Classical Conditioning Continued

In the post before, I talked a bit about classical conditioning, what it means, and gave some examples. If you were looking closely, I’m sure that you saw some examples in your every day life. If not, that’s okay. Maybe I just didn’t make it clear enough exactly how much of life this theory permeates. So, I’m going to take a little more time to look at some additional examples.

Did you know that if you’re wearing glasses and your remove them in front of a baby, they will stare at you for a while, trying to figure it out? Their visual field isn’t yet organized, and so they can’t understand what just happened. How did this person take their eyes off? Likewise, individuals who have been blind their whole lives who go through some type of procedure that gives them sight are still practically blind for a while. They will bump into things and not understand what they are looking at—often in very simply layouts.

What does this mean? I was feeding my dog the other day and thinking about this. My companion was sitting on the faux tile of my kitchen, wagging his tail and looking up at me with his green eyes as I took out his dog can. I popped the top, the aluminum seal broke, and my dog started crying and begging at the sound. Why does that sound make him whine more? Because he’s associating it with getting food. He’s classically conditioned to understand that he’s about to get a treat.

But what about the blind man? What does this mean for him?

Imagine that you have just been introduced to sight. You’ve never seen anything before and all of the sudden, in front of you, are all of these meaningless colors. You don’t know what is empty space and what is wall, or table, or computer, or another person. You have no idea.

Also imagine that, like most other blind people, you have a strong sense of hearing. Some visually impaired people can actually tap their cane on the ground and tell if there is either a wall or a bush in front of them because of the way the echo comes back.

I can’t imagine what that would be like.

Back to the current situation. You’re sitting there with all of these meaningless lines and colors in front of you. You have no idea what they mean. But you know what other things mean. You know what a wall is, you’ve just never seen one. Let’s say that you reach your hand out and BAM! you hit it on the table. You laugh and then begin to feel the table. You can hear your hand run over it, the friction. You bend down a little and smell it. Then, you sit back up and you look at it. You begin to tap on it and hear that familiar sound that you’ve heard before. You get up and leave.

So what do you perceive when you come back?

You can then kind of see the table. Although your sight still isn’t completely organized, you see a clump of brown color that used to be meaningless, until you ASSOCIATED it with your idea of table. You have an idea of what that brown clump is.

Then, as you go through your life, you start to connect more of these meaningless lines and colors with things that you know. You tap your cane, hear that there is a bush ahead of you, and then associate that green and brown pattern with what you know about bush.

Eventually, these associations permeate everything. You’ve connected these lines and colors to every one of your other senses. You can see.

I think that it is an interesting idea that even our sight is classically conditioned. Every electrical sensory input that goes into our brain is meaningless unless it is connected with something. What are you looking at right now? Try to find an electric socket and look at it. What do you see? What do you think of when you see it? Chances are, everything surrounding it is a result of your senses. And, a lot of our senses can be understood through the process of classical conditioning.

So, I want to emphasize again, psychology isn’t an exotic study. It makes sense. It’s all around us. We just have to know where to look for it.

Classical Conditioning: Something We All Can Use

Many conceptualize psychology as an exotic, non-applicable, clinical exercise in memorizing useless facts. However, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior (according to the first sentence of APA’s definition). The brain is the most complex machine that mankind has come across thus far. But this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try to understand it. We look for causalities in other areas of our lives. We trust the economists when they explain dividends and things like that to us. And even though at first we may not see the application, if we pay close attention, we can learn something that can help our financial situation. I feel the same about psychology, only the results can permeate even more of your life.

So, in honor of psychology’s dedication to the human cause and its role as an applied science, I’m going to be talking for the first few posts about something that I see as paramount for anyone who ever wants to get anything done to know about—conditioning.

There are two types of conditioning—classical and operant. And they simply work. If there is only one thing that psychology can prove and that works time after time after time, it is conditioning.

Classical conditioning came first and it makes the most sense to me to talk about it first, so I’ll start there.

What is classical condition, you might ask. Well, I might answer, classical conditioning is basically whenever two things become linked in the mind. Have you ever heard the dentists drill and cringed? Or have you ever eaten your favorite food, gotten food poisoning, and then not liked that food anymore?

I’ll give you another example from the man who coined the phrase—Ivan Pavlov. Ivan Pavlov took some dogs to his lab and offered them meat powder. They did what any dog owner knows they would—they salivated. But that’s not the interesting thing—dogs naturally do this when food is around. The interesting part comes whenever he started ringing a bell every time that he gave them their treat. Day after day, they were given the meat powder and the bell would ring.

After some time, Pavlov stopped giving the meat powder and just rang the bell. Then one of the simplest and most important things in the field of psychology happened: the dogs still salivated.

With no meat powder, the dogs salivated. The bell became linked in the dogs’ mind and they reacted to the sound of the bell just as if they were sniffing the meat. It’s kind of like whenever your dogs hear you open up the pantry where the treats are and they start running to you. The pantry being opened doesn’t automatically excite them—what’s exciting is that they’ve linked it with the treats. And treats are exciting.

Humans do this to. A lot.

Let’s compare a human example to the dog example that we just saw.

How do heterosexual men feel when they see an attractive young woman walking out of the ocean in a bikini? They like it, right? Think of this as the meat powder—it’s an unconditioned stimulus, or something that an organism naturally likes without conditioning. And what do we know about unconditioned stimuli like the meat powder? We know that you can link it with stuff. This is exactly what beer companies do. They put attractive individuals on their ads. They do that, and we link the two in our minds. It sounds odd, but companies spend billions of dollars researching and executing this kind of thing because it WORKS.

Remember those things. Classical conditioning is when two unrelated things become associated in the mind. Look for examples—they’re everywhere. The man who has the phobia of dogs because he was bitten as a child (he ASSOCIATES dogs with getting bit). When you smell the food that you ate before you had that stomach virus and you think that you’re going to throw up (you ASSOCIATE the food with getting sick). You pick up one container of detergent because it has a better package than another one (you’re ASSOCIATING quality packaging with a quality product).

This isn’t an exotic science. You see it around you all the time, you just have to know where to look.