Classical Conditioning
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| As you can see, my LaTeX skills are crazy. |
Recently, I’ve been interested in neuroscience, despite my lack of free time and my ever-so-slightly approaching deadlines. I thought I’d share something I learned about recently.
Definition
Classical conditioning occurs when a neutral stimulus is paired with an unconditioned stimulus, which turns the neutral stimulus into a conditioned stimulus. The response, in turn, shifts from an unconditioned response to a conditioned response. There’s a lot of vocabulary involved, so it’s probably easier to illustrate through an example.
Let’s say you receive a message from a friend or a loved one. This is an unconditioned stimulus, and it causes you to feel happy and potentially relieved, which is the unconditioned response. However, messages don’t come silently by default, and a notification is often sent before the message is received. This is crucial: the notification reliably comes before the message. Eventually, your brain learns to respond to the notification, which is essentially just a noise or a vibration, in the same way it responds to the message. The notification has become a conditioned stimulus and checking the phone is the conditioned response.
Intellection
Classical conditioning obviously appears in many aspects of life beyond our phones. Phobias and trauma are significantly influenced by classical conditioning too. What naturally follows is potentially learning about operant conditioning and observational learning, and if you’re interested in why social media and gambling are so addicting, intermittent reward plays a significant role. But that’s all for this week. Happy Thanksgiving!
Life Update!
There will be no life update this week, as it feels like all I’m doing is drowning in schoolwork and college applications while procrastinating like everything is fine. If a certain panda ever told you “Procrastination is the key to success,” then they lied.
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