Although none of us can know the future, predicting it is so important that organisms are hard wired to learn about predictable events in their environment. We saw in the previous chapter that I received a guitar for Christmas when I was 8. My first foray into public performance was a weekly talent show at a holiday camp called 'Holimarine' in Wales (it doesn't exist any more because I am old and this was 1981). I sang a Chuck Berry song called 'My ding-a-ling'1 and to my absolute amazement I won the competition.2 Suddenly other 8-year-olds across the land (well, a ballroom in Wales) worshipped me (I made lots of friends after the competition). I had tasted success, it tasted like praline chocolate, and so I wanted to enter the competition in the second week of our holiday. To ensure success, I needed to know why I had won in the first week. One way to do this would have been to collect data and to use these data to predict people's evaluations of children's performances in the contest from certain variables: the age of the performer, what type of performance they gave (singing, telling a joke, magic tricks), and perhaps how cute they looked. A regression analysis on these data would enable us to predict the future (success in next week's competition) based on values of the predictor variables. If, for example, singing was an important factor in getting a good audience evaluation, then I could sing again the following week; however, if jokers tended to do better then I could switch to a comedy routine. When I was 8 I wasn't the sad geek that I am today, so I didn't know about regression analysis (nor did I wish to know); however, my dad thought that success was due to the winning combination of a cherub-looking 8-year-old singing songs that can be interpreted in a filthy way. He wrote a song for me to sing about the keyboard player in the Holimarine Band 'messing about with his organ'. He said 'take this song, son, and steal the show'... and that's what I did: I came first again. There's no accounting for taste.
1 It appears that even then I had a passion for lowering the tone of things that should be taken seriously.
2 I have a very grainy video of this performance recorded by my dad's friend on a video camera the size of a medium-sized dog that had to be accompanied at all times by a 'battery pack' the size and weight of a tank (see Oditi's Lantern).