“You know, there were rumors that Skinner raised his own kid in an operant conditioning chamber.” Leslie was always full of trivia like this. In fairness, the topic is legitimately interesting. But of all the narrow interests to have, 1960s behaviorism makes for some truly weird conversations.
“Not true of course. He built what amounted to a fancy crib that would automate certain childcare tasks. But his work was controversial, and his detractors weren’t above slander.” I thought it was going to be a date. That’s egg on my face. Unless Leslie’s idea of a date is touring the dusty abandoned behaviorism lab of her university.
I wouldn’t put it past her. She really lives for her work. Although postgrads are more like indentured servants than conventional paid employees. “The experiments he was best known for involved the operant conditioning of pigeons. If you were ever shown any short films about B.F. Skinner in school, that’s probably what you saw. Row after row of little transparent plastic cages like these with pigeons in them, hopping, twirling, and eating food pellets out of a little dispenser.”
In fact I did vaguely recall something like that. It failed to capture my attention at the time but I now found myself scouring my memory for any details that I did retain, for the purpose of impressing Leslie. “Oh uh, yeah!” I blurted out. “Training the birds to perform specific tricks by giving them food every time they do it over and over. To create an association for them.”
She beamed at me and I experienced one of those rare epiphenal moments when I realize my education actually benefits me from time to time. Other than the basic math involved in calculating change for people buying coffee. Look at that degree pay for itself, huh? She took the moment of silence as an invitation to continue.
“The really interesting part was when he set the dispenser to give them food pellets at random intervals. If the pigeon happened to be doing some action when food came out like bobbing its head, it would mistakenly infer a causal association, and begin to repeatedly perform that action hoping for more food pellets.
Of course another eventually came, reinforcing the association. But if by chance it was doing something else, like spinning, it would add that to its ever-growing routine. Better safe than sorry! And because pellets always came eventually, it continued to develop a more and more complex ritual that it believed was causing the pellets to be released.”
“Like a rain dance.” I muttered, staring contemplatively at the empty wall of cages. “Exactly!” she replied, “or like prayer.” I furrowed my brow. “Hey now, that’s going a bit far.” She giggled and brushed it off. It was one of her few qualities I didn’t like. Unless you really got in her face about it, she usually couldn’t tell if she’d offended you and would carry on like it was no big deal. Like you were silly to feel anything.
Since I’m a sucker for a pretty face and a high IQ, I let her get away with it. I’m no doormat, but my “lower brain” does have significant veto power over the upper one. The hall of cages creeped me out, and I said so. She shrugged, having shown me what she wanted to, and we headed for the parking lot.
“How does dim sum sound?” Unfamiliar, I thought. But probably tasty, so soon we were barreling down the freeway towards whatever sort of restaurant serves it. Leslie drives like a maniac. She shuts down any complaints about it by pointing out that she’s never been in an accident. “Statistically, that means you’re due”. She wasn’t amused.
I remembered what dim sum is shortly after we were inside. In fact I’d had it before and at the time thought it was less of a meal and more of an extended snacking session. Over the various edible odds and ends, we discussed probability. She’d taken exception to my little barb in the car and, as is her tendency, overthinking it to absurd extremes.
“You know I was just teasing” I interjected. A flash of recognition. But she pretended that she knew. “Of course, I just think that’s a good jumping off point for some stimulating discussion. Now, do the odds of a collision really increase over time?
If you consider my history of driving as one long event, certainly. But aren’t the odds the same each time I drive to campus in the morning? Then there’s the question of whether or not I’m simply living in the continuity without any crashes.”
I vaguely recalled some TV show from the 90s about a bunch of college students jumping through wormholes to parallel Earths. I judiciously decided to keep it to myself as she’d never reacted well to pop culture references in the past.
Still, the way her eyes sparkled as she animatedly described the ‘many worlds interpretation’ to me was releasing all kinds of endorphins in my brain. I saw no reason to interrupt, even though she had a sizable chunk of fried shrimp stuck to her chin.
“So it may well be that every time I make some uncharacteristic decision while driving, it causes my continuity to diverge from the rest. Just because quantum uncertainty in my brain made me do something none of the other Leslies did.”
I mulled that one over. Everything I knew about the subject came from stoned viewings of Michio Kaku’s TV show. It took some work to formulate a question that wouldn’t betray my ignorance of the subject, while also challenging her somewhat.
“Is there anything you could do that would cause your continuity to re-converge?” She stared. It turned out to be one of those questions that was smarter than I realized. Not sure whether to be proud of that, to be honest.
But I was on a roll, so I pressed my luck. “For that matter, if you were to deliberately create conditions in a limited area identical to what’s happening there in a different continuity, would that cause the two continuities to converge only at that point?”
I wanted to impress her. Not render her mute. She spent the rest of the date doing napkin math. I’d sold her on our first date by singing Sam Cooke’s “Wonderful World” from the lawn outside her sorority house as she looked on from the second story window.
Corny to the point of fructose toxicity, but it did the trick. She goes in for that stuff even more than I do. It’s really hit and miss though. I never know what I’ll do or say that will delight her. It’s like Narnia, you can’t find it by trying to, you gotta stumble across it.
“You know, this is why I go out with you. You always ask the most interesting questions. I guess I don’t have an answer for you. I’m not even sure how anybody could properly devise an experiment to test that idea. I might steal it from you and write up a grant proposal.” I was all for it until she clarified that she was joking. Just about the grant proposal, I think.
I didn’t get into her pants but nonetheless considered it a successful evening. My feelings were definitely growing stronger but at the same time more confusing. It wasn’t yet clear to me how we fit together. What kind of dynamic we could build.
I’m no caveman, I’m perfectly comfortable with a girlfriend substantially smarter than me. But sometimes it left me wondering if she couldn’t do better, and if in some ways I wasn’t wasting her time.
I brought up Youtube when I got home and started binge watching stuff related to 1960s behaviorism. If I could see in it what Leslie saw I figured we might mesh better. When I next looked at the time, it was 3:49AM. Leslie would make some cute remark about the passage of time being relative to the observer. I filed that one away to use next time we got dinner.
If I hadn’t glanced back at the screen as I reached with the cursor to click the little X that closes the browser, I would’ve missed it. I nearly did anyway because it didn’t really register until I was halfway to my bed.
Subconscious confusion boiled over into the conscious. Wait a fucking second. Did I really see that? No, I’m just tired. Right? I deliberated whether it was worth the time and effort to watch the last few seconds of the video.
Curiosity won that battle. I plunked my boxer clad buns down on the cold metal folding chair I’d been using ever since a hefty friend managed to collapse my nice leather office chair to bits on a recent visit.
The remains still sat out by the dumpster, awaiting somebody who could find a use for such a thing. It was a hassle to find the exact video until I remembered the browser kept track of my recently visited URLs.
The footage played back more or less as I remembered. I expected to discover I’d imagined the anomaly. But no, there it was again. I blinked, rewound the video by a few seconds and watched again. The pigeon in the last cage in the row hopped, twirled, bobbed its head, hopped, scratched the ground, hopped, twirled….then vanished.
There was no hiccup in the video to suggest a cut. Skinner kept talking in the foreground without any discernible jump or interruption. The pigeon just disappeared. Over and over I rewound the video to watch the last few seconds. Then I scoured the comments for any mention of it. I was evidently the only person to notice.
Unsurprising given how few views the video had. Groundbreaking experiments lose to headbanging black metal kittens and narrated video game playthroughs in the market of passing interest. I watched every other video I’d been through looking for the same thing. It only occurred in the one video. Why? What set that pigeon apart from the rest?
On a whim I wrote down the actions it performed prior to vanishing. Then watched the other pigeons frame by frame looking for any who did the exact same dance. When 8am arrived, eyes bloodshot, hands shaking, I was finally satisfied it was unique. That was the only unique thing about it that was apparent in the video anyway.
I wracked my brain trying to determine what if anything it could mean as I stumbled to bed. I double checked my phone and thanked God that I didn’t have work today before collapsing in a heap and losing consciousness.
My dreams were varied and bizarre. Endless rows of cages stretching to infinity, warping around in a sort of kaleidoscopic flux. A pigeon was contained in each, performing a different dance. Some were breakdancing. Others doing the waltz. I woke up at 5 that evening, feeling rested and inspired.
I downloaded a plugin for capturing Youtube videos and saved the video to a folder I resolved I’d use for everything related to this investigation. That was priority one, as if it were taken offline or something I’d have nothing to show anyone I wanted to convince of any of this. Or myself. Without that video I wondered if, after a long enough time, I wouldn’t just convince myself I’d imagined it and get on with my life.
I should’ve. But it’s like the hanging thread which unravels the sweater. The one you cannot help but tug on despite knowing damn well you shouldn’t. I briefly considered showing this to Leslie. After all it was something concerning her pet interest that she didn’t yet know about. I doubted there was any gift she’d appreciate more.
At the same time I feared she might think I was being foolish. That she'd dismiss the anomaly as something to do with how the video was recorded, a post-processing prank or some other mundane explanation. Maybe that really was it? Something in me nonetheless drove me to tug that thread.
The first stab at it was a Wikipedia binge on quantum teleportation. I couldn’t understand any of it and before long I was on a page about how sailboats are made without fully understanding how that happened. So I searched for information on rituals involving dance. Rain dances, fertility dances, dances to raise the dead. Nothing jumped out at me.
Until I clicked onto a ridiculously dated website about Samhain. It was an archived copy of what had once been a Geocities site so a lot of the links didn’t work and it was littered with animated gifs which had at best a tenuous relation to the topic of the page. Straining my eyes to read the purple text on the black repeating starfield background, I began to recognize that this was what I’d been looking for.
Samhain is believed by Celts to be a special, liminal time when our world is closest to the world of spirits such that they can more easily pass through. I corroborated this on other websites to make sure it wasn’t just the 1994 ravings of some isolated lunatic and found it was accurate, at least with respect to Celtic beliefs. However the site mentioned something I found nowhere else. A ritual for piercing the membrane between our world and the next….which included a dance.
A medieval illustration depicted some crudely drawn robed fellow performing something like a pirouette atop an elaborate geometric glyph on the ground, which the caption said was drawn with charcoal. At the points where the inset triangle, square, pentagon and hexagon touched the outer edge of the circle which contained them all, there were small red candles.
It looked like what Hollywood led me to believe was how you go about summoning demons and other otherworldly creatures from the realms they inhabit. Possibly the same ritual, inverted? For bringing them here, instead of sending yourself there. I smiled as I imagined some nightmarish eldritch abomination summoned at a bad time, appearing atop the symbol in a bathtub, clutching a soapy loofa.
Aha! There it is. “Ritual instructions”. Only upon clicking it I got a white screen with black text reading “Page removed from archive due to copyright claim.” I raised an eyebrow. How does one copyright a ritual? I felt I had enough to show someone now without being dismissed outright. But could I really go to Leslie with it? She didn’t go in for this sort of stuff.
Stay Tuned for Part 2!