C. Judson Herrick

Anatomical Patterns and Behavior Patterns

ANIMAL ANIMAL behavior is behavior of something. Having determined what an animal does, we are interested to learn how he does it and what he does it with. The simpler patterns of vertebrate behavior are usually described in terms of reflexes and the linkage, recombination, and conditioning of these units. Reflex behavior is commonly regarded as the operation of a more or less stable anatomical arrangement of neurons connected as reflex arcs or circuits. The tendency is to regard these as enduring anatomical patterns which are given in the innate organization and to conceive them as the starting-point of an analysis of the nervous apparatus in all more complex forms of behavior. But the observed behavior does not always conform with this scheme and the known structure of the nervous system is equally at variance with it. It is the organism as a whole that is behaving, not merely the reflex arcs. Indeed, the nervous arcs habitually employed in the performance of some act may be seriously damaged by the destruction of important links in the chain of conductors and after a time a readjustment is made so that the accustomed behavior is carried on with the aid of apparatus never before used in this way. The ability of the individual to make the appropriate reaction is not dependent upon the integrity of those particular parts of the nervous system hitherto employed. There is of late a strong trend in general biology, in neurophysiology, in psychology, and in philosophy toward a search for mech-