Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Palvlov's experiment - Classical conditioning


Assalamualaikum

Its been a while since I write about science. I think I should again. So today, I would like to share with you all about Pavlov's experiment. Please refer to above diagram. The dog are conditioned to salivate when after they were conditioned for sometime. In other words, we can program the dog's behavior and way of thinking.

Some of you might wonder why did I bring this topic up. I brought it up because in many ways we were conditioned like Pavlov's dog. No we are not animals and we do not behave like one but we can certainly become one when we stop using our brain. When we stop to think.... we stop to ponder.... and we stop to reflect.....

What I meant to say is we be can be as manipulated like Pavlov's dogs. Maybe we already have been conditioned and manipulated this way.

I would like to give some examples:

1. We define a beautiful women as tall, fair and thin like models.
2. We define handsome to be tall, dark, rich, sexy...
3. We believe buy expensive stuff from MLM company even though there are better quality and cheaper products in the market.
4. We believe that 'health food' can cure diseases like diabetes.
5. We believe that there are life culture of useful bacterias in yogurt even though it was pasturized.
6. We still practice culture when got nothing to do with Islam even though it was syirik.
7. We believe out government is doing us good by giving free H1N1 and HPV shots even the vaccines were never proven to work and contains heavy metals which are bad for health.
8. We still believe everything on TV and newspapers to be true.
I can go on and on......

The question is how did we got conditioned in the first place. I believe we are conditioned in many ways.

The biggest culprit is TV. Since young, as young as a baby, we were exposed to TV. TV have basically cultured us. We are made to believe many things from the TV. Fashion is one example. Today, we can see many teenagers wears clothing like they were hookers. They believe that their clothing are OK because its on TV. To be exact, they were made to think that way. So sexy clothing only fit for hookers became fashion and proper clothing are considered to be old-fashioned. Baju kurung, proper cheong sam and sari became outdated and clothing for whores and beggers became the 'in thing' in fashion.

Other than that, TV also conditioned us to accept certain culture such as smoking, drinking and free sex (not to mention lesbianism and gayism). All this have became a norm in our life today. The reason is because we were made to think that way by TV. If a couple is kissing in the public today, how many people will stop and tell them that it was wrong? Somewhere in our head, it was program as 'biasala tu budak-budak baru nak bercinta'. There are many more examples of how we were conditioned by TV but I wont write more. JUST STOP AND THINK.

Other than that we were conditioned in school. Many might not realize it. Even the teachers did not realize it but they conditioned their students in school, some in a good way and some in a bad way. I can give you one easy example: when a teacher steps in a class, the student will automatically become quiet. Now this happens because they were conditioned from small to be quiet when the teacher steps in.

Not all, but there are some teachers that conditioned their students in a bad way. For example, when a student was question like:

S: Sir, why can we do it like this?
T: Why are you asking? You are the teacher or I am the teacher? Just do what I ask you to do.

Any of you remember this dialogue? Well most of my friends told me that the 'Uztaz' or 'Ustazah' in their school are like that. Unfortunately many so called ulamaks that I met are also like this.... What happen was this people basically conditioned their student to just 'ACCEPT' and 'DONT ASK QUESTION'.

As a result our student who are Malaysian citizen became what I called as 'stupid' and what most people call as ignorance. Since they are trained to just accept and dont ask questions, they were basically conditioned to not to have a very important skill which is 'THINKING'.

When we stop thinking and just believe and accept things around us without making any judgement or evaluation, we became not so different from Pavlov's dog. Woof! Woof! Woof!

Classical conditioning actually starts at home, fathers and mothers out there you should start to teach your children to think, ask questions and encourage them to seek knowledge. If we fail, our children will be contaminated and end up manipulated like a puppet.

- I am sorry for the terrible English, I am sleepy. Share if you have other examples of classical conditioning.

1 comment:

  1. WOULD it be alright if I use your image in a movie that I am making for school?

    ReplyDelete