More Classical Conditioning

Following on from my last post I was reading more about Behavioural learning, in particular more about Classical Conditioning. It turns out that this form of conditioning has so many more benefits than making dogs drool on cue...

I mentioned last time about Conditioned Taste Aversion - when a food is paired with nausea which then leads to the food making you feel sick whenever you come across it. I started to think just how amazing that is. In most cases this form of conditioning takes several pairings of the stimulus with the response before it actually takes hold, but Conditioned Taste Aversion is such a strong piece of learning that it only takes one pairing of that curry you had at the dodgy Thai take-away and spending the next three days clutching the toilet to turn you off curry for years. That's a seriously strong conditioned response!

But what really made me think 'Holy crap, I didn't know we could do that!' was the case of Conditioned Immune Responses. It turns out that one of the simplest forms of learning can effect something so vital as your immune system! Studies of patients undergoing chemotherapy for cancer treatment found that simply presenting the same stimuli that is paired with the chemo (ie, the same nurse that you always see, or the room that your always in during the therapy) will achieve the same result in reducing the patients immune responses even before the chemo has been administered.

Holy crap!

Beyond this, another study into drug tolerance found that the environmental cues present when drugs were administered typically became associated with the response of those drugs!

I'm personally going to put my self on the line for science and try this during this flu season. When I get sick this year I'm going to test this theory and play a certain song on my iPod, how about Queen Don't stop me now, when I take my Codrol, then we'll see if I can fight my cold with the power of Queen.

The Story of Pavlov and His Dogs

Okay, I can already see the responses forming in peoples minds - Pavolv? Seriously? Everybody knows about Pavlov... this can't have been enough to blow a mind! And you'd be right. Everybody does know about Pavlov, including me, so in today's lecture I was not expecting to get anything particularly new out of it.

I'm even pretty sure that if you haven't heard of Pavlov's experiments you know about the effect of Classical Conditioning. If you've ever got food poisoning and then couldn't even stand the smell of the food that gave it to you, months or years later then you've been conditioned in the same way that Pavlov's dogs were. Still doesn't sound familiar? Here comes a really brief explanation...

Pavlov was actually a Physiologist who was studying the digestive systems of dogs, to be specific measuring the gastric juices being produced. Pavlov would give present them with food and they would product gastric juices. At the same time that the dogs were given food there was a  noise like a bell that came from the machine that gave them food. One day as Pavlov pressed the button for the food to be given to the dog, the noise like a bell happened but no food appeared... yet the dogs still produced gastric juices.

Thus Pavlov was given the idea of Classical Conditioning in which the pairing of an unconditioned stimulus (the presence of food) with a conditioned stimulus (the bell noise) illicited the unconditioned  response of gastric juices, so that when you took away the unconditioned stimulus (the food) the dogs still illicited the response of getting their stomach juices ready for food.

It's pretty much the bread and butter of Behavioural Psychology, and so far, no mind-blowing action, it was all as I knew it.

The kicker - Pavlov didn't use a bell... ever.

He noticed the pairing between food and his presence not the sound of a bell.

Okay, it's not that mind blowing. I had a better mind-blowing experience from a few weeks back but I wanted start with something light.

Give me your thoughts about Pavlov or maybe even times that you've tried Operant Conditioning in your life.

I'll be back soon with more things that blew my mind.