Austin Meakim’s Reviews > Gravity’s Rainbow > Status Update

“Slothrop is able to predict when a rocket will fall at a particular place, His survival to date is evidence he’s acted on advance information, and avoided the area at the time the rocket was supposed to fall.” Dr. Groast is not sure how, or even if, sex comes into it.

It implies moving past the tongue-stop—beyond the zero—and into the other realm. Of course you don’t move past. But you do realize, intellectually, that’s how you ought to be moving.

Can a conditioned reflex survive in a man, dormant, over 20 or 30 years? Did Dr. Jamf extinguish only to zero—wait till the infant showed zero hardons in the presence of stimulus x, and then stop? Did he forget—or ignore—the “silent extinction beyond the zero”? If he ignored it, why? Did the National Research Council have anything to say about that?

Most likely he did. But as Ivan Petrovich himself said, “Not only must we speak of partial or of complete extinction of a conditioned reflex, but we must realize that extinction can proceed beyond the point of reducing a reflex to zero. We cannot therefore judge the degree of extinction only by the magnitude of the reflex or its absence, since there can still be a silent extinction beyond the zero,”
(UHHHHHHHHHHHHH)

Now ordinarily, according to tradition in these matters, the little sucker would have been de-conditioned. Jamf would have, in Pavlovian terms, “extinguished” the hardon reflex he'd built up, before he let the baby go.

Uh, x? well, what’s x? Why, it’s the famous “Mystery Stimulus” that’s fascinated generations of behaviorial-psychology students, is what it is.

Pudding: Do we have to do it because the Americans do it? Must we allow them to corrupt us?

Pudding: We can’t, Pointsman, it’s beastly.
Pointsman: But the Americans have already been at’ him! don’t you see? It’s not as if we're corrupting a virgin or something—

Whig eccentricity is carried in this house to most unhealthy extremes.

“The subject will seek to impose structure on it. How he goes about structuring this blob, will reflect his needs, his hopes—will provide, us with clues to his dreams, fantasies, the deepest regions of his mind”