Pavlov's Dog
Nov. 7th, 2004 11:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkatFirst off, had a lovely Saturday afternoon. Cjlaksy kindly donated his time and his car and drove me around Brooklyn - to locate a) a new, cheap TV/DVD stand and b) a DVD player. And yep we got them. I now am a proud owner of a Zenith DVD player. Moderately priced. With loads of stuff on it that I can't use (my TV does not come equipped with stereo surround sound or Digital, it's one of those older 90's models). CJL stared at the hookins, I stared at them,
and wondered - okay there's only two holes, and three plugs. What to do? Oh, look the cable box has the right number - let's try that. (Yeah right. Has to be plugged into the TV.) Finally realized okay we can plug in the video and one audio, but not both audios. Does it work? Yep. Put in Buffy S5 Disc and voila the brillance of DVD. Yes, I have now discovered something everyone on my flist probably already knows - the picture quality on DVD's is about 80% better than as originally aired or taped. So is the sound quality. Even with just one plug in. Amazing. Methinks I see lots of DVD renting and expenditures in my future. In return, I took cjlasky to dinner and we discussed the ATS S6 Virtual Project.
Oh political joke that I got from my mother last night:
A friend from Texas emailed her a map of the US, with the red and blue marked out clearly, noting that the blue states all bordered or came close to Canada, or were at the coast line. The Blue states = "United States of Canada", the red? "Jesus Country".
***********
Are We Pavlov's Dogs?
[I posted an entry about this some time ago. Didn't like it. Decided to rework it, make it better. So here's my second attempt.]
Pavlov as many people know, was a Russian Scientist who studied the reflexs of dogs. He determined through a series of experiments that when dog's saw food or were to be fed they would salivate. The saliva was necessary to digest their food. But dogs salviated without seeing food, what caused this?
Here's a blurb from an article on Pavlov by Lorie Friedholm, a Science Journalist, which dicusses reflexes. Found at: http://nobelprize.org/medicine/educational/pavlov/readmore.html
"Pavlov became interested in studying reflexes when he saw that the dogs drooled without the proper stimulus. Although no food was in sight, their saliva still dribbled. It turned out that the dogs were reacting to lab coats. Every time the dogs were served food, the person who served the food was wearing a lab coat. Therefore, the dogs reacted as if food was on its way whenever they saw a lab coat.
In a series of experiments, Pavlov then tried to figure out how these phenomena were linked. For example, he struck a bell when the dogs were fed. If the bell was sounded in close association with their meal, the dogs learnt to associate the sound of the bell with food. After a while, at the mere sound of the bell, they responded by drooling."
A child is told not to touch a hot burner. But it's not until the child touchs the burner that he or she learns never to touch it or in some cases sees someone else touch it and get burned, which I suppose takes the kid up a step from the dog - we don't necessarily have to experience it ourselves to get the message. At any rate - sense memories affect behavior. Conditioned responses or learned responses. I remember that much from my Introduction to Psychology Course way back in 1986 - where we spent hours teaching a rat to go through a maze and press a lever. (I called my rat Adam's Apple, we got along quite well, was sorry to part with him. Had a better relationship with the rat actually than the guy I named him after. (Another story for another day) Heh. (Was very disappointed to discover Psyche 101 did not include readings by Freudd and Jung, but rather lots of stuff by tedious behavorists and several medical case studies.) At any rate the exercise involved showing the rat food -then rewarding it with the food if it pushed the lever. If it went the wrong way or did the wrong thing? It got shocked. Eventually the rat would learn what to do to get food and avoid pain.
Common sense really - if I do this, I get burned. Do this? I get food. Sort of like Spike in S4-S5 BTVS. If I'm a nice informative vampire - Buffy is nice to me and gives me things. If I'm mean nasty vampire, I get staked, punched, abused. Or Alex in A ClockWork Orange - if I am violent, I get sick. If I'm not I'm fine. Conditioned response. Yet, we are talking about people who can think, who can choose.
As a child, a small child, I remember finding spiders fascinating. My mother informs me that I actually tried to eat a few daddy long-legs - a concept that makes me cringe. Now I fear them. Why? Ah, pavlov's dog. Sense memory.
Around the age of 6 or 7 - two things happened regarding spiders that changed my perception of them forever: 1) Someone dumped a jar of daddy long legs on my head. 2) We were playing a fun adventure game of kidnapped, were about to be put in a fort, but had to interrupt our play and go home, when I almost put my hand on a giant wolf spider. The girl behind me screamed bloody murder and stopped me. Wolf Spider's are bad news - they bite you and don't let go apparently - or that's what I was told in graphic detail.
After that kids seemed to think it funny to throw or chase me with spiders. And of course, my third grade teacher, who I despised with a bloody vengeance, loved the beasts. So it's not surprising that I reacte a bit like Pavlov's dog when it comes to spiders. Tense up. Adrenaline races. Blood pressure spikes. And want to flee the room.
Yet, one of my friend's significant other finds spiders and scorpions beautiful. He sees the beauty in them. And I can't help but wonder what his background with them was. How it differed from mine. And how different I might be, if I wasn't taught to fear them.
Another sense memory: as a child my brother and I used to fight. We'd punch and kick and chase each other like most children do. Until the day came when I realized that whenever I kicked him, he kicked me harder. No one won these battles. Actually, I was far more successful when I just left the room or stopped speaking to him or pretended he didn't exist (ie. ignore). This worked.
Hitting him? Bigger bruise. Ignoring him? Very effective.
Conditioned responses are good things, in most cases, they protect us. We know not to touch hot burners for instance. Or pet a growling dog. Or punch someone.
We know not to cross the street when a car is coming. Or jump off a roof. Yet, they can also cause us to fear things that in a different light can be beautiful - such as a spider.
What happens when we associate a conditioned response with people?
When I was in college, one of my friends struggled with her prejudice against people who happened to have dark skin. Very dark skin. And looked a certain way. She fought against this prejudice. When I asked her why this was a problem, she explained - "when I was a small child, my house was vandalized several times, and there were a series of robberies done in our neighborhood by a gange of black men. One of them held a knife on my father. I had nightmares for weeks. As an adult, I know it's silly to associate the two, but
I do...and I fight against it."
At my new workplace, I was discussing the old evil boss from old company with a co-worker and she pointed out something that had not occurred to me before. That something about me, my mannerisms, my speech, may have reminded "evil" boss of someone who hurt him deeply - causing a reflexive dislike towards me.
Nothing I did. No fault of mine. Except I reminded him of someone else. This reminded me oddly of a friend in college, who once explained to me why she didn't want to do anything for my birthday while she went out of her way to celebrate all her other friends birthdays. It was because something I did reminded her of my mother and her reflex was to punish me. She was self-reflective enough to see this, but not enough to realize it was wrong and fight against the impulse.
How does one deal with strong sense memories? A mannerism that reminds them of someone who hurt them you? A smell? A sound? A touch? Can these be eradicated with time?
The people at my new workplace were all in the World Trade Center. When they moved to their new building, the building management conducted a series of fire alarms. The first time they conducted these fire alarms - which consisted of blaring lights and loud warning buzzes - the people raced to the exits, ducked under their desks and panicked. Finally, someone in charge, advised the management that they had to tell the people that they were testing the fire alarm system first. Even with the notice - people were still a little jumpy. It took three years for them to get past it.
Now I look at the responses people have to same-sex marriage, which reminds me of the responses they had to interracial marriage in the 70s (actually some places still have that reaction), and I wonder why they feel this way? I know it is partly conditioned response. Either from parents. Media. Churchs. Someone has shown them an ugly picture. In one thread in livejournal, pointed out by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
matociquala, a published and prolific fantasy writer, Anne McCaffrey, is quoted as stating that anal rape causes homosexuality. She is again quoted as stating that a friend of her's was raped this way and became a homosexual as a result of it. It sounds absurd, insane, and overwhelmingly offensive on many levels, I know. But it also goes a long way to explaining the knee-jerk response people have to the idea of same gender couples. They don't see the people. They don't see the love. They don't understand it's about love. Instead they see well the thing that causes the conditioned response. The anal jokes. The sodom and gomerha (sp?) biblical tale. In the 1980s, when the AIDS scare first arose, I remember one my friends, a Regan conservative, very straight-forward, bright, tons of common-sense, honestly believed you could get Aids if you were in a Jacuzzi with a homosexual. Why? Urban legends. In College, I minored in Folklore, which involved studying urban legends. And boy the way some of these legends have changed our behavior. Are they true? Yes and no. Urban legends are based on truth - sort of like the trick lab coat in Pavlov's experiment. Stained with food but not food - the dog is responding to an illusion of food.
In an urbane legend, a real event is embellished, exaggerated, and twisted to suit the new teller's purpose. Examples include razor blades in apples. NEVER HAPPENED! But we believe it because so and so told us. Yet, if we check the source, we'll discover so and so's reliable source was really just another person who found out from another so and so, and no you can't trace the origin. Same with the hand being cooked by the microwave. Or the rat in the Nieman Marcus bag. There is a web site that specializes in debunking Urban legends. While normally harmless, some cause us to fear other people. Why is it people remember the negative stories over the positive?
I was thinking about the ATPO S6 script, there's a section I wasn't overly fond of, the last two acts covered it. It's the typical scenario dating back to the Western, where our injured heroes are captured by what appears to be the enemy. In this case demons. In previous cases - Indians in the Old West.
They take them at spear point. They have a shaman. Each sci-fi fantasy sooner or later goes here and so do westerns. We keep telling this tale. And I began to wonder why? Because no one has learned from it. No matter how many times we tell it, no one learns. So we keep finding new ways to tell it. To somehow get across the message that the people that appear to be your enemy actually can end up saving your life. This version was actually very creative, it even used the scarey/normally poisonous deadly spider as a healing agent. Demonstrating metaphorically that what we think would kill us, might save our life. The writer was using an old tale, told in a new way, as a means to inform the reader that the people they've demonized are just people like them. If you can just see beyond the conditioned response. Spike's first reaction to the spider is fear, until he realizes it is saving Gunn. Spike/Gunn go to the demons for help. Angel/Illyria see them initially as a threat and believe spike and Gunn were killed by them. The contrast is interesting. Have I seen it before, yes.
Each time the cure seems scary, but it's not. I've even written it. And all for the same reason - to try to pull us above the conditioned response. Because while conditioned responses can save one's life they can also kill us.
Thinking, communicating with the demon tribe - enables Gunn and Spike to survive. And working with them provides them with an exit from the desert world. Overcoming their conditioned response, enables them to survive.
They choose.
I think that's what it all comes down to - choice. How you choose to view the world and those around you. If you choose to have someone else such as Pavlov condition your views or you choose to rise above the conditioning. A few years back I had a bad relationship - as a result I found that I reacted negatively to certain stimulus: Grateful Dead Albums, Star Trek, Finesse Shampoo amongst other things - which brought up memories of the person. I've realized recently that I can choose not to react negatively to these items. That I can make the conscious choice to ignore those responses and not allow those reflexs to cloud how I see them. I am not Pavlov's Dog. I can choose.
Hmm, somewhat rambly in places. Hope it made sense. No time to really proof-read.
and wondered - okay there's only two holes, and three plugs. What to do? Oh, look the cable box has the right number - let's try that. (Yeah right. Has to be plugged into the TV.) Finally realized okay we can plug in the video and one audio, but not both audios. Does it work? Yep. Put in Buffy S5 Disc and voila the brillance of DVD. Yes, I have now discovered something everyone on my flist probably already knows - the picture quality on DVD's is about 80% better than as originally aired or taped. So is the sound quality. Even with just one plug in. Amazing. Methinks I see lots of DVD renting and expenditures in my future. In return, I took cjlasky to dinner and we discussed the ATS S6 Virtual Project.
Oh political joke that I got from my mother last night:
A friend from Texas emailed her a map of the US, with the red and blue marked out clearly, noting that the blue states all bordered or came close to Canada, or were at the coast line. The Blue states = "United States of Canada", the red? "Jesus Country".
***********
Are We Pavlov's Dogs?
[I posted an entry about this some time ago. Didn't like it. Decided to rework it, make it better. So here's my second attempt.]
Pavlov as many people know, was a Russian Scientist who studied the reflexs of dogs. He determined through a series of experiments that when dog's saw food or were to be fed they would salivate. The saliva was necessary to digest their food. But dogs salviated without seeing food, what caused this?
Here's a blurb from an article on Pavlov by Lorie Friedholm, a Science Journalist, which dicusses reflexes. Found at: http://nobelprize.org/medicine/educational/pavlov/readmore.html
"Pavlov became interested in studying reflexes when he saw that the dogs drooled without the proper stimulus. Although no food was in sight, their saliva still dribbled. It turned out that the dogs were reacting to lab coats. Every time the dogs were served food, the person who served the food was wearing a lab coat. Therefore, the dogs reacted as if food was on its way whenever they saw a lab coat.
In a series of experiments, Pavlov then tried to figure out how these phenomena were linked. For example, he struck a bell when the dogs were fed. If the bell was sounded in close association with their meal, the dogs learnt to associate the sound of the bell with food. After a while, at the mere sound of the bell, they responded by drooling."
A child is told not to touch a hot burner. But it's not until the child touchs the burner that he or she learns never to touch it or in some cases sees someone else touch it and get burned, which I suppose takes the kid up a step from the dog - we don't necessarily have to experience it ourselves to get the message. At any rate - sense memories affect behavior. Conditioned responses or learned responses. I remember that much from my Introduction to Psychology Course way back in 1986 - where we spent hours teaching a rat to go through a maze and press a lever. (I called my rat Adam's Apple, we got along quite well, was sorry to part with him. Had a better relationship with the rat actually than the guy I named him after. (Another story for another day) Heh. (Was very disappointed to discover Psyche 101 did not include readings by Freudd and Jung, but rather lots of stuff by tedious behavorists and several medical case studies.) At any rate the exercise involved showing the rat food -then rewarding it with the food if it pushed the lever. If it went the wrong way or did the wrong thing? It got shocked. Eventually the rat would learn what to do to get food and avoid pain.
Common sense really - if I do this, I get burned. Do this? I get food. Sort of like Spike in S4-S5 BTVS. If I'm a nice informative vampire - Buffy is nice to me and gives me things. If I'm mean nasty vampire, I get staked, punched, abused. Or Alex in A ClockWork Orange - if I am violent, I get sick. If I'm not I'm fine. Conditioned response. Yet, we are talking about people who can think, who can choose.
As a child, a small child, I remember finding spiders fascinating. My mother informs me that I actually tried to eat a few daddy long-legs - a concept that makes me cringe. Now I fear them. Why? Ah, pavlov's dog. Sense memory.
Around the age of 6 or 7 - two things happened regarding spiders that changed my perception of them forever: 1) Someone dumped a jar of daddy long legs on my head. 2) We were playing a fun adventure game of kidnapped, were about to be put in a fort, but had to interrupt our play and go home, when I almost put my hand on a giant wolf spider. The girl behind me screamed bloody murder and stopped me. Wolf Spider's are bad news - they bite you and don't let go apparently - or that's what I was told in graphic detail.
After that kids seemed to think it funny to throw or chase me with spiders. And of course, my third grade teacher, who I despised with a bloody vengeance, loved the beasts. So it's not surprising that I reacte a bit like Pavlov's dog when it comes to spiders. Tense up. Adrenaline races. Blood pressure spikes. And want to flee the room.
Yet, one of my friend's significant other finds spiders and scorpions beautiful. He sees the beauty in them. And I can't help but wonder what his background with them was. How it differed from mine. And how different I might be, if I wasn't taught to fear them.
Another sense memory: as a child my brother and I used to fight. We'd punch and kick and chase each other like most children do. Until the day came when I realized that whenever I kicked him, he kicked me harder. No one won these battles. Actually, I was far more successful when I just left the room or stopped speaking to him or pretended he didn't exist (ie. ignore). This worked.
Hitting him? Bigger bruise. Ignoring him? Very effective.
Conditioned responses are good things, in most cases, they protect us. We know not to touch hot burners for instance. Or pet a growling dog. Or punch someone.
We know not to cross the street when a car is coming. Or jump off a roof. Yet, they can also cause us to fear things that in a different light can be beautiful - such as a spider.
What happens when we associate a conditioned response with people?
When I was in college, one of my friends struggled with her prejudice against people who happened to have dark skin. Very dark skin. And looked a certain way. She fought against this prejudice. When I asked her why this was a problem, she explained - "when I was a small child, my house was vandalized several times, and there were a series of robberies done in our neighborhood by a gange of black men. One of them held a knife on my father. I had nightmares for weeks. As an adult, I know it's silly to associate the two, but
I do...and I fight against it."
At my new workplace, I was discussing the old evil boss from old company with a co-worker and she pointed out something that had not occurred to me before. That something about me, my mannerisms, my speech, may have reminded "evil" boss of someone who hurt him deeply - causing a reflexive dislike towards me.
Nothing I did. No fault of mine. Except I reminded him of someone else. This reminded me oddly of a friend in college, who once explained to me why she didn't want to do anything for my birthday while she went out of her way to celebrate all her other friends birthdays. It was because something I did reminded her of my mother and her reflex was to punish me. She was self-reflective enough to see this, but not enough to realize it was wrong and fight against the impulse.
How does one deal with strong sense memories? A mannerism that reminds them of someone who hurt them you? A smell? A sound? A touch? Can these be eradicated with time?
The people at my new workplace were all in the World Trade Center. When they moved to their new building, the building management conducted a series of fire alarms. The first time they conducted these fire alarms - which consisted of blaring lights and loud warning buzzes - the people raced to the exits, ducked under their desks and panicked. Finally, someone in charge, advised the management that they had to tell the people that they were testing the fire alarm system first. Even with the notice - people were still a little jumpy. It took three years for them to get past it.
Now I look at the responses people have to same-sex marriage, which reminds me of the responses they had to interracial marriage in the 70s (actually some places still have that reaction), and I wonder why they feel this way? I know it is partly conditioned response. Either from parents. Media. Churchs. Someone has shown them an ugly picture. In one thread in livejournal, pointed out by
matociquala, a published and prolific fantasy writer, Anne McCaffrey, is quoted as stating that anal rape causes homosexuality. She is again quoted as stating that a friend of her's was raped this way and became a homosexual as a result of it. It sounds absurd, insane, and overwhelmingly offensive on many levels, I know. But it also goes a long way to explaining the knee-jerk response people have to the idea of same gender couples. They don't see the people. They don't see the love. They don't understand it's about love. Instead they see well the thing that causes the conditioned response. The anal jokes. The sodom and gomerha (sp?) biblical tale. In the 1980s, when the AIDS scare first arose, I remember one my friends, a Regan conservative, very straight-forward, bright, tons of common-sense, honestly believed you could get Aids if you were in a Jacuzzi with a homosexual. Why? Urban legends. In College, I minored in Folklore, which involved studying urban legends. And boy the way some of these legends have changed our behavior. Are they true? Yes and no. Urban legends are based on truth - sort of like the trick lab coat in Pavlov's experiment. Stained with food but not food - the dog is responding to an illusion of food.In an urbane legend, a real event is embellished, exaggerated, and twisted to suit the new teller's purpose. Examples include razor blades in apples. NEVER HAPPENED! But we believe it because so and so told us. Yet, if we check the source, we'll discover so and so's reliable source was really just another person who found out from another so and so, and no you can't trace the origin. Same with the hand being cooked by the microwave. Or the rat in the Nieman Marcus bag. There is a web site that specializes in debunking Urban legends. While normally harmless, some cause us to fear other people. Why is it people remember the negative stories over the positive?
I was thinking about the ATPO S6 script, there's a section I wasn't overly fond of, the last two acts covered it. It's the typical scenario dating back to the Western, where our injured heroes are captured by what appears to be the enemy. In this case demons. In previous cases - Indians in the Old West.
They take them at spear point. They have a shaman. Each sci-fi fantasy sooner or later goes here and so do westerns. We keep telling this tale. And I began to wonder why? Because no one has learned from it. No matter how many times we tell it, no one learns. So we keep finding new ways to tell it. To somehow get across the message that the people that appear to be your enemy actually can end up saving your life. This version was actually very creative, it even used the scarey/normally poisonous deadly spider as a healing agent. Demonstrating metaphorically that what we think would kill us, might save our life. The writer was using an old tale, told in a new way, as a means to inform the reader that the people they've demonized are just people like them. If you can just see beyond the conditioned response. Spike's first reaction to the spider is fear, until he realizes it is saving Gunn. Spike/Gunn go to the demons for help. Angel/Illyria see them initially as a threat and believe spike and Gunn were killed by them. The contrast is interesting. Have I seen it before, yes.
Each time the cure seems scary, but it's not. I've even written it. And all for the same reason - to try to pull us above the conditioned response. Because while conditioned responses can save one's life they can also kill us.
Thinking, communicating with the demon tribe - enables Gunn and Spike to survive. And working with them provides them with an exit from the desert world. Overcoming their conditioned response, enables them to survive.
They choose.
I think that's what it all comes down to - choice. How you choose to view the world and those around you. If you choose to have someone else such as Pavlov condition your views or you choose to rise above the conditioning. A few years back I had a bad relationship - as a result I found that I reacted negatively to certain stimulus: Grateful Dead Albums, Star Trek, Finesse Shampoo amongst other things - which brought up memories of the person. I've realized recently that I can choose not to react negatively to these items. That I can make the conscious choice to ignore those responses and not allow those reflexs to cloud how I see them. I am not Pavlov's Dog. I can choose.
Hmm, somewhat rambly in places. Hope it made sense. No time to really proof-read.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Twice-told tales
Date: 2004-11-08 07:29 am (UTC)"No matter how many times we tell it, no one learns. So we keep finding new ways to tell it."
We do. We have to. The tribe needs to learn the lesson again and again. You just hope you can tell it in a way that doesn't bore everybody.
The Wa!Jani, as I think I've said before, are an amalgamation of just about every desert tribe in Western fiction: they're the Lakota, the Bedouins, the ancient Hebrews, the Fremen. But most importantly, they are NOT US. Which always (in my mind anyway) brings up the question:
Who are "we," anyway?