Learning

Science Behind Learning

Learning happens to us every day of our lives, from the second we are born, or even before. Learning is described as the process by which life experience causes change in the behavior or thinking of an organism. There are several types of leaning, association, maturation and conditioning are just a few. Conditioning is one of the most common forms of learning. Classical conditioning is a form of learning in which animals or people make a connection between two stimuli that have occurred together such that one predicts the other. They have done studies on both humans and animals, dogs to be particular in this research. They were able to condition dogs to know they were going to receive food any time they heard a bell, or they also used circles to get the dogs to know they are receiving food. This type of learning is generalization. Generalization is the process by which stimuli that are similar to the conditioned stimulus cause the same conditioned reaction. Research has shown that the dog being able to decipher between the different shapes to know whether it would get food or not is like humans deciphering between different logos or food and drinks and such. The conditioning in children is a little different, it’s more of association. Jenny would associate red sports car with getting ice cream, because her uncle always took her to get ice cream in it. It’s a learned behavior. Other testing was done on children, that is not used today because it caused more harm that help. They showed a young child a rat and he reacted kindly to it, but when they showed him the rat again they made a loud noise which upset the child, which made his terror be associated with the rat, which caused similar looking items to the rat to cause him fear as well. This type of research has been discontinued. Continuing off of fears, we can use conditioning to alleviate phobias. When exposed in small doses of your phobia you can start to get over what causes the panic in you, because you had to learn that phobia at some stage in life, so now you can unlearn it.

Personal Learning

Overcoming your phobias was something that really stood out to me. I knew people have been able to overcome fears, especially irrational ones, but I never thought of it as us unlearning something we had previously learned. I didn’t know how we acquired fears, but I never thought of them as something we learned. Why would you want to learn to be afraid of something, that’s just a weird thought? I have a lot of irrational fears that I'm not sure where they come from, but I usually am able to overcome them after a short while of just avoiding things that may be associated with them and just immerging myself around them again. I guess avoidance gives me enough time to realize that there is nothing wrong with those things. I still haven’t gotten over my irrational fear of eating in the dark, it just creeps me out.

Real-world Application

Previously I talked about how we are always learning new things every day, and that will never stop. Usually we don’t realize things that we are learning. We learn from experiences. Things we see other people do in situations and they have a positive out come from them, we will start doing those as well, and we won’t realize we are doing them, we are conditioned to do things that provide a positive response or reward.