The search for a ‘sleep’ button for his young son is endless, but then along comes Ewan McGregor…
The psychologist BF Skinner put pigeons in a box to study their responses to stimuli. One cohort were given grain if they pecked a button and they quickly worked out the mechanism by which they were being rewarded. In another group, however, grain was dispensed entirely randomly, with no input from the pigeon having any effect. Rather than clocking this distribution as entirely senseless, Skinner found these pigeons instead contrived ever more elaborate patterns of behaviour to get the desired effect. Some walked in circles, others pecked at the walls, each thinking they had intuited some replicable method of attaining their desire. I think of that second group of pigeons a lot, pacing anti-clockwise round our bedroom, humming as I rub my son’s temple in a desperate attempt to get him to sleep.
The issue of sleep is one I’ve not really broached in this column since – whisper it – my son had previously slept quite well in his early days. We have friends with toddlers who’ve never slept three hours in a single block, so we know how obnoxious that sounds. But for a brief, exalted time that now seems to wave to us from a distant past, he did exactly that. And we held this like a shameful secret, fearing the magic of this particular arrangement would be broken if we said it aloud. Or, like Superman’s parents, feared our beloved Clark would be taken away from us so that his super powers would be studied.
Continue reading...from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2CtxdQ9
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