248 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1954 



intensive habit formation by experience, training, and education. 

 Even when such patterning of response is well established, the richness 

 of internal comniimication is so great that a small resistance here, a 

 sudden surge of mental current there, in the network may channel the 

 impulses in a new direction. 



It is these uncertainties that create individual differences in be- 

 havior and capacity. They direct and redirect for good or bad what- 

 ever is passing through our heads. They must in some way account 

 for the mystery of original thinking and artistic composition. They 

 will forever keep education from being a routine business. 



The complexity of human thought and behavior is of course nothing 

 new ; my point is that science has caught up with that fact and now 

 perceives that the bodily mechanism possesses a similar order of 

 complexity and therefore may be assumed capable of conducting very 

 complex and subtle operations. A recent experiment illustrates per- 

 fectly what I am trying to say. One subject of Liddell's investigation 

 at Cornell was a nursling goat, three weeks old. When it was given 

 the routine treatment of painless but unceasingly recurrent electric 

 shocks, it developed tlie usual neurosis. This animal was one of twins. 

 The other of the pair of kids was subjected to the same experimental 

 treatment, except that its mother was left with it in the large stall 

 where it lived during the period of exposure to emotional trauma. 

 This second kid did not become neurotic at all. The presence of its 

 mother had done something inside the little animal that kept its nerves 

 from jangling. If its unprotected brother's neurosis was a mechanistic 

 disturbance, from which the twin was protected by the comforting 

 presence of a mother, then — at least in the case of these particular 

 goats, under experiment by Liddell in a barn near Cayuga Lake — it 

 looks as if the benefit afforded by the nanny's presence was also a 

 biophysical phenomenon. But the scientist must admit that a mecha- 

 nism that needs its mother is indeed a special kind of mechanism. 



By such means as this, by the intercommunication of companion- 

 ship, of mood, of sympathy and solace, individuals are integrated into 

 still more complex organizations of flock and herd, family, tribe, 

 and race. In this gift of communication, living organisms greatly 

 excel the machines. We have all been astonished by Von Frisch's 

 discovery of the signal language of honeybees. Certain man-made 

 automatic control systems perhaps approach that achievement of the 

 bees; but at a higher level how infinitely varied is the ability of human 

 beings to transmit complex eddies of thought and emotion to one 

 another ! 



Thus we have just about reached a truce in the old quarrel between 

 vitalism and mechanism. Both sides perceive that whatever our re- 

 spective hypotheses may be about the way things work inside us, we 



