Biography of Frederic Skinner

Burrhus Frederic Skinner conducted pioneering work on experimental psychology and advocated behaviourism, which seeks to understand behavior entirely in terms of physiological responses to external stimuli. He also wrote a number of controversial works in which he proposed the widespread use of psychological behavior modification in order to im­prove society and increase human happiness.

Skinner was born in rural, Pennsilvania. He attended Hamilton Col­lege in New York with the intention of becoming a writer and received a B. A. in English literature. After graduation, he spent a year in Green­wich Village attempting to become a writer of fiction, but he soon be­came disillusioned with his literary skills and concluded that he had lit­tle world experience and no strong personal perspective from which to write During this time, which Skinner later called The Dark Year, he had read Russet's Philosophy in which Russell discusses the behaviourist philosophy of psychologist John Watson. At the time, Skinner had be­gun to take more interest in the actions and behaviors of those around him, and some of his short stories had taken a "psychological" angle. He decided to abandon literature and seek admission as a graduate student in psychology at Harvard University, which at the time was not re­garded as a leading institution in that field,

Skinner received a Ph. D from Harvard in 1931 and remained at that institution as a researcher until 1936. He then taught at the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis and later at Indiana University at Bloomington before returning to Harvard as a tenured professor in 1948. He remained there for the rest of his career.

DEJA VU

The term deja vu is French and means, literally, "already seen." Those who have experienced the feeling describe it as an overwhelming sense of familiarity with something that shouldn't be familiar at all. For example, you are traveling to London for the first time. You are in the cathedral, and suddenly it seems as if you have been in that place before. Or maybe you are having dinner with a group of friends, discussing some current political topic, and you have the feeling that you've already ex­perienced this very thing — same friends, same dinner, and same topic.

The phenomenon is rather complex, and there are many different theories as to why deja vu happens.

The term was introduced by Emile Boirac (1851 — 1917), who had strong interests in phenomena. Boirac's term directs our attention to the past. What is unique about deja vu is not something from the past but something in the present, namely, the strange feeling one has. We often have experiences the novelty of which is unclear. In such cases we may have been led to ask such questions as, "Have I read this book be­fore?" "This place looks familiar; have I been here before?" We may feel confused, but the feeling associated with the deja vu experience is not one of confusion, it is one of strangeness. There is nothing strange about not remembering whether you've read a book before, especially if you are fifty years old and have read thousands of books over your life-time. In the deja vu experience, however, we feel strange because we don't think we should feel familiar with the present perception. That sense of inappropriateness is not present when one is simply unclear whether one has read a book or seen a film before.

The Swiss scholar Arthur Funkhouser suggests that there are several "deja experiences" and asserts that in order to better study the phe­nomenon, the nuances between the experiences need to be noted. In the examples mentioned at the beginning, Funkhouser would describe the first incidence as deja visite ("already visited") and the second as deja vecu ("already experienced or lived through").

As much as 70 percent of the population reports having experienced some form of deja vu. A higher number of incidents occur in people 15 to 25 years old than in any other age group.

Since deja vu occurs in individuals with and without a medical con­dition, there is much speculation as to how and why this phenomenon happens. Several psychoanalysts attribute deja vu to simple fantasy or wish fulfillment, while some psychiatrists think it is a mismatching in the brain that causes the brain to mistake the present for the past. Many parapsychologists believe it is related to a past-life experience. Obvi­ously, there is more investigation to be done.