Then
he euthanized the rats that had been reared in good conditions and
removed their brains - - - ground up the brains - - - took an extract
out of the solution of ground-up brains and shot it directly into the
brains of the still living rats reared in poor conditions. Lo and behold
. . . the rats from the poor conditions made tremendous jumps
behaviorally. Kretch tells me that these rats raised in the poor
conditions overcame 60 to 70% of the difference between the performing
levels of the two rat groups. You see, this raises the question: what is
it that they were shooting into the brains of the rats still living from
the poor group, if it isn’t some kind of chemical?
Question:
In terms of explanations on psychological grounds, you can be
allowed the basic assumptions that the brain is basic to any
psychological behavior in a certain sense that you don’t need to
experiment. You know that there has to be the brain biochemical basis
for change of behavior and that when our behavior changes there is some
kind of change in the physiological situation. Now, it we can find the
correlates, which I’m in favor of pursuing, we can give some
substantiation but you can’t use one to explain the other. The change
in the chemical doesn’t explain the psychological change. You can’t
really say which comes first because it is probably more complicated
than this.
Dr.
Graves:
I do agree with you because this is the way, at least as I
understand it, and I think you can check me on this better than I can,
the greatest advance of modern physics was when Maxwell reversed and
tried to explain the electromagnetism in terms of . . . oh, I forget
which it was . . . you see what I’m trying to do is to explain the
brain in terms of behavior. I’m reversing the process. I’m saying
that I’ve got the behavior. Now, I’m going to say what the brain is
like because man behaves the way the brain is constructed. I’m not
trying to explain behavior in terms of the brain.
Question:
(same person) Maybe my question is not valid but what I’m trying to get at
is when you’re working alone with your psychological experiments and
you are trying to conceptualize it . . . and you come to a block where
you can’t understand it, you can’t explain it in terms of
psychological data. If at that point you jump and say, well, it was
something in the brain that changes, I think that is invalid. I think
that’s what I mean by pseudo-explanation. It’s not simply using it
as a confirming correlate, a mutually confirming correlate. I agree that
it is an important aspect of it but they are still running
kind-of-parallel, and we do try to make bridges across but I don’t
think we can use one to explain the other.
Dr.
Graves: The studies to which I have been referring are
the studies which I have to do with moving of the behavior in or out at
will by changing the chemistry - or by changing the behavior and moving
the chemistry.
Now, these studies exist. So I’m saying if one can take certain
chemicals as I’m sure many of you know is being done at the present
time and is being used as a psychiatric treatment by moving aggression
in and out of a patient, a person - - - as they are now doing at
Harvard, by the injection of chemicals, as they are now doing in
animals. If you can find as these studies show and I hypothesize that as
the level of existence changes then the chemistry changes also. I
don’t think we can get away from it. The fact is that these are
neither cause nor effect . . . they are a system.
Question:
I don’t know how important my question is but when should we be
using chemical means to change a patient’s behavior and when should we
be using psychological means to change a patient’s behavior?
Dr.
Graves:
The importance of your question to me is this. If one has a
patient before him, and remember that my data is phenomenal beliefs of
people . . . if that person believes that change takes place
psychologically and not chemically then you jolly well better not be
messing around with chemical means of changing him. Use a psychological
means. This is what I’m concerned with.