps 

 has been checked. (I understand such experiments do give the 

 predicted results.) Bateson compared the classical conditioning 

 experience of one rat with the instrumental conditioning experi- 

 ence of another, and said that each rat then allowed free experience 

 in the world would find his experiment-induced expectations more 

 or less reinforced. This is part of establishing a particular learning 

 set. An animal given a learning set in terms of experience with 

 classical conditioning should learn an instrumental conditioning 

 situation less easily than would a naive animal, and vice versa. 



At the human level, we at Michigan have an interdisciplinary 

 study on schizophrenics, attempting to break them up into sub- 

 categories. Our social scientist came to the interesting conclusion 

 that the social space in which a schizophrenic subject lives (in 

 contradistinction to the non-schizophrenics in the same hospital 

 and under the same conditions) — his social world — is different 

 from that of non-schizophrenics and that the behavior of the 

 schizophrenic, so abnormal relative to our world, may not be too 



