Ari Handel - Don't Fall In Love With Your Monkey

 

 

"Don't fall in love with your monkey." [audience chuckle] My advisor warned me, but I didn't listen. There's some things you have to learn for yourself. It was 1992, and I was a young graduate student, getting ready to take Santiago out of his cage for the first time. So, I put on these bouffant boots and a little blue cap and a big pair of welder's gloves and I turned to my advisor. And my advisor gave me one last piece of advice. He said, "Be as inevitable as the tides." And he sent me up to the monkey room. [audience chuckle] 

 

So, I went upstairs, and I unlocked the door, and I opened the door. There's a waft of warm air came whooshing out at me, and it smelled something-- some combination of Purina monkey chow and monkey feces and just plain monkey. [audience chuckle] And I walked in. It's a small room, it's cinder block, and it's just big enough for eight cages, four on the top and four on the bottom. And Santiago's cage is on the bottom right-hand corner. So, I leaned down and I unlocked the door, and I tried to go and take Santiago to the cage.

 

I stuck my hand in, and it was a little scary because Santiago is a wild animal. He does not want to be taken out of his cage. And he's batting at me and trying to hit my hand when I reach for him. And he's big, and he's fast, and he's nimble, and I'm slow, and I'm in bulky clothing, and I'm starting to get hot. I'm starting to sweat. And the monkeys in the room can sense that there's conflict going on, they're starting to hoot and holler and screech, and they are working me up. And finally, I get one hand around Santiago's bicep. And Santiago does exactly what you would do if some blue ogre reached into your house and grabbed you by the arms and tried to take you out. He bit me as hard as he possibly could, right here at the soft part of my hand.

 

And it hurt. It really hurt. It hurt a lot. And every nerve in my hand was screaming to me, "Drop the monkey." [audience chuckle] But I was as inevitable as the tide. So, I did not drop the monkey. Instead, I reached my other hand in, grabbed his other bicep and pulled his arms behind his back. And I took him out, and I stuck him in his monkey chair, and I brought him down to the lab.

 

Now, down in the lab, Santiago, he is now the one who is frightened. He is quaking. He's shivering in his chair. So, I take a bottle, and I fill it with juice, and I hold it up to his mouth, and he starts to suck the juice. It's Hawaiian Punch. He starts to suck the juice, and I can see his little mouth around the edge of the bottle, and the juice is dripping down his chin and it's so cute, his little eyes. And I'm looking at him, and I see in his eyes this look, and it's joy. And I think I know that joy is meant for the fake fruit flavoring in the bottle, [audience chuckle] but I can't help feeling that some of that joy is from me.

 

Now, I think that I became a neurobiologist in fourth grade when my mom gave me this coloring book of the human brain for a book report. And it said that this part of the brain back here is for seeing things, and this part up here, that's for thinking about stuff or, like, when you have to do your math homework, and there's a part in the middle that's for feeling things, that's for when you get scared of dark, and you don't want to go downstairs into the basement. And that meant to me that when we see, perceive, think, and feel about the world, we're using this. And so, if we want to know how to understand the world, what it's like to live inside of a human mind, then we just have to understand this.

 

So, when neurobiologists want to study the human mind, they look at the brains of monkeys. And I wanted to ask complex questions about mental functioning, which meant that I had to use a complex behavioral task. And that meant that Santiago had to learn to play a video game. [audience chuckle] So, I would put him in a room facing a giant screen with a tube connected to his mouth that contained juice. And I'm going to the next room where I had a computer, and I could control all these lights that would flash on that screen. And Santiago's job was to look at the lights in the right order and with the right timing, and if he did it right, he would get some juice. Now, this was not actually a very complicated game to play. You guys could all play it very easily. But it was very hard to teach Santiago how to play the game. And the reason is that I just could not tell him how to play, Santiago did not speak English. In fact, Santiago lacks the mental capacity to speak any human language whatsoever.

 

So, we had to invent our own language. And I would watch Santiago's eye movements, and I would see that if they were drifting slowly, that meant that he was very frustrated. But if they were shimmering very fast, that meant he was excited. So, I would watch those eye movements, and I would adjust the difficulty of the task accordingly to cajole him forward or to calm him down so that slowly and surely, together, the teacher and the student, we learned this task together. And when we did, Santiago got very, very happy. He was like a gambler who has just cracked the blackjack tables, because now he could just get juice, juice, juice, juice, juice as much as he wanted. So, he would just sit in that room, and he would play the game all day long, and he would drink tremendous, tremendous volumes of juice. [audience chuckle]

 

And that made me happy, too, because now that Santiago was working well, I could do the thing that I really wanted to do, which was I would lower a probe down into Santiago's brain, [audience chuckle] and I would listen to the activity of individual neurons while he was performing this task. And what I found once was that there were neurons in his brain that got activated every time Santiago made an eye movement. But the cool thing, and it is so cool, it's mind blowing, is that these neurons did not get activated just when he made the eye movement. They got activated as soon as I gave him enough information that he could choose which eye movement to make. Listening to these neurons, I could predict in advance what he was going to do long before he did it. That meant that I was eavesdropping on him while he was making a decision. I was inside that coloring book. I was reading my monkey's mind. So, we did this for quite some time. Santiago would work and get juice, and I would get data out of his brain and we went through this for days and days and days.

 

And at night, I would go up to the monkey room, and I'd give all the monkeys treats, give them apples and oranges and grapes and bananas. And I would always give an extra big handful to Santiago because he was my boy, and I wanted him to know that. So, went on like this for some time and then something happened that had not happened in a long time. I went upstairs to get Santiago, and he tried to bite me. And when I brought him downstairs to the game room, he wouldn't work. He just banged and aborted every trial. Bang, bang, bang. And I couldn't figure it out at first. And then it slowly dawned on me that Santiago was a smart, smart animal. I mean, he was smarter than a dog or a cat. He was primate smart.

 

And I realized that he must have figured out sometime during the night that I was not bringing him down to that room so that he could play a game so he could have fun. I was bringing him down there for my benefit. He was my servant. He realized that I think. And that realization made the juice taste bitter. And he didn't want to do it anymore, so he was having no part of it. And I had a monkey who was on strike. [audience chuckle]

 

So, I did the thing you do when this happens. I turned off the water in Santiago's cage. Now, the idea is that he's only going to get enough water to keep him healthy, and anything extra, he's going to have to earn. The problem with this plan is that every night, I would go upstairs to the monkey room, and I would give Santiago his little supplement of water, and he would drink it right down in front of my face. And then he would have nothing. And I would go home, and I would get a glass of iced tea, and I would drink it, and I would think about Santiago lying in his cage with no water. And then the iced tea would turn to a beer, which would turn to a bourbon. And I would be sitting there, drowning my sorrows. [audience chuckle] And I would wake up in the morning, and I would be filled with guilt over what was happening to Santiago, what I was doing to him. 

 

But in the morning, when I took Santiago and I put him in that room and he started to bang and holler and would not work that guilt or to anger, because whose fault was it, really, that Santiago was not drinking? Whose fault was it that I felt guilty every day that I was forced to be the [beep sound]. It was Santiago's fault. I mean, he was sitting there with a juice tube in his mouth, and there was a game he knew to play, and he wasn't playing. And I would get so angry at him and so frustrated that I would storm into that room, and I would scream at him, "Santiago, why don't you just work already? The game is here. You know how to play. Work. Why can't we just go back to the way it used to be? When you were getting the juice and I was getting the data. We were so happy." [audience laughter] But he wouldn't listen. And I would get angry, and sometimes I would get so angry, I would pull on his little monkey ear, and he would go, "Eee." [audience chuckle]

 

And then the anger would turn back to guilt. And I would run into the other room, and I would find the button that controls the juice, and I would just press it, [shushes] giving Santiago juice until the guilt dissipated. And this went on day after day after day after day after day after day. And I got so frustrated, eventually, that I walked into that room one day. And I was like, "Okay, if you are not thirsty, I know you're thirsty. I'll show you how thirsty you are." And I walked into the room. I poured myself a huge glass of Hawaiian Punch.

 

I took my mask off. I made eye contact with Santiago, and staring at him in the eye, I drank the juice down, taunting him. [audience chuckle] And he just looked at me simply. And I realized that I had long ago left scientific objectivity behind. [audience laughter] No, really, I needed help. This was not working. [audience laughter] So, I went to my advisor, and he said to me, "Stop playing who's the monkey." [audience laughter] And what he meant was, I was engaged in a battle of wills and a battle of wits with animal whose brain is the size of my fist and I was losing. [audience laughter] I was supposed to be training him, and he was training me. And what he was training me to do was get guilty, get angry, cross the line, get guilty again, and give him free juice. And believe me, free juice is the sweetest tasting juice there is. [audience chuckle]

 

But now, no more. I was going to be hard, and I was going to be serious. And I never went into that room anymore, and I never gave them free juice. And it was treat time, I went upstairs to the monkey room, and every monkey in that room got treats. They got nice, juicy treats, cucumbers and apples and pears and grapes, but not Santiago. For Santiago, it was cashews and peanuts and crackers. [audience aww] And it took a long time because I had really done a very good job of training Santiago, that I am really a pushover. But eventually, eventually, eventually, there came a day, after months and months of suffering on his part and mine, when I walked up to the monkey room, and instead of trying to bite me, Santiago just did this.

 

And when I took his hand in my hand, he did this. And I grabbed him, and I brought him downstairs to work, and he started to play the game. But he didn't play it with, like, the exceptional enthusiasm he had played it with before. He wasn't like, "Whoa, this is the greatest thing ever." No, he sat there and just played the game like a factory worker in front of an assembly line. He just kind of went-- [shushes]. And that should have been a good day for me because I was getting back to the business of science now. I could get my data, Santiago could get its juice. The suffering for us was over. But it wasn't a good day. Because, you see, with all that stuff that had gone before, the competition and the cooperation between us, I had gotten to know Santiago.

 

And now that Santiago wasn't there anymore, I was sitting here with just another broken monkey with a broken will. And I was the one who had broken it. And something snapped a little for me, too, that day because I was going to finish my thesis but the mystique of being a scientist and finding out all this stuff about the mind just didn't seem so magical anymore.

 

So, there were other monkeys. [audience chuckle] I didn't need to be told not to fall in love with them. I instinctively held myself aloof from that. And because of that, I had no mercy on them. And when their will, when they went on strike, when they got upset and it was time to break them, I broke them like that, really fast. And that was good, because they didn't suffer very much, and neither did I. 

 

But I also didn't go up to the monkey room anymore. Because I didn't want to see those animals when they were still a little bit wild. I didn't want to be reminded of that part of them and what I was going to do to that part of them. And it took eight years but I got all the data I needed, piece by piece by piece. And I put my brick in the edifice of human knowledge. And I got my PhD and then I quit, and I wrote a thesis. And thesis is 364 pages long. And it's filled with facts and data and graphs and theories. But the most significant page for me is the first one which says simply, "Dedicated to the memory of Santiago."