Fortunate Accidents
What do brandy, matches, anesthesia, Vaseline, chewing gum, saccharin, X-rays, radioactivity, Corn Flakes, tempered glass, plastic, insulin, penicillin, Teflon, Velcro, the microwave oven, the pacemaker, and Botox have in common?
Let me answer that with a short story.
Ivan Petrovich Pavlov was born in Ryazan, Russia, on September 26, 1849, the first of eleven children. Although he could read by the age of seven, Pavlov did not begin formal schooling until he was eleven because of injuries he suffered after falling from a high wall onto a stone pavement.
Not exactly the ideal beginning for someone who would eventually become one of the most famous scientists in history.
Pavlov went on to become a physiologist and won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his research on digestion.
So, please, do not start pushing yourself, or your children, off walls in hopes of improving academic performance. Unfortunately, science has not been able to replicate that part of the experiment.
I like to imagine Pavlov waking up one morning and saying, “Today seems like a good day to study digestion.”
Of course, it was not quite that simple.
Pavlov wanted to understand what happens from the moment food enters the mouth until the body is finished with it. Saliva begins breaking it down, food travels through the esophagus into the stomach, gastric juices continue the process, nutrients are absorbed in the small intestine, water is absorbed in the large intestine, and eventually the body politely disposes of what it no longer needs.
Simple, right?
True to form as a scientist, Pavlov approached the problem methodically. For his research, he used dogs rather than human subjects, which was probably fortunate for humanity and somewhat less fortunate for the dogs.
During his experiments, Pavlov noticed something interesting. The dogs began salivating before the food actually arrived.
Certain sights and sounds associated with feeding were enough to trigger the response. Eventually, a signal associated with food could cause the dogs to salivate even when the food itself was not yet present.
And just like that, while studying digestion, Pavlov stumbled into psychology. This observation helped establish what we now call classical conditioning.
Classical conditioning is a form of learning through association. Something that originally produces little or no particular response becomes connected to something that naturally does. After enough repetition, the previously neutral stimulus can trigger the response all by itself.
The key word is association.
Your brain learns that one thing means another.
Think of it this way. Imagine you dislike mac and cheese. Then, somehow, you become convinced that a skyscraper-swinging superhero loves mac and cheese. Suddenly, eating it feels a little more appealing because perhaps, somewhere deep inside your highly sophisticated adult brain, consuming enough fluorescent cheese might make you slightly more like him.
It will not.
But advertisers sincerely appreciate your optimism.
Pavlov’s discovery turned out to reach far beyond hungry dogs.
Classical conditioning became important to understanding how humans and animals respond to their environments. It can help explain the development of fears and phobias, automatic habits, emotional reactions, preferences, and many behaviors we perform without consciously thinking about why.
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It can even help explain why we buy things.
Advertising understands association extremely well.
A product by itself may not produce much emotion. It is simply a bottle, a car, a perfume, a hamburger, or a phone.
So advertisers surround it with things that do produce emotion.
Beautiful people, celebrities, music, family, sex, adventure, success, humor, nostalgia, happiness.
Show the product beside those things often enough, and our brains may begin connecting them. The product is no longer merely a product. It becomes a feeling.
Consider the soda in the famous red can. The beverage is repeatedly associated with celebration, friendship, family gatherings, holidays, and happiness.
Perfume and automobile companies frequently associate their products with beauty, status, attractiveness, power, or success.
Humorous advertisements make us laugh and then place the product right beside that pleasant emotion.
The message does not necessarily say:
“Buy this and you will be happy.”
It does not have to.
Your brain can finish the sentence.
And that is where Pavlov’s accidental discovery becomes much more interesting, and perhaps a little disturbing.
A scientist studying digestion accidentally helped open a door into understanding how behaviors can be learned, fears can be created or reduced, emotional responses can become attached to seemingly unrelated things, and human preferences can be influenced without our being fully conscious of the process.
Classical conditioning would eventually contribute to psychological theories and therapeutic techniques used to understand and treat fears and other learned responses.
But the same basic principles of association can also be used to influence behavior.
To sell us things, to shape preferences, to make something feel safe, to make something feel frightening, to make us want something we did not want five minutes ago.
Pavlov discovered that a dog could hear a signal and begin salivating because its brain had learned what that signal meant.
More than a century later, our signals are everywhere. A logo, a notification, a song, a celebrity, a slogan.
We like to believe we are rational creatures making independent choices.
Perhaps we are.
Or perhaps we have simply become very sophisticated at explaining why we walked toward the bowl after hearing the bell.
So the question we should ask ourselves is:
Are we Pavlov’s dogs?
