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Isolation

Isolation

我们与猴子

Preface: Following the previous #AI series and #MarvinMinsky series. This post is co-written with Claude.


It's clear that attention is a superpower we have: attention decides what we pay attention to, and how we frame the situation, however, what we decide to pay attention to, at which stage to we decide to pay attention to, and what attracts our attention more than others is still unclear. Other than the things we are told to pay attention to, something interesting buggles my mind. It makes sense that we can quickly identify our own names in a party, but what about the voices from an opposite sex? We are hyper aware of ourselves, but also hyper aware of people we are interested in. I wonder, were the people that didn't turn to the voice of opposite sex gay? If attention is not just about performing tasks, but also self-awareness and belonging, then the mechanism of it might be far more complex than some boxes and arrows.


When Love Became a Research Subject

On August 31, 1958, Harry Harlow of the University of Wisconsin delivered his presidential address to the American Psychological Association in Washington. The title was "The Nature of Love." He opened by conceding that some considered love too intimate and personal a subject for experimental research. Then he presented the experiments.

The work had not started as a study of love. Harlow's lab in Madison had been separating rhesus monkeys from their mothers a few hours after birth and raising them by hand, using techniques developed at Yale, to produce healthy, disease-free animals for learning experiments. The bottle-fed infants were in some ways healthier and heavier than mother-reared ones. But the staff noticed something else. The infants clung fiercely to the folded gauze diapers that covered the wire-mesh floors of their cages, and when the pads were removed once a day for cleaning, they threw violent tantrums. Harlow compared it to a human child's attachment to a blanket, a pillow, or a stuffed toy. The lab had also found that an infant monkey raised on a bare wire floor survived the first five days of life with difficulty, if at all.

This ran against the prevailing view. Behaviorists and psychoanalysts alike held that an infant's love for its mother was secondary: the mother feeds the child, hunger is relieved, and affection attaches itself to the source of food. The behaviorist John B. Watson had gone further and warned parents in the 1920s that hugging and kissing children would make them weak and dependent. Love, in this account, was a by-product of the bottle.

To separate food from comfort, Harlow built two kinds of surrogate mothers. The first was a block of wood covered in sponge rubber and sheathed in tan terry cloth, with a light bulb behind it radiating warmth. Harlow described her in his address as soft, warm, and tender, a mother with infinite patience who was available twenty-four hours a day and never scolded. The second had the same shape but was made of bare wire mesh. Eight newborn monkeys were each given a cage with access to both. For four of them, the feeding bottle was mounted on the cloth mother; for the other four, on the wire mother.



Within a few days the pattern was clear. Regardless of which mother held the milk, the infants spent nearly all their time on the cloth mother, by most accounts seventeen to eighteen hours a day. Those fed by the wire mother went to her only to nurse, then returned to the cloth one. Harlow named what the cloth mother provided "contact comfort," and argued it was a need as basic as food.



He then tested what the cloth mother was for. In the fear test, a mechanical teddy bear the size of the infant marched toward it beating a drum. Whichever mother had fed them, the infants ran to the cloth mother and clung to her. After a few moments of rubbing against her, many turned to look at the toy, and some left her to approach and explore it. Infants raised with only a wire mother did not seek her out; they clutched themselves, rocked, and cried.

In the open-field test, infants were placed in an unfamiliar room filled with blocks, blankets, and containers. With the cloth mother present, they used her as a base, venturing out to explore and returning to touch her. Without her, they froze, crouched, sucked their thumbs, and cried. Harlow's conclusion was that attachment rests on the comfort of contact, not only on the satisfaction of need, and that what the infant gains from that contact is the security to explore.



The cloth mother had limits Harlow did not foresee in 1958. The monkeys raised on her grew up socially impaired: they could not relate normally to other monkeys, and many of the females later neglected or abused their own infants. In the 1960s Harlow moved from studying the presence of love to studying its absence. Some infants were kept in total isolation for up to two years; others were placed in a narrow stainless-steel chamber he himself named the "pit of despair." They emerged severely disturbed. Even at the time, some colleagues considered the work cruel. Some researchers, including former students, later cited these experiments as one of the factors behind the rise of the animal liberation movement in the United States.


In Absence of Love

Let's look into Harlow's experiments a bit closer, especially the ones that focused on the absence of love. From around 1960, Harlow and his students began publishing their observations on isolation. They used two methods. Partial isolation meant raising an infant in a bare wire cage where it could see, hear, and smell other monkeys but never touch them. Monkeys raised this way stared blankly, circled their cages in repetitive loops, and mutilated themselves. Total isolation meant shutting an infant, from a few hours after birth, in a chamber where it saw no animal of any kind, human included. The periods were three, six, and twelve months, and for one group twenty-four.

Harlow recorded what happened when the chamber doors opened. No monkey died during isolation, but on release they usually went into a kind of emotional shock, clutching themselves and rocking. Of six monkeys isolated for three months, one refused to eat after release and died five days later; the autopsy attributed death to emotional anorexia.



Three-month isolates recovered partially once placed with peers. Harlow compared three months to a human child spending more than a year in a poor orphanage. Six months was different. Total isolation for the first six months of life, he wrote, produced severe deficits in virtually every aspect of social behavior, and the effects appeared to be permanent. He had assumed twelve months would be no worse than six. Instead, twelve months of isolation almost obliterated the animals socially. The standard procedure of housing them with normal age-mates had to be stopped after ten weeks, because the normal monkeys were injuring them too badly.

Harlow also wanted to know whether attachment would survive a mother who hurt her child. He and Suomi built what they themselves called "monster mothers": cloth surrogates that blasted compressed air, that rocked violently, or that thrust brass spikes out of their chests. The results contradicted behaviorist prediction. Infants that were blasted or shaken clung tighter. In a version where a buzzer sounded before each blast, the infants did not learn to move away at the buzzer; they clung harder the moment they heard it and took the full force of the air. When the spikes came out, they moved only slightly away, waited for the spikes to retract, then returned and clung again.

Harlow and Suomi later wrote that the best monster mothers they could produce were the products of their own experiments: females raised in isolation. These females could not mate, so the lab restrained them on a frame to force impregnation. Many of these "motherless mothers" ignored their infants entirely; others attacked them brutally, and some crushed their infants' skulls with their teeth. Yet even infants abused by their own mothers continued to show intense attachment, returning to them again and again. The drive to attach did not depend on how the infant was treated.


The Darkest Experiments: Well of Despair

The darkest experiments came around 1970. The vertical chamber was a stainless-steel trough with sloping sides and a rounded bottom that a monkey could not climb out of. Its technical name was the "vertical chamber apparatus," but Harlow insisted on calling it the "pit of despair," and also the "well of despair" and "well of loneliness." The monkeys placed in it were three months to three years old and had already bonded with their mothers. The science writer Deborah Blum, in her biography Love at Goon Park, writes that most stayed in the chamber for about a month, no more than six weeks. Within a few days they stopped moving and huddled in a corner. The aim was an animal model of human clinical depression. Suomi used the chamber for his doctoral dissertation in 1970 and wrote that he could find no monkey with any defense against it. In 1972 the psychiatrist William McKinney, Suomi, and Harlow published the results in Archives of General Psychiatry.

These were also the darkest years of Harlow's own life. He had struggled with depression throughout his life. In 1967 his second wife, the developmental psychologist Margaret Kuenne Harlow, was diagnosed with cancer; she died on August 11, 1971. During her illness Harlow became severely depressed, and after her death he underwent electroconvulsive therapy. A year later he retired and moved to Arizona. Blum's biography sets the pit of despair beside his own depression, but that connection is the biographer's, not a statement of Harlow's.

The evidence in humans predates Harlow's monkeys. In 1945, the Viennese-born psychoanalyst René Spitz, by then in the United States, published a paper on "hospitalism." He compared infants in a foundling home in Mexico with infants in a prison nursery in New York. The foundling-home infants lacked neither food nor hygiene; to prevent infection they were often kept alone in small cubicles and rarely held. They withdrew, lost weight, declined badly in development, and many died. The infants in the prison nursery saw their mothers every day and developed more or less normally. Spitz called the state caused by a short loss of the mother "anaclitic depression": if the mother returned within three to five months, the infant recovered quickly; beyond five months, the decline grew steadily worse. In 1947 he edited his footage into a short film, Grief: A Peril in Infancy. When he showed it to psychoanalysts in New York, a colleague reportedly asked him: why did you do that to us?

More than half a century later, the question received its first randomized test. Ceaușescu's Romania left behind a vast network of orphanages. In 2000, Charles Nelson of Harvard, Nathan Fox of Maryland, and Charles Zeanah of Tulane, working with the Romanian government, launched the Bucharest Early Intervention Project. 136 children aged 6 to 31 months who had been living in institutions were randomly divided into two groups: half stayed in the orphanages, and half went into a foster care network the project built for the purpose, since Bucharest had almost no foster homes at the time. Among the children placed in foster care, 49.2 percent formed secure attachments; among those who stayed in institutions, 17.5 percent did. Within the foster group, children placed before age two were significantly more likely to become securely attached. IQ and brain activity showed the same time boundary. The researchers followed the children into their late teens, and the benefits of foster care held. The study drew its own ethical criticism: it randomly left half the children in an environment already known to be harmful.

The environments in these studies had one thing in common. Food, warmth, and hygiene were all there. What was missing was someone who kept noticing the child and responding. 🧪


Timeline

  • 1905 — Harry Harlow born in Fairfield, Iowa.

  • 1928 — John B. Watson's Psychological Care of Infant and Child warns parents against hugging and kissing their children.

  • 1945 — René Spitz publishes "Hospitalism," comparing infants in a Mexican foundling home with infants in a New York prison nursery.

  • 1947 — Spitz's film Grief: A Peril in Infancy.

  • 1958 — Harlow delivers "The Nature of Love" to the American Psychological Association in Washington (August 31).

  • 1959 — Harlow and Robert Zimmerman report 165 days of follow-up on cloth- and wire-mother infants in Science.

  • c. 1960 — Harlow's lab begins publishing on partial and total social isolation.

  • 1966 — The U.S. Animal Welfare Act is passed.

  • 1967 — Margaret Kuenne Harlow diagnosed with cancer.

  • 1970 — Stephen Suomi uses the vertical chamber ("pit of despair") for his doctoral dissertation.

  • 1971 — Harlow and Suomi publish "Social Recovery by Isolation-Reared Monkeys" in PNAS, describing the "therapist" monkeys; Margaret Harlow dies (August 11).

  • 1972 — McKinney, Suomi, and Harlow publish the vertical-chamber study in Archives of General Psychiatry; Suomi and Harlow publish "Social Rehabilitation of Isolate-Reared Monkeys."

  • 1981 — Harlow dies (December 6).

  • 2000 — The Bucharest Early Intervention Project begins in Romania.

  • 2002 — Deborah Blum publishes Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection.

  • 2014 — Nelson, Fox, and Zeanah publish Romania's Abandoned Children.

  • 2023 — Nearly two decades of BEIP follow-up show the benefits of foster care persisting into adolescence.


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