58 Biological Psychology
pulled all these threads together into a general central theory
of motivation.
Eliot Stellar worked with Clifford Morgan as an under-
graduate at Harvard. After obtaining his doctorate in 1947 at
Brown University, he spent several years at Johns Hopkins
and joined the psychology department at the University of
Pennsylvania in 1954. Stellar did extensive work on brain
mechanism of motivation. He coauthored the revision of
Morgan’s text in 1950 and published his influential central
theory of drive in 1954.
Philip Teitelbaum (1955) did the classic work on charac-
terization of, and recovery from, the lateral hypothalamic
“aphagia” syndrome. He discovered the striking parallel with
the ontogenetic development of feeding behavior. In addi-
tion, he discovered more general aspects of the syndrome, for
example, “sensory neglect.”
Frank Beach received his doctorate from the University of
Chicago under Lashley in 1940 and then joined the American
Museum of Natural History in New York. He moved to Yale
in 1946, and then to the University of California, Berkeley, in
- From the beginning, he focused on brain mechanisms
of sexual behavior (see Beach, 1951). As the study of sexual
behavior developed, hormonal factors came to the fore and
the modern field of hormones and behavior developed. Beach
played a critical role in the development of this field, as did
the biologist W. C. Young of the University of Kansas. They
and their students shaped the field as it exists today.
Even within the field of hormones and behavior, several
fields have developed. Sexual behavior has become a field
unto itself. Another important field is the general area of
stress. The endocrinologist Hans Selye was an important in-
tellectual influence. Kurt Richter, a pioneering figure in this
field, took his BS at Harvard in 1917 and his doctorate
at Johns Hopkins in 1921 and was a dominant influence at
Hopkins. His early work was on motivation and feeding (see
Richter, 1927). His pioneering “cafeteria studies” in rats are
still a model (if given a wide choice of foods, they select a
relatively balanced diet). Richter then focused on the adrenal
gland, its role in diet and in stress. He also did pioneering
work on circadian rhythms in mammals. The modern field of
stress focuses on hormonal-behavioral interactions, particu-
larly adrenal hormones, as in the work of Seymore Levine
(1971).
Neal Miller represents a uniquely important tradition in
biological psychology. From the beginning of his career,
Miller was interested in physiological mechanisms of both
motivation and learning. He took his doctorate at Yale in
1935 and stayed on at Yale for many years, with a year out in
1936 at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute. Throughout his
career he has exemplified superb experimentation and an
unusual ability to synthesize. He was a pioneer in early stud-
ies of punishing and rewarding brain stimulation and their
roles in learning and in the study of conditioned fear (see
Miller, 1948, 1961). In later years, his work focused on
mechanisms of instrumental conditioning of autonomic
responses—biofeedback techniques—and brain mechanisms
of learning. The impact of his work is much wider than bio-
logical psychology, influencing learning theory, psychiatry,
and clinical medicine as well.
James Olds, whose untimely death in 1976 cut short an ex-
traordinary career, made the most important discovery yet in
the field of motivation—rewarding electrical self-stimulation
of the brain. He got his doctorate at Harvard and worked with
Richard Solomon. Solomon, although primarily a behavioral
student of learning, had considerable impact on biological
psychology through his theoretical-experimental analysis of
hypothetical central factors in learning. As a graduate student
Olds read and was much influenced by Hebb’s Organization
of Behaviorand obtained a postdoctoral fellowship with
Hebb at McGill in 1953. He began work there with Peter
Milner. In his own words:Just before we began our own work (using Hess’s technique for
probing the brain), H. R. Delgado, W. W. Roberts, and N. E.
Miller at Yale University had undertaken a similar study. They
had located an area in the lower part of the mid-line system
where stimulation caused the animal to avoid the behavior that
provoked the electrical stimulus. We wished to investigate posi-
tive as well as negative effects (that is, to learn whether stimula-
tion of some areas might be sought rather than avoided by the
animal).
We were not at first concerned to hit very specific points in
the brain, and, in fact, in our early tests the electrodes did not al-
ways go to the particular areas in the mid-line system at which
they were aimed. Our lack of aim turned out to be a fortunate
happening for us. In one animal the electrode missed its target
and landed not in the mid-brain reticular system but in a nerve
pathway from the rhinecephalon. This led to an unexpected
discovery.
In the test experiment we were using, the animal was placed
in a large box with corners labeled A, B, C, and D. Whenever the
animal went to corner A, its brain was given a mild electric shock
by the experimenter. When the test was performed on the animal
with the electrode in the rhinencephalic nerve, it kept returning
to corner A. After several such returns on the first day, it finally
went to a different place and fell asleep. The next day, however,
it seemed even more interested in corner A.
At this point we assumed that the stimulus must provoke
curiosity; we did not yet think of it as a reward. Further exper-
imentation on the same animal soon indicated, to our surprise,
that its response to the stimulus was more than curiosity. On the
second day, after the animal had acquired the habit of returning