[vinnomot] Humanism and Psychology: (Basic 2): Introduction to Human Learning

Understanding Ourselves and Our Universe: How Psychology Can Turn the "Mysteries of Human Nature" into Useful Tools for Self Improvement and Success in Life

 

Part 2: An introduction to human learning and conditioning

 

 

Learning (conditioning) is the most important natural determinant of human psychology for participants for two reasons:

1.  As was previously noted, the answer to the question "Why did I or someone else, think or feel or do that?" will the vast majority of the time be, "I or they learned to think ot feel or do that in this situation."

2.  When it comes to making changes in one's own or someone else's thoughts, feelings, or behaviors, the only ethical and feasible way we can do that is to change the learning contingencies. (We have to use learning, because changing our own or others' behaviors using trauma, as by harsh and offensive behavious, beating or frightening somebpdy with punishment here or in the so-called next world is not ethical, and for most of us who don't work in the most advanced scientific laboratories, changing our inherited factors via genetic engineering is not feasible.)

So not only is learning the most powerful natural determinant of how we live our everyday lives, it is also the most powerful tool for changing -- presumably for the better -- the psychological repertoires of ourselves or others, both in the short-term and long-term. (How's that for serendipity in nature?!)

Let's start, as usual, by defining our key terms and concepts. Learning is defined as a relatively permanent change in behavior (or cognition or affect) due to experience. We further clarify this statement by defining "relatively permanent" as long-term (from a minute to scores of years), but amenable to change (not totally permanent or chronic); and "experience" as antecedent and consequential stimuli from our external (outside one's body) or internal (inside one's body but outside one's CNS) environments. (Never forget that for all practical purposes, psychologically "you" are your CNS. Changing your CNS changes you, and changing you changes your CNS.)

Antecedents (As) are stimulus events that precede a behavior (or thought, or feeling) and make it more or less likely to occur. Consequences (Cs) are stimulus events that follow a behavior (or thought, or feeling) and determine its future occurrence in the same or similar situations. We will also now further define behavior (B) as any observable action of an organism (including actions that can only be observed using sophisticated technology such as microscopes or brain imaging techniques); cognition as any symbolic representation in the brain (such as a thought, idea, memory, intention, sensory image, etc.); and affect as the emotions (i.e., positive/pleasant or negative/unpleasant feelings; e.g., happiness, sadness, anger, or surprise) that are naturally and functionally related to cognitions and behaviors, and to antecedents and consequences.

NOTE: From here on, we will use behavior as the summary term for behaviors and thoughts and feelings, since all three work essentially the same way at the inter-cellular and intra-cellular levels in the brain. And just to be absolutely clear, we are saying that a thought or feeling is a neurochemical event in the brain (as it produced by a nerve+chemical change)), just as all behaviors are neurochemical events (+ muscle events) elsewhere in the body. All psychological phenomena are biochemical; nothing else!

We'll also be using two other important terms and concepts in this discussion that should be defined here. The conceptual, functional, and biological basis for the powerful effects of learning and conditioning (which -- remember -- we are using as synonyms) is that the situational stimuli that precede the behavior (A), the behavior(s) that follow(s) (B), and the consequential stimuli that result from that behavior (Cs), are all associated in the brain as a functional " situational stimuli (A),  ->behavior (B) -> consequential stimuli (C) unit", and that unit is retained that way in human memory (and that is called associative learning).

Thus, specifically what is learned is not only the specific As, Bs, and Cs, but more importantly the association that doing a particular B in response to a particular A usually produces a particular C! (See below for a more detailed discussion of the A -> B -> C Model of associative learning.) If you're at home and say something nice to your spouse, and she/he smiles in return, you not only have a memory of your home's stimulus characteristics, and your spouse's characteristics and smile, and your nice words, but the all-important fact that saying something nice (B) in your home environment (A) made your spouse smile (C), which you liked. So the next time you're just at home doing nothing, and you want a lift, your brain will recall that previous experience -- and all other similar ABCs in your past -- and produce whatever B you've learned to do in that situation to get a reinforcement (like saying something nice to your spouse). Life is learning and using such associations

The other term we need to define up front is behavior management. Associative learning occurs almost every minute of every hour of every day of all people's lives, whether we want it to, pay attention to it, or are aware of it at all. But when we intentionally use the natural principles of learning to systematically influence someone's learning (e.g., try to increase desirable behaviors or decrease undesirable behaviors in ourselves or others), that's called behavior management. Synonyms for behavior management are behavior modification (shorthanded BeMod), consequential management, selective conditioning, antecedent control, consequential control, and behavior therapy, among many others. We'll use BeMod as shorthand for behavior management in this course.

NOTE : Abuse of Psychology for political purposes, through BeMod doesn work, and that it means using cold-hearted or "aversive conditioning" techniques; even approaching the types of tortures associated with prisoners of war, or "brainwashing," or those depicted in such classic movies and books as One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and A Clockwork Orange, or Manchuria Candidate. Since BeMod actually includes such techniques as kissing a loved one when they say or do something nice, grading student papers highly when they're correct and low when they're incorrect, and literally millions of other non-aversive or coercive techniques, that is a blatantly slanted and unethical practice of BeMod, and participants should not taje such information as false-info and disinformation (intentionally false info). What associative learning/conditioning and behavior management, ethically practices, are can be ascertained by using your rational, values-driven, intelligent brains to judge them. In the previous paragraph's example, if your spouse had been intentionally smiling more at you in an effort to get you to say more nice things, that would have been an example of him/her using BeMod on you, not an experiment but as a natural thing.

As noted, learning "is as simple as ABC." Whenever a person encounters a situation, antecedents,(stimulus events that precede a behavior or thought, or feeling and make it more or less likely to occur), encourage or discourage particular behaviors (or cognitions or emotions, which at the cellular level are really just tiny behaviors) to occur, which are then followed by positive or negative consequences, which determine whether we'll do the same or similar things in that or similar situations in the future. Up until recently, scientists thought there were many different types of learning -- such as classical conditioning, operant or instrumental conditioning, verbal learning, insightful learning, incidental learning, etc., etc. -- that followed different natural principles, but it now seems clear that those apparently different types are all parts of the same associative learning paradigm, which is the ABC model we've just described. And that's the same learning paradigm that all non-humans follow, too. It is the general natural law of learning.

In everyday language, humans spend their lives encountering various antecedent situations, remembering what they did in that or similar situations before (whether we consciously know we remember them, or not), then manifesting the behaviors that produced the most consistently positive consequences in the past, and finally noting which antecedents led to which behaviors with which consequences, for use when similar antecedent situations are encountered in the future. That's how most normal and intelligent behaviors (and thoughts and emotions) develop. And that's what most of the memory areas of our brains are used for: remembering our past learning experiences and applying those "experiential lessons learned" to future situations. (Remember too, that when we refer to learning or conditioning behaviors, we're including cognitions and emotions too, because thoughts and feelings are learned in exactly the same way!)

It can't be emphasized too much that all human cognitions, emotions, and behaviors are learned by the A -> B -> Cs, from the prenatal environment to the deathbed, by every single intact person on the planet, from time immemorium. Hitler and Socrates and George W. Bush and the Pope and Madonna and you and I and everybody else have behaved and thought and felt as we have primarily because we learned to act (think, feel) that way due to the pre-programmed psychological repertoire we inherited at conception, and the learned antecedents and consequences which shaped those behaviors throughout life+ something more called faith/ideology or propaganda effects.

People who behave very consistently throughout their lives literally can't think of any other way to behave to get the positive consequences they need; and people who make major -- and even minor -- changes in their behavior patterns do so because they can think of better ways to get the positive consequences they want, or even better consequences. One of the main functions of the brain, therefore, is to meticulously register, associate, and recall the millions of instances of A -> B -> C sequences throughout our lives and to efficiently generalize that knowledge to similar situations in the future.

We'll call this important brain function -- which, again, is absolutely critical to normal adaptation, the development of intelligence, problem-solving, critical thinking, and many other "higher" human and humanistic skills -- the human "conditioning computer." NOTE also that throughout this discussion, we'll use a lot of "shorthand notations" for the lengthy terms routinely used in learning. This will not only shorten the discussion and expand your vocabulary.

These simple initial examples are but tiny droplets in the mighty river of influences that learning has on human life. As soon as the fetus in the womb develops enough of a nervous system to sense and associate stimuli and responses (yes, conditioning can even occur in utero!), associative learning begins to powerfully complement our genes in determining the course of our development. Our basic pre-programmed instincts and reflexes are re-programmed by learning to serve more adaptive purposes, and our genetically pre-programmed predispositions are programmed and re-programmed into specific adaptive thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in life. And as we grow, and encounter new challenges and changed environments, our old habits are re-programmed into newer, more adaptive psychological repertoires so we can continue developing successfully. For most of us, learning is the most powerful determinant of "who we grow up to be," and it is the most powerful tool to change "who we are" if that's not adaptive enough. We can -- and routinely do -- learn to "grow old gracefully," and we're capable of learning right up until the moment of brain death. Such is the influence of learning.

To summarize what we've learned thus far, for the genetically intact individual with a normal range of environmental experiences, one's genes provide a huge potential psychological repertoire (via a large number of genetic predispositions and a relatively few instincts), from which one's learning experiences selects the particular thoughts, feelings, and behaviors which are most adaptive for one's environment(s) as we develop. This prototypical "normal" developmental pattern thus produces successful children, adolescents, and adults, whether in any particular instance we're talking about a really good head-hunter in the Amazon jungle, or a competent car designer in Japan, or a successful soccer player in the U. K., or a happy and effective humanist in any line of work in any nation in the world!

But what happens if and when an individual's genes aren't "intact," or one starts out with an intact nervous system but it is subsequently damaged by injury or disease, or one's nervous system remains normal but there is not a normal range of learning experiences or the enviornment to benefit development? This is the domain of the third natural determinant of human psychology -- trauma -- which we'll address next.

 

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