Mike rubbed the tip of an index finger over his chin. “These illustrations are analogues of the human mind?”
“That’s right. Some people have minds like steel balls. They can learn, but you have to hit them pretty hard to make them do it. On the other hand, some people have minds like glass balls: They can’t learn at all. If you hit them hard enough to make a real impression, they simply shatter.”
“All right. Now what has this got to do with you and Snookums?”
“Patience, boy, patience,” Leda said with a grin. “Actually, the lead-ball analogy is much too simple. An intelligent mind has to have time to partially recover, you see. Hit it with too many shocks, one right after another, and it either collapses or refuses to learn or both.
“The first two times the brain was activated, the roboticists just began feeding data into the thing as though it were an ordinary computing machine. They were forcing it to learn too fast; they weren’t giving it time to recover from the shock of learning.
“Just as in the human being, there is a difference between a robot’s brain and a robot’s mind. The brain is a physical thing—a bunch of cryotrons in a helium bath. But the mind is the sum total of all the data and reaction patterns and so forth that have been built into the brain or absorbed by it.
“The brain didn’t have an opportunity to recover from the learning shocks when the data was fed in too fast, so the mind cracked. It couldn’t take it. The robot went insane.
“Each time, the roboticists had to deactivate the brain, drain it of all data, and start over. After the second time, Dr. Fitzhugh decided they were going about it wrong, so they decided on a different tack.”
“I see,” said Mike the Angel. “It had to be taught slowly, like a child.”
“Exactly,” said Leda. “And who would know more about teaching a child than a child psychologist?” she added brightly.