Walked into a room I remodeled 15 years ago and reached for the light switch. OOPS! Wrong side of the doorway. I had changed the light switch’s position 15 years ago, but my brain sent my hand back to the former position. Sometime after 1958 my dad bought a Mercury that had push buttons instead of a gearshift. I drove that vehicle until I got my first car, a VW Bug with a stick shift on the floor. After driving that vehicle exclusively for about a year, I had occasion to drive that Mercury, automatically reaching for and pushing the buttons as I had before. When I got back into my VW, I reached to push the nonexistent buttons. Conditioning. Plain and simple. It’s tough to overcome. The brain likes what it’s used to liking. Patterns persist. Habits form. Repetition is a mode of existence. *
So, think carefully before you try to dissuade someone from a long-held political view. Conditioning applies there, too. Breaking a conditioned response takes time and patience, and there’s no guarantee that a person will not return to the former conditioned state.
*See an interesting YouTube video entitled “The Backwards Brain Bicycle: Smarter Every Day 133” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFzDaBzBlL0&t=418s Or read A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess or see the movie for an interesting take on conditioning.
So, think carefully before you try to dissuade someone from a long-held political view. Conditioning applies there, too. Breaking a conditioned response takes time and patience, and there’s no guarantee that a person will not return to the former conditioned state.
*See an interesting YouTube video entitled “The Backwards Brain Bicycle: Smarter Every Day 133” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFzDaBzBlL0&t=418s Or read A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess or see the movie for an interesting take on conditioning.
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