Today I learnt the technical part of psychology of Pavlov’s Animal conditioning, which is the way a dog was trained in such a way that it will salivate as he hears the bell, or jump on its own without being shocked. Some of these terms (on my own understanding yet) are:

Neutral Stimulus – the bell/the food before conditioning, meaning the object at its own initially is not associated with anything and would not stimulate (cause) any response (reaction). The object as a pure form, its very existence.

Unconditioned stimulus – 5 senses, the sun is bright and cheerful, meat on the plate, the hot kettle, these are natural stimulus that will excite our 5 senses to have response.

Unconditioned response – natural biological response, for example to retract our hands on boiling kettle, to squint the eyes on bright vision, or to be disgusted.

Conditional stimulus – salivation + food + bell all paired, so each unconditioned stimulus is associated with other 2, thus being conditioned, its like being grouped together and given identity, once there is A, must have B and C, or A = B =C they go together.

Conditioned response – for each conditioned stimulus, others will follow through, sort of naturally, “learnt”, the result in a change of lifestyle, in the case, the dog will salivate the moment it hears the bell or smell the food.

Extinction – without frequency of the conditioned stimulus to be fulfilled, will stop, eg after the food ceased to come after the bell, the dog would not salivate anymore.

Discrimination – differentiation, choose within 2 stimulus, whistle and bell, one food comes, one don’t, or blowing of whistle of own field instead of other adjacent fields.

So some of the thoughts I had:

For babies reacting to different objects/sounds, like clapping, or the tsk sounds to lure the baby to approach the caller, if one caller had one specific object, so the baby would discriminate which of the callers would give him the best attention/gift/pat? Then would always approach the person with that object after being repeatedly conditioned to do so? Or maybe we can condition the baby to always follow a certain movement of hand, that all callers would use the same pattern to call on him?

So to discipline a child, for example, the child says please, then you give him a sweet, and he walk away happily.

Please, sweet, happily walk away
One day, if you reject, like : Please, no, will he still happily walk away?
So please and happily walk away are paired, even if one of them (please and sweet) is not fulfilled, the others will follow by, in this case, happily walk away? Is this the explanation, which thus gives others an impression of well disciplined child? But of course, then it will have extinction once the sweet is not there anymore for a period of time.

Then let’s take for example:

Bath, smoke, mug
So if one day smoke is taken away, will the person still study?

Or the morning bell before primary school, will that make students nearby school still have the school mindset during holidays, like in the morning as the child wakes up, he hears the bell, so he immediately would sort of line up to class, so at home he would start to automatically take out his textbooks?

How about saddist conditioning, we condition pain in such a way that it is necessary? Is this how they trained the Spartans? Those killer machines in myths and legends or movies? So we can condition someone to totally deviate with the norms from young? Similarly we can condition humans to adopt some kind of routine, McDonalization. Hmm…….