Healing Psychology, Part G - The Drive/Habit System

Previous episodes of this series pointed to psychology’s difficulty explaining addictions and other disease-like quirks of human behavior. The weakness of today’s psychology’s can be traced its disconnect from its mother science—biology. For it is in biology that we find the concepts that explain the normal learning of habits. And understanding normal habit development allows us to understand the abnormal habits we call addictions. As a bonus, understanding habit development casts light on the function of conscious awareness—the ultimate mystery at the heart of psychology.

Transcript

 Part G - The Drive/Habit System
This episode of Healing Psychology is a reading of Chapter Six of my upcoming book Reimagining Psychology.
Copyright (c) Thomas O. Whitehead, 2022, All rights reserved.

[Introduction]

Welcome to Part G of the multi-part series, Healing Psychology. The title of this episode is “The Drive/Habit System.” Previous episodes highlight psychology’s curious failure to help us explain and control addictions and other disease-like habits. The failure is entirely unnecessary. It can be traced to a single source—psychology’s disconnect from its mother science, biology. 

A little over a century ago, influential theorists decided that psychology should no longer concern itself with mind, conscious awareness. That was a strange decision, because psychology’s very name means “the scientific study of the mind and its functions.” As it turned out, this was a dreadful blunder, because awareness is the true link between biology and psychology. The decision to discount awareness cut its connection to biology.

We can use well-validated biological concepts to put the science of behavior back on track, and so overcome its current limits. So, this episode is about re-connecting psychology and biology. In Part G we’ll look closely at the Drive/Habit system, nature’s evolved means of creating and maintaining normal habits. If we can understand how habits are normally created, we can better understand how the process can go wrong. Grasping the Drive/Habit system tells us how, why, and under what conditions malignant habits predictably arise. Further, it casts light on the purpose of conscious awareness in animal life.

Many of the ideas in this episode aren’t mainstream psychology. But you’re invited to listen … anyway.

[Reading]

The Drive/Habit System 

• Actions originally prompted by conscious intelligence may grow so automatic by dint of habit as to be apparently unconsciously performed. Standing, walking, buttoning and unbuttoning, piano-playing, talking, even saying one’s prayers, may be done when the mind is absorbed in other things. [1]

- William James

• A habit may be considered as a convenient kind of stupidity which leaves a person free to act intelligently elsewhere. [2]

- George A. Kelly

More than a century ago influential theorists decided to ban subjective experience from the science of psychology. They even excluded any reference to mind, conscious awareness—the root meaning of the word “psychology.” In the future, they said, the concern of this science would be observable behavior, things researchers could see and precisely measure. Henceforth, psychology would focus upon the learning and unlearning of habits. That sharp emphasis, they reasoned, would remake psychology into a genuinely useful, top-notch science—a field of study equivalent in stature to respected sciences such as physics and chemistry.

Quite unfortunately, they were dead wrong. The decision to ignore experience was a horrible blunder, a true disaster. Why? Because in truth, subjective experience is the key to everything in psychology. It is the most direct cause of animal behavior. So, the decision to exclude it made it literally impossible to explain the very thing theorists wanted to explain—behavior. Ignoring experience left scientific psychology stumbling in the dark. 

Science is about explanation, building a deep understanding of its subject matter. Without understanding, psychology could never become a real science. The best researchers could do was assemble a collection of practical techniques for controlling and manipulating behavior. 

A collection of practical techniques is called a technology. Technology is useful, of course—usefulness is its whole purpose. But techniques don’t explain anything. So, psychology’s new technological path did not lead it toward science. And it gets worse. Excluding reference to experience severed psychology’s link to its mother science—biology. Why? Because an animal’s subjective experience is the psychological expression of its biology. 

The bottom line is that the decision to ignore experience threw psychology off the yellow brick road toward its maturity. Suddenly it was both clueless, and isolated from the other sciences. The aim of this book is to correct that dreadful error by restoring psychology’s link to biology. It is in biology that we find the concepts that help us understand addictions and other out-of-control habits. But … how do we re-connect to biology? As a first step, we need to understand the role of conscious experience in normal habit development, how it guides the translation of instinctive drives into learned behaviors. 

Drives are the inherited behavioral tendencies built into higher animals’ genes, written right into their DNA. Genes are the foundation of animal biology. Because drives are the behavioral expression of an animal’s genes, they are the missing link between psychology and biology. If we can understand drives, we regain the power to explain behavior in a genuinely scientific way. And understanding normal behavior scientifically, we have a better chance of understanding abnormal behavior—out-of-control, parasitic habits such as addictions. 

Is it hard to understand that missing link? Is it complicated? Not at all. In fact, the truth is both simple, and rather obvious. Why, then, do we not see the truth? As discussed earlier, the answer is the same one we get when we ask why the alcoholic doesn’t grasp the obvious source of his difficulties, his drinking. And the same one we get when we ask why the anorectic fails to see the obvious, that she is starving herself to death. The problem isn’t complexity, but denial, the cognitive and perceptual distortion that accompanies all parasitic habits. 

We’ll talk about denial more in later chapters, and why it is an issue in psychology. But the focus of the present chapter is nature’s system of drives and habits, and how subjective experience fits into that system. So, here we’ll be talking about the creation and control of habits. 

The history of learning

To understand what habits are, it helps to know their evolutionary history—how higher animals, including humans, acquired the remarkable power to individually adopt new patterns of behavior. That ability came into being, as did every other feature of living things, through natural selection. Let’s review the evolution of flexible animal behavior. 

There was an epoch, way back in the history of this planet, when all life was simple. The most elaborate lifeforms on this earth were single-celled organisms. Back then there weren’t any complex, multi-celled animals. The animal behavior of that ancient world was not the kind we know today. The only “acts” those single-celled creatures could perform flowed from their manufacture and release of proteins. 

In cells, it is proteins that make things happen. For example, certain kinds of proteins provoke cellular movements. We can think of a cell’s manufacture and release of proteins as “micro-behavior,” behavior on a tiny scale. [3]

Even the simplest cells must be responsive to their environments. For single cells, being responsive means creating and releasing different proteins under different conditions. So, the cells must have a way to store a variety of protein patterns, and a way to activate them under the specific conditions where their release will help them stay alive. Cells store their protein patterns in “blueprint” form within the informational macromolecules DNA and RNA. They keep the patterns until needed. 

The simplest of one-celled animals often hold the patterns in a string (or loop) of genetic material floating within the cell. That strand contains the cell’s genes. [4] The more genes, the greater the potential for responsiveness to its environment. And the more responsive the cell can be, the better its chances of survival. 

We can think of that collection of genes as a form of accumulated wisdom, life-preserving capability gathered over the eons through natural selection. Of course, this kind of “wisdom” is not mentality. Presumably, one-celled animals have little or no mentality. They store this kind of wisdom in their DNA. 

For a long time, there were nothing but these single-celled animals. Then, much later, multi-celled organisms evolved. To further enhance their survival, cells with the same DNA joined together in groups—first just identical cells in simple clusters, and later in more complex assemblies with differentiated parts. Eventually certain animals came to comprise billions of highly specialized cells of multiple types. 

The rise of multicellular life created a need to keep all those different kinds of cells working together as a team. This invited the evolution of behavior on a grander scale, the coordinated activity of all those separate cells, the larger kind of animal behavior we are considering in this book. Coordinating the activity of the cells was at first handled purely by chemical means. Developing later were the specialized connections we call nerves. 

The first primitive multi-celled animals could not, as individuals, learn habits. Those simple species had to evolve their characteristic behavior over their generations through natural selection. And evolution is a painfully slow process. Every bit of the behavior of those more primitive animals was what we call instinctive. Their patterns of activity were all “hard-wired,” built-in, having limited flexibility.

Even today, a multitude of lower animals still live by reflex, instinct. The individual behavior of lower animals has an unbending, robotic quality. And yet, their inborn collection of instincts does reflect the wisdom of their species. Their instincts were gathered through natural selection, because those instinctive behaviors made it more likely that individual members of the species would survive to reproduce. Any change in the behavior of lower animals’ must come about through evolution of the entire species—the same way their bodies evolve. 

It’s important to realize that though these simpler animals don’t display a lot of variability in what they do, every instinctive behavior must be at least somewhat adjustable, or the instinct won’t help the animal survive. Even microbes must respond with some sensitivity to varying environmental conditions. As the animals grew more complex, natural selection increased that individual sensitivity and flexibility.

Drives are instinctual

Over the generations, complex animals’ instincts have become so flexible that they don’t even look like instincts anymore. They have lost the rigidly robotic quality we associate with instincts. Despite this change, it’s still correct to regard them as “instinctive,” because at their root they are the inherited tendencies common to every member of their species. So, there is continuity between the rigid instincts of the simpler animals and the more flexible tendencies inherited by animals that can learn. There’s a continuous spectrum of animal behavior, one that ranges from acts reflecting the most rigid of instincts, to acts arising from the most flexible of instinctual drives. 

Today’s psychology mistakenly draws a line between instincts and learned behavior. In reality, there isn’t any clear separation between them. [5] An individual animal’s every learned behavior, its every habit, begins with instinctual patterns inherited by all members of its species. All behavior, of both lower and higher animals, is based upon instinct. It’s just that in the brainiest of higher animals the individual expression of those instinctive patterns has become exceptionally flexible. 

The continuity between the two is much more important than it seems. It was theorists’ failure to grasp the instinctive basis of learned behavior that led to the failure of strict behaviorism. Today’s psychology remains confused about this very point, because it is still in the throes of a sort of “behaviorist hangover.” We can tie the currently feeble state of behavioral science to its misunderstanding of learning.

Customized instincts

Late in the history of life, some animal species evolved nervous systems of great sophistication, including the intricate assemblies of neurons that would eventually become brains. Though instinctive tendencies were still the root of their behavior, these highly developed animals had evolved a way to express their inherited tendencies in a fluid and variable way—by “soft-wiring” their expression. 

Under this new arrangement, an individual animal could alter its behavior simply by adjusting connections within its brain. “Learning” is our name for this new capability. And what a fantastic innovation it was! Over the generations, the ability to develop habits gradually freed individuals from the prison of inflexibly programmed responses. The real beauty of this system is this: the capacity to form habits gave individual animals more freedom, while sacrificing none of the priceless accumulated wisdom within their species’ collection of instincts. [6]

So, evolution first produced instincts that were relatively rigid, and then evolution progressively made expression of those instincts more flexible. Despite this gradual relaxation, these more flexible instincts evolved in a way that retained the wisdom of the species, its ability to guide individuals toward useful, adaptive behavior. 

In his seminal book Out of Control author Kevin Kelly emphasizes that evolution does more than improve adaptation. It also explores ways to improve the efficiency of evolution itself. Kelly writes, “Evolution daily scrutinizes the world not just to find fitter organisms, but to find ways to increase its own ability … because the speeding up of adaptation is the runaway circuit it rides on.” [7] Individual learning is an extension of evolution by natural selection into individual life.

Are higher animals’ learned habits “better” than the more rigidly instinctive behaviors of lower animals? Are species that can learn more successful at surviving in this world? Surprisingly, there’s no single answer to this question. What’s better depends on the degree of flexibility required to keep an animal alive in its specific environment. American biologist Eric Pianka writes, “Learning is favored in unpredictable situations where animals can best adapt by altering their behavior appropriately. Instincts are basically ‘hardwired’ learning and evolved under predictable situations, especially those that involve life-and-death decisions.” [8] 

There are enormous advantages to the more flexible approach—individualized adaptation through learning. But in unchanging environments those advantages don’t increase survival rates. So learned habits are not the best solution in every case. In part that’s because the capacity to learn, to adjust individual behavior on the fly, comes with a hefty price tag, a cost that can never be safely ignored. Very, very unfortunately, today’s psychology does ignore that cost. 

What’s the cost of greater flexibility? It’s this: learned habits can go rogue. Unavoidably, the process through which habits are formed creates rogues, some of which will evolve into parasitic habits. That problem is a major focus of this book. But why does this happen? What is it about learning that would create out-of-control habits? For the answer we must dig a little deeper into the nature of habits. And we must understand them scientifically.

Drives and habits

The only way to change an entire species’ behavior is time-consuming biological evolution. But the newer, smarter, learning-enabled species don’t have to wait for biological evolution. Individual animals enjoy a freer lifestyle based upon their ability to form their own habits, individual patterns of learned behavior. Though they can’t change their inherited tendencies, behaviorally complex animals—rats, pigeons, people, and horses, for example—can tailor those tendencies to their current circumstances “on the fly,” through the drive/habit system. [9]

What’s the drive/habit system? Lower animals inherit only comparatively rigid instincts. Higher animals inherit a set of more adjustable tendencies. Our current psychology confuses us by giving these more flexible tendencies a different name. Rather than calling them flexible instincts, which is what they are, it calls them drives. 

The different labels imply that they’re different things. But they’re not. “Instincts” and “drives” are both inherited impulses. Both are products of natural selection, and both reflect the animal’s way of surviving in the world. Instincts and drives are two ends of a continuous spectrum of gene-based tendencies, ranging from super rigid to super flexible. Drives are the core of the drive/habit system. And just like instincts, drives are embedded in the animal’s biology, its DNA. 

So, a drive is really just a customizable instinct. It provides a generalized plan for how an animal will go about doing something that helps it stay alive. [10] [11] Although all members of the species inherit identical drives, those drives end up expressed differently by different individuals, as their own habits. Their specific expression varies from animal to animal. Though based on a tendency common to all members of a species, each habit is unique to a particular animal. Said another way, drives are the inherited, generic blueprints for behavior. The habits are the individually customized products built from those blueprints.

Like instincts, drives evolved to help the animal satisfy its needs. Unlike an instinct, though, a drive doesn’t spell out exactly how the animal will meet its need. Those precise details appear in the learned behavior that expresses the drive. So, a specific habit developed by an individual animal is its unique customization of a species-wide tendency. 

The capacity to perceive certain objects and events, and the readiness to act in certain ways, are part of the specifications already built into the drive. But the individual’s learned habits, the concrete behaviors flowing from the blueprints, are whipped up on demand. Each learned habit is that animal’s means du jour of expressing its inborn and unchangeable drive. [12]

An object-oriented system

The drive concept is similar to the notion of the archetype, as conceived by brilliant Swiss psychiatrist C. G. Jung, whose insight often goes uncredited. Here’s something really interesting: there’s a concept in computer science that can help us understand why the evolution of a species ends up producing those archetypal drives. 

Modern programming languages are “object-oriented.” Object-oriented programming (OOP) uses units of written code called “classes.” A “programming class” sounds like it might be an educational experience for programmers. But it’s a technical term. 

A class is a chunk of computer code that serves as “a blueprint or archetype” [13] for a general category of specific computer behaviors. Programmers create classes when they know they’ll have to write similar code over and over. Rather than tediously repeating their work again and again, the programmer writes an abstract form of the code just once, and then re-uses that code as often as needed. 

Why am I talking about this here? Because animal drives work exactly like OOP classes. They are abstract forms that can be re-used by the individual animal as often as needed. They evolved for the same reason programmers create OOP classes—efficiency. And, amazingly, the way they work casts light upon conscious experience.

Here’s an example of the relationship between a class and a specific instance of that class. Suppose a programmer is writing the code for an auto-racing computer game. She might set up a class that she names “Vehicle.” Her Vehicle class is like a form that’s not filled out yet. It might have blank spaces for Make, Model, Engine Power, Color, Special Equipment, Weight, and so on. [14] Once she fills in all the blanks, the newly created vehicle will look and handle on the computer screen like the one she has specified with the information in the blanks. [15]

But the Vehicle class is reusable. She can create another specific kind of car without writing any additional code. She simply fills in the blank spaces in the class with fresh information, and a different car will appear on the screen, one that looks and acts quite differently. The same class can—with no coding changes—be used to create a Ferrari or a 10-ton truck. [16]

Setting up a reusable class is a lot of work. But it’s worth it, because from then on, the programmer can use the Vehicle class to create any kind of car she wants. To create a new car for her game, all she has to do is fill in the blanks with new information—creating a specific instance of the general form. She can re-use the Vehicle class to create an unlimited number of different vehicles, each performing just the way she specifies, simply by putting new data into the blanks. Each additional car is a separate “instance” of that generic Vehicle class.

Jung’s classy idea

This is exactly the way animals’ inherited archetypes work. Well before there were any computer languages, Carl Jung clearly and insightfully incorporated the class concept into his notion of archetypes.

The word “archetype” might sound like it refers to some mystical, fuzzy-headed, airy-fairy notion. But the idea isn’t actually mystical at all. It’s a precise, down-to-earth, practical concept. In fact, an archetype is just a special kind of instinct. Jung himself pointed out over and over that archetypes are simply the psychological and behavioral parts of animal instincts. Animal instincts and Jung’s archetypes are two sides of the very same coin. In Jung’s own words,

• The instincts…  form very close analogies to the archetypes, so close, in fact, that there is good reason for supposing that the archetypes are the unconscious images of the instincts themselves, in other words, that they are patterns of instinctual behavior. [17]

Jung’s archetype concept is an extension of the instinct concept (and the more flexible, instinct-like drive concept) into mental life. Scientists—even psychologists—readily acknowledge instinctive behavior, the inherited predisposition to act in a certain way. In Jung’s view, archetypes are just “forms of instinct” that remain unconscious until expressed as specific thoughts, mental images, or behaviors. [18] They are inherited predispositions reflecting the way ancestors have gone about making their living in the world. It’s clear that archetypes are at the core of animal drives. According to Jung,

• There are as many archetypes as there are typical situations in life. Endless repetition has engraved these experiences into our psychic constitution, not in the form of images filled with content, but at first only as forms without content, representing merely the possibility of a certain type of perception and action. When a situation occurs which corresponds to a given archetype, that archetype becomes activated and a compulsiveness appears, which, like an instinctual drive, gains its way against all reason and will… [19]

Jung’s description is consistent with the ideas of our most advanced behavioral theorists. [20] 

It’s no accident that the word archetype is often used to describe the classes used in computer programming. Like Jung’s archetypes, OOP classes are forms without content. They are blueprints for something yet to be constructed. Just like Jung’s archetypes, OOP classes don’t become real until they are instantiated—that is, until fleshed out with specific data. Animal archetypes and drives are forms without content. They provide structure for a possibility that will not be realized until it is fleshed out, instantiated as a specific percept, concept, or behavior. 

Archetypes are inborn patterns in the animal’s psyche. They remain entirely unconscious, forms devoid of content, until they are given concrete expression—instantiated. Inherited internal forms, they are common to all members of a species, waiting silently behind the scenes to provide the structure for specific percepts, ideas, figures, emotions, and actions. Like OOP classes, these blueprints must be made specific [21] before they become real—much as the programmer makes specific cars using her Vehicle class. 

As a psychiatrist, Jung concerned himself more with people than with rats. Nevertheless, his archetype concept applies to all animals, rats included. Well versed in evolutionary theory, Jung knew very well that archetypal forms are the predispositions common to all individuals of a species, primordial patterns put in place by evolutionary forces, beginning long before humans ascended from their animal ancestors. 

Archetypes, wrote Jung, are “not individually acquired but are inherited.” They are “inborn forms of ‘intuition,’ namely the archetypes of perception and apprehension, which are the necessary a priori determinants of all psychic processes.” [22] They are in this sense the animal’s priceless psychological heritage, passed down from all the generations that went before, just as surely as the structure of its body was passed down. Jung scholar John Ryan Haule says that

• Jung remained consistent throughout his life, arguing that the archetypes are inherited with the structure of the brain, that they represent the results of evolutionary process, and that they are the structural, organizing members of the psyche. [23]

Animal drives always specify species-specific, archetypal patterns of perception, behavior, and valuation. The archetypal patterns of an animal drive are on tap throughout the individual’s life, just waiting to be expressed as a specific habit. We can consider any given drive a general behavioral mold that can shape a wide range of specific individual habits. The only requirement, as with OOP classes, is that all the blanks be properly filled in. 

Species-specific drives

In OOP terms, a habit is an “instantiated” [24] drive. Drives are instantiated when all the blanks are properly filled in. But what are the “blanks” in a species’ inherited drives? And what does “filled in” mean? 

The information needed to instantiate a drive depends completely upon the approach the species has evolved for making a living in its natural environment. Drives relate to what the animal needs—basic things like sustenance and reproduction. But that’s not all. They also point to action, specifying how the animal will go about meeting those needs. Further, they specify valuation, how to assess the habit’s success. The drive points both to the need itself and the behavioral and perceptual archetypes the animal will use to service the need. 

Here are some examples. In search of food in their natural environment, rats explore and manipulate things with their paws, noses, and their jaws. They poke and sniff and pry and nibble. Natural selection shaped both rat bodies (paws, noses, jaws) and typical rat behavior (poking, sniffing, prying, nibbling) to support the rat lifestyle. So, when they get hungry, both bodies and drives are ready to serve them.

Rats are born with the capacity to perceive the kinds of food they are seeking, a readiness to engage in certain kinds of behavior when they locate one of those food items, and a feeling-based way to evaluate their success. Each readiness is pre-structured by the inherited archetypal forms of their drives. Each of the rat’s subjective feelings, percepts, and actions is an instantiation of one of those inborn archetypal patterns. 

Pigeons have many of the same nutrient requirements as rats. But they obtain their food very differently—by pecking at spots on the ground. Pigeons’ hunger drive is colored by their archetypal predisposition to walk around and peck at things. Horses, too, have similar nutritional requirements. But they feed while wandering the grassland in the company of their herd. So, horses’ hunger drive includes a yearning to be with fellow horses while they wander and graze. 

Though these separate species’ physiological needs (e.g. for nutrients and water) are similar, their drives reflect the different approaches each has evolved to meet those needs. 

Suppose we confine a hungry rat to a laboratory cage. There it does the best it can to instantiate the archetypes embedded within its innate drives. It tries to squeeze the limited stimuli and behavioral possibilities into its inborn drives. In this restricted environment, the rat quickly starts doing the kinds of things suggested by its drives. It engages in exploration and manipulation using its nose, paws, and jaws. Its behavior is quite variable at this point. 

Eventually the rat happens to press a bar (one of the few interesting things in its cage), and (as the experimenter has arranged) a food pellet drops into a tray. The smell of the pellet fits an inborn archetype based on smell, and permits the rat to recognize it as food. The rat evaluates the appearance of food as satisfying. It keeps the behavioral variant in which it was engaged just before that experience of satisfaction. Now it is more likely that it will repeat this variant. After several iterations, the rat is pressing the bar more often. It is developing a habit. [25]

Matching habit to habitat

At this point the rat is in the incubation stage of an emerging habit. During incubation the separate threads of behavior making up the habit are fine-tuned so that they work well together as a unified whole. The specific habit gradually tightens up under the continuing press of the animal’s experience of satisfaction. And that feeling of satisfaction is guided by the archetypal drive.

This tightening-up happens in the same way that evolution through natural selection happens. It’s an iterative process that requires variation and selection. Each time the animal expresses the developing habit, it comes out a little differently. The rat is more likely to repeat the variants that provide the most complete experience of satisfaction. The ones that are less satisfying are less likely to reappear, chipped away by the selection process. 

Habit variability is high during the incubation stage, because improvement through selection wouldn’t work at all without variants. Later, as the habit becomes as satisfying as possible, the amount of variability will decrease.

That’s the drive/habit system. Where the environment is not very predictable, animals equipped with this nifty new capability enjoy a spectacular adaptive advantage over their dimwitted, robot-like competitors. As soon as this newfangled system gained traction, there was no holding it back. The brains supporting learning grew bigger and bigger. One result (to make a long story shorter) was us—the behaviorally complex human beings that we are.

Learned habits are instantiated on demand, and are abandoned [26] when no longer needed. The Drive/habit system means that an animal can behave flexibly, but in a way that remains true to its essential nature. When we say that the animal has “learned something,” what we mean is that the animal has, through an iterative process of variation and selection, developed a habit that instantiates one of its inherited drives. 

Single-celled animals accumulate their biological nuggets of wisdom through natural selection, and store them as strings of nucleotides—their genes. During its lifetime a drive/habit animal creates individual behavioral wisdom by instantiating its inborn drives, and stores those nuggets within its memory as habits. 

Animal values, animal awareness 

The instinctive drives of each species reflect the archetypal patterns of their species. One aspect of a drive is an inborn animal value. [27] The natural drives of each species equip the individuals of that species with the ability to evaluate its own acts. And this is where awareness comes into the drive/habit picture. Because it is through subjective experience that the individual animal converts its drives into habits, and subsequently evaluates their success.

Individual animals’ internal feeling states, their subjective experiences, allow them to choose among their innate drives in the creation of their own habits, to decide where to apply the habits they create, and empower them to evaluate the success of their actions. Each animal has an inborn sense of what is “good” and what is “bad” (relative to its own species). As we will discuss in the next chapter, a drive/habit animal retains habit variants that precede a “good” feeling, and rejects those that precede a “bad” feeling. Their intuitive, subjective evaluation of their acts is at the heart of their ability to learn. Their experienced valuation is the mechanism for selecting among habit variants.

In the evolution of species, the selection mechanism is life-versus-death. That’s what separates the wheat from the chaff. It was natural selection that created the species’ drives. The system that spawns and refines habits, the drive/habit system, operates similarly. But with individual habits, the selection mechanism is not life-versus-death, but the experience of valuation, satisfaction versus dissatisfaction. The animal applies its inborn values by repeating habit variants whose results it experiences as most fulfilling. Over time, the satisfying variants crowd out the less satisfying. 

Who or what decides which habit variants will be more satisfying to the animal, more valued than the others? This question might seem like a real stumper, because the evaluation of one’s acts requires considerable finesse. But remember that drives are like extra flexible instincts. Evolution itself has instilled the necessary finesse into both instincts and drives, just as it has created the animal’s magnificently intricate body. Evolution builds into each instinct, and each drive, the ability to evaluate the effectiveness of its instantiations. 

Antonio Damasio, a scientist internationally recognized for his research on the neurology of emotion, stresses this very point in his widely praised book, The Feeling of What Happens. He makes the function of emotions clear, and how they evolved to aid survival.

• At their most basic, emotions are part of homeostatic regulation and are poised to avoid the loss of integrity that is a harbinger of death or death itself, as well as to endorse a source of energy, shelter, or sex… Emotions are inseparable from the idea of reward or punishment, of pleasure or pain, of approach or withdrawal, of personal advantage and disadvantage. Inevitably, emotions are inseparable from the idea of good and evil. [28]

Emotional states, the foundations of conscious awareness, are there for the best of reasons. Anyone who understands the logic of natural selection knows that nature would not equip animals with feelings unless those feelings had survival value. Feeling states evolved because they enable us to identify and act upon life-or-death issues. What they are good for is guiding the individual animal’s adaptation. More specifically, they guide the instantiation and refinement of individual habits. 

All higher animals, those with the ability to learn, have the power to assign value to their own acts. Experiencing its own acts in terms of fulfillment motivates and guides the animal to instantiate one of its generic drives as a concrete habit. Once a habit has been instantiated, the experience of fulfillment steers the animal toward refining that habit by favoring some variants over others.

I began this chapter with a century-old quote from psychologist William James. He noted that most of what we do, we do unconsciously, by force of habit. And habits can be executed without awareness. Recent careful research has confirmed that conscious awareness is absolutely required to instantiate a drive as a habit, but that consciousness inevitably fades after the habit has been established. [29] This implies that the role of conscious awareness is to govern the value-driven creation and application of habits. We will discuss this critical topic in more detail in later chapters.

Instinct and archetype

Every animal species evolves specific ways of making a living in its natural environment. No reasonable person doubts that this principle applies to the animal’s bodily structure. The rat’s teeth, whiskers, and keen sense of smell are custom-designed to help it live in the way it has evolved to live. The principle also applies to its inherited drives. The animal’s drives developed along with its bodily structure, complementing that structure with the ability to assemble habits that enable efficient use of its body. 

Part of the rat’s innate drive is the instinctive impulse to explore by sniffing, nibbling, exploring—to use the features of its body effectively. Among the critical parts of the animal’s drive are internal “psychological models” of specific objects, events, and behaviors supporting its survival within its natural environment. Individuals instantiate these predetermined models, its archetypes, as current need dictates. 

The rat has inherited an internal model for food items that will nourish it. Even before it has learned anything at all, it has an intuitive sense of what it needs to sustain itself. It also has internal models for the kinds of behaviors that will lead it to those food items, and models for the kinds of behaviors in which it will engage after it finds them. Further, the rat’s inborn values cause it to feel satisfaction or dissatisfaction as it applies these internal models. The rat’s values aren’t human values, of course. They’re rat values. When a rat stumbles across a dirty, half-eaten ham sandwich in a dark alley, it might evaluate the event as “wonderful.” Most humans would not have the same experience. 

The collective unconscious

Given the sophistication of the archetype concept, it is remarkable that Jung expressed it before the idea of OOP classes became available in the computer age. Further, he introduced a label for the entire package of archetypes inherited by each member of a species. He called this package “the collective unconscious.” This term, like the word archetype itself, sounds like it might refer to something mystical or occult. Nothing could be further from the truth. The collective unconscious is simply a label for the animal’s complete collection of inherited archetypes, the psychological side of its instincts. 

Jung emphasized that if animals have instinctive behaviors—and no one doubts this—then each of these instinctive behaviors must have a psychological aspect. So, instincts and archetypes are really just different aspects of the same package. Both are part of the behavioral/psychological heritage of humanity. Jung wrote,

The hypotheses of the collective unconscious is, therefore, no more daring than to assume there are instincts. One admits readily that human activity is influenced to a high degree by instincts, quite apart from the rational motivations of the conscious mind… I must emphasize yet again that the concept of the collective unconscious is neither a speculative nor a philosophical but an empirical matter. [30]

An individual rat is born with a broad collection of archetypes, patterns determining the kinds of percepts and behaviors it can achieve. This is the rat species’ collective unconscious. The individual rat doesn’t have to do anything to earn this priceless legacy. It is a gift, a product of evolution, the birthright of every member of its species.

No less than rats, evolution bequeaths individual humans a collective unconscious. We are not ordinarily aware that this set of inherited archetypes is even inside us. Archetypes don’t enter our awareness until instantiated, embodied in concrete form. These inborn patterns are not things or events in themselves, but a readiness to experience things and events in specific ways. Jung compared archetypes to dry riverbeds. The empty channels have been shaped by past flows over immense history. Yet each can easily flow again under the right circumstances. 

Jung well knew that each of our percepts and behaviors derives from an inborn archetype, one element of our species’ collective unconscious. And he knew that the same is true of all higher animals. This truth is among the many that behaviorists dumped when they banned consideration of animal experience. 

Jung’s insight is a dumpster baby. That infant notion lives even now, crying out for acceptance by mainstream science. As I will stress in the pages to follow, recovering that idea empowers us to understand precisely how ordinary habits can, under specific conditions, morph into malignant viral processes such as addictions. 

Summary

·    Subjective experience is the key to everything in psychology. A century ago, psychology’s decision to exclude it made it literally impossible to explain the very thing theorists wanted to explain—behavior.

·    Eons ago, the natural selection of higher animals became centered on general drives rather than on specific behaviors. The result was the drive/habit system. 

·    The drive/habit system is the engine behind animal learning. Drives are like general blueprints for the satisfaction of basic needs. A single drive can accommodate the development of a variety of different habits. 

·    The drive/habit system allows for flexible animal learning. Under this system, individuals can alter behavior “on-the-fly” to meet changing environmental demands. 

·    The drive/habit system of behavioral control is superior in many respects to purely instinctive behavior. It provides an adaptive advantage to animals that must stay alive in unpredictable environments. 

·    The drive/habit system is similar to the archetype concept introduced by Carl G. Jung several decades ago. And both animal drives and Jung’s archetypes work like the “classes” in modern Object-Oriented Programming languages.

[Post Episode]

Thank you for your interest in this episode, Healing Psychology Part G – The Drive/Habit System. The Healing Psychology series will continue with readings of additional chapters of the book. The title of the next part is, “A Crippling Error.” That episode concerns psychology’s strange decision to exclude awareness and mind from scientific psychology. Additional information is available on the website, Whiteheadbooks dot com. 

Please join us!

[Music Credits]

1.    “A Lullaby for Logan” – Written and performed by Tom Whitehead.

2.    “Voyage of Discovery” – Written and performed by Tom Whitehead.

--------------

[1] James W. The Principles of Psychology (Kindle Edition). Kindle Locations 137-139.
[2] Kelly GA. The Psychology of Personal Constructs. Vol. I, II. Norton, New York. 2nd printing: 1991. Routledge, London, New York. Page 169.
[3] Proteins fold into different shapes, becoming 3-D objects that cause things to happen. The electrical charge of different parts of the protein also affects their action.
[4] For purposes of this discussion, we are ignoring the additional genetic material stored within the cell’s plasmids.
[5] Plotkin H. Evolutionary Thought in Psychology: A Brief History. Blackwell Publishing, 2004. Page 100.
[6] Pianka ER. Natural selection. Online article, 2000. Available at  http://www.zo.utexas.edu/courses/THOC/natural.selection.html
[7] Kelly K. Out of control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World. Addison-Wesley, Boston, 1994. Page 361.
[8] Pianka ER, 2000.
[9] Where does the term “Drive/Habit system” come from? The concept of drives was introduced by theorists in the later stages of the behavioral movement. It was an effort to explain variation in animal behavior that did not fit the S-R paradigm they were using. The concept of habits has existed for centuries. I am simply combing the two terms here.
[10] Woodworth RS. Psychology: a Study of Mental Life. William Holt and Company, New York, 1921. Reformatted as a Kindle Book, and available at Amazon.com. Woodworth, who studied under William James, helpfully points out that the drive inherited by the animal is not a blank slate. Instead, the drive is a template evolved from a “native reaction” the animal possessed before the range of its behavioral responses was broadened to enable the acquisition of individual habits. [Kindle location 3873]
[11] As immunologist Irun Cohen puts it, what is learned by the individual animal “extends the evolutionary germ-line learning of the species.” [Cohen I, 2004. Page 86.]
[12] Readers familiar with psychology know that these days animal drives are not mentioned much by learning theorists, outside the limited area of motivational theory. The reason for this has nothing to do with the validity of the drive concept, as I present it in this book. Rather, its position on the periphery of learning theory has more to do with the historical failure of Clark Hull's audacious attempt to express drive theory in mathematical terms. One of his formulas reads (when translated from symbols to English), “The likelihood of a response is the product of habit strength, drive, stimulus-intensity dynamism, and incentive motivation.” [Lefrancois GR. Theories of Human Learning: What the professor said (sixth edition). Wadsworth, United States, 2011. Page 82.] This is an impressive formulation based on thousands of careful behavioral observations. Like other behaviorists, though, Hull strove to avoid any reference to experience. So, the animal's interpretation of the stimulus was not a part of his formula. Unfortunately for Hull, the animal's individual interpretation is the single most important determinant of its behavior. So, his remarkable formulas were never able to predict animal behavior with precision.
[13] Boudreaux TJ. PHP 5: Your visual blueprint for creating open source, server-side content. Wiley Publishing, Indianapolis IN, 2005. Page 194. In this introductory text for the object-oriented programming language PHP the author notes that “Objects are created, or instantiated, from a class definition. You can think of a class as a blueprint or archetype from which tangible instances are created.”
[14] The details in this example are not very realistic, as it is contrived simply for illustration of the concept.
[15] These things happen because the programmer has tediously set up code to make them happen. For example, the Color variable is set up to display one of a variety of screen colors, and the Model variable causes a pre-programmed vehicle shape to be displayed. Setting up a class is labor intensive. But once that work is done, the class can with very little additional effort be used to create a variety of different instances.
[16] Each new vehicle behaves the way it does because it operates within an environment simulating certain features of the physical world – like gravity, inertia, and friction. Going into all that here would only muddy the illustration.
[17] Jung CG. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. The Collected Works of CG Jung (2nd Edition), Volume 9, Part 1. Princeton University Press, 1990. Paragraph 91, pages 43-44.
[18] Jung, CG. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Vintage books, New York, 1962. Page 168.
[19] Jung CG, 1990. Paragraph 99, page 48.
[20] For example, the ideas of Donald Hoffman, Anil Seth, and Irun Cohen.
[21] Jung did not use the word instantiation, of course. That word is from a computer technology that didn’t exist in his time. Nevertheless, his emphasis upon the difference between the unconscious archetypes themselves and their expression in concrete images and activities made it clear that he was thinking in terms of class instantiation.
[22] Jung CG. Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. The Collected Works of CG Jung (2nd Edition), Volume 8. Princeton University Press, 2014. Paragraph 270, page 3089.
[23] Haule JR. Jung in the 21st Century, Volume One. Taylor and Francis, 2010. Kindle Edition. Page 69.
[24] “Instantiation” is a concept from OOP programming. It means filling in the blanks in an OOP class to create a specific instance of that class.
[25] The rat’s cage is likely to distort the developing habit into an abnormal form.
[26] The abandonment of habits is called “extinction” by behaviorists. This label suggests that they were comparing the extinction of habits to the extinction of species. And there is in fact a direct parallel.
[27] When we use the word “values” we most often think of human values. But this presumption is at least in part a result of a short-sighted reluctance to fully embrace the continuity between humans and other animals. In fact, rats, fishes, and mountain lions all have innate values, without which they could not survive.
[28] Antonio R. Damasio. The Feeling of What Happens. Body and emotion in the making of consciousness. Harcourt Brace and Company, New York, 1999. Pages 54-55.
[29] Dehaene S and Naccache L, 2001. Pages 12-13.
[30] Jung CG, 1990. Paragraph 92, page 44.