Elephants on Acid

by Boese, Alex

  “Eat your vegetables.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “You’re not leaving this table until you finish them.”

  “Waaaahhhhhhh!”

  Scenes like this are all too common at dinner tables, as desperate parents try to force good nutrition on their resistant kids.

  Wouldn’t it be easier just to let children eat whatever they want? Whenever frazzled parents compare notes, someone inevitably makes this tempting suggestion. And someone else is sure to chime in with, “Yeah, wasn’t there a doctor who conducted an experiment that proved that if kids are allowed to eat whatever they want, they naturally choose a well-balanced diet?”

  Yes, there was such a doctor. Her name was Dr. Clara Davis. But despite the urban-legend-style rumors that circulate about her study, what, if anything, it proved is up for debate.

  Davis’s study, conducted in 1928, was a culinary version of Psammetichus’s language experiment. Psammetichus had hoped to discover the natural language of humans by observing children who had never heard others speak. Similarly, Davis hoped to discover humankind’s natural diet by observing children who had never been fed solid food before and were therefore free of adult tastes and habits. Would they prefer a carnivorous, vegetarian, or omnivorous diet? And more important, would their bodies automatically make them desire the foods that met their nutritional needs, providing them with a well-balanced diet?

  Davis used as her subjects three newly weaned infants between seven and nine months old at Cleveland’s Mount Sinai Hospital. She arranged for the infants—Donald, Earl, and Abraham—to eat alone, away from other children. At the beginning of each meal, a nurse placed a tray in front of the boy. On the tray were dishes containing different foods—chicken, beef, cauliflower, eggs, apples, bananas, carrots oatmeal, and the like. The child was free to eat whatever he wanted from this tray, in whatever quantity he desired. The nurses had specific instructions about how the feeding should occur:

  Food was not offered to the infant either directly or by suggestion. The nurses [sic] orders were to sit quietly by, spoon in hand, and make no motion. When, and only when, the infant reached for or pointed to a dish might she take up a spoonful and, if he opened his mouth for it, put it in. She might not comment on what he took or did not take, point to or in any way attract his attention to any food, or refuse him any for which he reached. He might eat with his fingers or in any way he could without comment on or correction of his manners. The tray was to be taken away when he had definitely stopped eating, which was usually after from twenty to twenty-five minutes.

  Initially the children didn’t display great manners. They thrust their whole hand or face into the dishes. They threw food on the floor. When they tasted food they didn’t like, they spluttered and spat it out. But soon they figured out the routine. Like little princes, they would point at a dish with their stubby fingers, open their mouths expectantly, and wait for the food to arrive.

  Two of the children stayed on the diet for six months, the third for a year. At the end of this period, Davis examined her data and tried to draw some conclusions.

  She found it impossible to discern any innate dietary preferences beyond noting that humans are definitely omnivorous. At first the children sampled dishes randomly, but soon they developed favorites they sought out no matter where the dishes were placed on the tray. However, their favorites changed unpredictably every few weeks. The nurses would say, “Donald is on an egg jag this week.” Or perhaps it would be a “meat jag” or a “cereal jag.” Milks, fruits, and cereals were, by volume, the foods the kids chose most often. They chose bone product, glandular organs, and sea fish least often.

  Did the children make sensible choices that provided for their dietary needs? Here we should note that Davis conducted her experiment before scientists had a clear understanding of the role vitamins play in our bodies’ health. So from a modern perspective, her analysis seems less than rigorous. She basically eyeballed the kids, decided they looked plump and well nourished, and declared they had done a fine job of managing their dietary needs. She noted the children had come down with a series of illnesses during the course of the experiment—including influenza, whooping cough, and chicken pox—but she didn’t regard this as significant. And perhaps it wasn’t, given the germs they were exposed to at the hospital.

  However, Davis did offer one tantalizing piece of evidence to indicate the existence of a self-regulating dietary mechanism. One of the children, Earl, had begun the experiment with a case of rickets. Davis added a dish of cod liver oil to his tray in the hope that he would voluntarily down the fishy liquid. Surprisingly, he did—for three months, until his rickets were cured. Then he stopped eating it. Perhaps his body made him desire the medicine he needed. Or perhaps it was random chance. It’s difficult to say.

  Davis declared her experiment a success, but she readily admitted this wasn’t an invitation to laissez-faire rules in the dining room. As her critics often point out, and as she acknowledged, there was a trick to her experiment: The 52children had no unhealthy options. Davis gave the infants no canned, dried, or processed foods, no peanut butter sandwiches, no chocolate milk, no cheese, no butterscotch pudding, no ice-cream sundaes—in other words, no tasty but unhealthy enticements to lure them from the path of righteous eating. Davis had stacked the deck in her favor. As long as the kids consumed enough food, the odds were they would get a balanced diet.

  So if you’re a parent and want to try your kids on Davis’s eat whatever-you-want diet, feel free. It probably won’t do any harm. But realize the first step is to eliminate junk food. All Happy Meals, crisps, pizza, and fizzy drinks must go. Then watch your child’s eyes widen with delight as you offer him a selection of cooked marrow, spinach, raw carrots, unprocessed whole wheat, and cauliflower. You probably won’t be able to count to five before you hear the “Waaaahhhhhhh!” Most parents will quickly conclude it’s easier to stick with the pizza and force the little darlings to eat a few vegetables now and then.

  The Masked Tickler

  The Leuba household, 1933. An infant lies awake in a crib. Suddenly a man opens the bedroom door and walks toward the baby. He is wearing a cardboard mask with narrow slits cut out for his eyes. He stands over the child without saying a word. He holds himself tense, as though consciously trying to suppress his body language. Then he reaches down and pokes the child gently beneath the armpit. The child looks up and smiles. The man nods slightly, his hands continuing to move as if following a predetermined pattern. He pokes along the ribs, under the chin, on the side of the neck, inside the knees, and finally runs a finger along the soles of the feet, all without making a sound. When the child laughs the man abruptly steps away, picks up a journal, and busies himself writing in it for the next few minutes.

  A stranger observing these events might have been alarmed. What was the masked man doing? Was he an intruder? Did he mean to kidnap the child? But there was no cause for concern. The man was Dr. Clarence Leuba, the child’s father and a professor of psychology at Antioch College. His mysterious actions were part of an experiment to understand the phenomenon of tickling.

  Leuba wondered why people laugh when they’re tickled. Tickling, after all, is not self-evidently funny. Many find it painful, especially if done to excess. So is the laughter a learned response, something we pick up as infants by observing others laugh when tickled, or is it an innate response?

  Leuba reasoned that if laughter is a learned response to tickling, then it should be possible to raise a child who would not laugh when tickled. For this experiment to work, the child would need to be shielded from all displays of tickle-induced laughter. He could not hear his mother chuckle as she bent down to tickle him. Nor could he observe siblings cackle with glee as fingers sought out their armpits. If the laughter response was innate, the child would eventually laugh anyway, but if the response was learned, the child would respond to tickling with a blank stare.

  Such an experiment would not be easy to co
nduct, but for the sake of science, Leuba decided to give it a try.

  He volunteered his own household as the experimental setting. He could scarcely invade another family’s home to monitor their tickling behavior around the clock. And he would use his own newborn son as the test subject. In his research notes he designated the boy as R. L. Male.

  Only one serious obstacle lay in Leuba’s path—his wife. With a single giggle she could ruin everything. In his report he cryptically noted that “the mother’s cooperation was elicited.” This doesn’t give us much of a clue about her reaction to the idea. Did she laugh, or roll her eyes and say, “For God’s sake, Clarence, why?” We will never know. But somehow Leuba did obtain her promise of assistance.

  And so the Leuba household became a tickle-free zone, except during experimental sessions when R. L. Male. was subjected to laughter-free tickling. During these sessions, strict guidelines were followed. The tickler concealed his face behind a twelve-by-fifteen-inch piece of cardboard. He maintained a “smileless, sober expression, even though his face was hidden behind the cardboard shield.” And the tickling followed a regular pattern—first light, then vigorous—in order of armpits, ribs, chin, neck, knees, then feet. Occasionally Leuba used a tassel.

  Even outside of the experimental sessions there were guidelines to be followed: “The baby should never be tickled when he can see or hear a person laughing or when laughter is being produced or facilitated in him by jouncing, a peek-a-boo game or the like.” Perhaps, for the mother’s benefit, this rule was posted on the refrigerator.

  The experiment proceeded. The rules were enforced. But, unfortunately, a few lapses occurred. On April 23, 1933, Leuba 53recorded a confession from his wife—on occasion, after her son’s bath, she had “jounced him up and down while laughing and saying ‘Bouncy, Bouncy.’ ” Perhaps this was enough to ruin the experiment. That is not clear. What is clear is that by month seven, R. L. Male was happily screaming with laughter when tickled.

  Leuba was undeterred. When his daughter, E. L. Female, was born in February 1936, he repeated the experiment, with the same result—laughter at seven months. You sense a certain regret in Leuba that his children kept turning out so normal. Laughter, Leuba concluded, must be an innate response to being tickled. There went his chance at raising the world’s first untickleable child.

  Did the children suffer any psychological damage as a result of the experiment? Did they develop a profound fear of masked men, a fear they could never quite understand? We don’t know. A follow-up study was not conducted.

  Leuba’s study received scant attention from the scientific community, although fifty-eight years later Dr. Harris did cite it in her mock-tickle-machine study (see chapter two). However, a faint echo of Leuba’s experiment can be found in American popular culture. In the 1970s a masked villain named the Tickler appeared on an episode of the TV show Spidey Super Stories. With feathers attached to his fingers, the Tickler incapacitated his victims with laughter before robbing them. A mere coincidence? Probably. But it’s fun to imagine Dr. Leuba, frustrated by the slow progress of his research, sneaking out of his home one evening and embarking on a new career as a comic-strip super villain.

  A Girl Named Gua

  From the start, Winthrop and Luella Kellogg knew their adopted daughter, Gua, was different. It wasn’t just her physical appearance—her lumpy overhanging brows or the black hair that hung down on either side of her face like sideburns. There were other things. Her jumping, for instance. Her great strength would send her flying through the air, from window to bed or from porch to ground. When startled she would instinctively vault forward two or three feet. All the other babies would simply look around bewildered.

  “Of course she’s different,” people told them. “She’s a chimp!” But the Kelloggs were determined to ignore this surface difference. In their eyes, she was just a little girl—though admittedly one hairier than most.

  The experiment occurred to Winthrop Kellogg in 1927, while he was a graduate student in psychology at Columbia University. He had read an article about cases of wild children raised by animals. Even after being returned to society, such children often continue to act more animal than human. They grunt and crawl around on all fours. Kellogg wondered what would happen if the situation were reversed. If an ape were raised by a human family, would it learn to act like a human, walking upright and eating with a knife and fork? Kellogg suggested to his wife, Luella, that they take a chimpanzee baby into their home and find out. They would never put it in a cage or treat it like a pet. Instead they would cuddle it, talk to it, spoon-feed it, and clothe it like a child. At the least, Kellogg figured such an experiment would offer valuable insights into the relationship between environment and heredity.

  Luella resisted the idea. Evidently she was the sensible one. But in 1931 a grant from the Social Science Research Council gave Winthrop enough money to conduct the experiment, and the Yale Anthropoid Experiment Station in Orange Park, Florida, offered him a chimp. Grudgingly, Luella agreed to go along with her husband’s plan, so they packed their bags and moved to Florida to meet their new daughter.

  One other factor made the timing perfect. The Kelloggs had recently had a child of their own, a son named Donald. This presented Winthrop a unique opportunity to raise a chimp and a human side by side, allowing him to collect detailed data about the comparative rates of development of the two species.

  Gua arrived at the Kellogg household on June 26, 1931. She was seven and a half months old. Donald was ten months old.

  During the first meeting of the two infants, the parents hovered over them nervously, ready to intervene at the first sign of tension. But there was no need. Donald was immediately fascinated by Gua. He reached over and touched her. Initially Gua showed little corresponding interest, but by the next time they met, she had warmed up to him considerably. She leaned over and kissed him. From that moment on, the two were inseparable.

  The experiment proved to be a full-time job. Not only were there the usual tasks involved with caring for infants—bathing, feeding, changing diapers—but the Kelloggs also kept themselves busy recording details of how the babies ate, slept, walked, and played. They noted unusual emotional reactions. For instance, Gua had an unaccountable fear of toadstools. They wrote down responses to smells—Donald liked perfume but Gua hated it. They even recorded what sound a spoon made when it was knocked against the infants’ heads:

  The differences between the skulls can be audibly detected by tapping them with the bowl of a spoon or with some similar object. The sound made by Donald’s head during the early months is somewhat in the nature of a dull thud, while that obtained from Gua’s is harsher, like the crack of a mallet upon a wooden croquet or bowling ball.

  The Kelloggs also devised tests to measure Donald’s and Gua’s abilities. For instance, the suspended-cookie test—how quickly could the infants figure out how to reach a cookie suspended by a string in the middle of the room? And the sound-localization test—with hoods over their heads, could they locate where a person calling them by name was standing? Gua reliably performed better on these tests than Donald, demonstrating that chimps mature faster than humans. So score one for the chimp.

  But the Kelloggs were interested not only in Gua’s development, but also in how humanized she was becoming. Here the results were mixed. Gua picked up some human behaviors. She often walked upright, and she ate with a spoon. But in other ways she remained decidedly chimplike. She was, in the words of the Kelloggs, a creature of “violent appetites and emotions.” Simple things, such as people having changed their clothes, would confuse and frighten her. The ability to speak eluded her, despite Winthrop’s repeated efforts to make her say “Papa.” And she failed entirely to grasp the concept of pat-a-cake—a game that Donald understood right away. So score one for the human!

  To be fair, Donald wasn’t proving to be much of a speaker, either. Nine months into the experiment, he had only mastered three words. Which left pat-a-cake
as the sole arena in which he truly reigned victorious over the chimp. But what he did say began to worry the Kelloggs. One day, to indicate he was hungry, he imitated Gua’s “food bark.” Suddenly, visions of their son transforming into a wild child, grunting and crawling on all fours, danced before their eyes. Perhaps, the Kelloggs realized, some playmates of his own species would be better for his development. So on March 28, 1932, they shipped Gua back to the primate center. She was never heard from again.

  Could Gua have been humanized had the experiment continued longer than nine months? The answer is certainly no. Primatologists now know enough about chimpanzees to state this definitively. Chimps are wild animals. Their inherent wildness eventually reasserts itself, even if they’re raised in a human family. So it’s just as well the Kelloggs ended the experiment when they did.

  Unfortunately, every year people insist on learning this lesson the hard way. It’s become quite popular to purchase baby chimps as pets—even though they can cost more than forty thousand dollars. But a few years later, owners have on their hands a full-grown, enormously strong animal that requires skill and training to handle. Mature chimps can be willful, mischievous, and destructive. If they’re bored they look for trouble. They pull down drapes and knock over furniture. They’re smart enough to know the one thing a person values most in the house, and they may purposefully decide to smash it. Come to think of it, they’re not that different 54from a typical younger sibling. So perhaps Gua could have been a normal little sister for Donald after all.

  Baby in a Box

  The first baby was a lot of work. There was all that laundry and cleaning, and if he wasn’t careful when he bent down to lift the child out of her crib, he risked spraining his back. So in 1943, when Burrhus Frederic Skinner’s wife became pregnant for a second time, he decided to use his scientific training to reduce the drudgery of baby care. He came up with a device he called the mechanical baby tender. It became more widely known as the “baby box.”