Who is a good monkey?

*note*- I'm going to talk a bit about behavioral conditioning. I apologize to the three out of the five people who check this that won't have a clue.

I have just spent the last week in San Francisco at a Giraffe conference. It was my first confrence and I thought it was great. My flight home is at 6am (because the lady in Admin must hate me, apparently). Since I'd have to be ready to catch my shuttle at 3:30, I figured it would just be easier not to sleep at all over just getting 2-3 hours. I guess all the TV stations got together and decided what insomniacs really need to do is get more exercise. I'm guessing it takes care of the "I just don't have the time" argument as well as the "you could tire yourself out more" argument. But I digress. Anyway, I was flipping thru the channels and I see an ad for an ab cruching machine that makes an audible click when you do the crunch "correctly." I found this to be intriguing timing as I had just spent 16 hours of the last two days in a training seminar/ workshop. The connection being is that clicker training is a widely used and accepted method of positive reinforcement training. On the one hand, it amused me to think of how people would react if they knew they were paying for the same basic technology that trainers use on dogs. I know it doesn't matter- people are animals too, after all. But as the highly evolved creatures we like to think we are, some people tend to get a bit uppity.

On the other (and more main) hand: in this instance the click is being used as a "good job!" or, to put it more technically, a bridge. (well, actually it is really just a marker signal but I won't try to hurt your heads that much. I am pretty sure no one has even bothered to read this far anyway). It is called a bridge (partially) because it links a good behavior with the promise of a reward. For that to ever truly work the reward has to be a primary basic reinforcer (usually food.... Which admittedly would not be ideal here) Thus the problem is you are getting clicked over and over for no reward. This is why this type of exercise stuff doesn't work generally. Weelllll...... I suppose you could say all the action you will get from your abtastic new physique is the reinforcer (sex is a primary reinforcer, after all). But that is crazy unlikely. A) the click isn't directly liked to that in the first place and B) that is so far temporally distant to the behavior as to be practically unusable. Basically if you had the dedication and strength of will to hold out for that uncertain reward two months from now then you'd already be going to the gym anyway.

So what do we take away from all of this? A) I was being capable of way too much rational thought at 2 am after sleeping for only six of the last 38 hours and B) my spell check had no prob at all with the word "abtastic."