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.