Pavlov and His Dog

The phrase Pavlov's Dog resonates with people as a phrase representing conditioning. Pavlov, a research scientist is the 1890's, found that the dogs he studied, not only salivated at the sight of food, but even at the possibility of food. He learned that any event or object that the dogs began to associate with food would cause salivation. Food was the unconditioned stimulus and saliva was the unconditioned response. He introduced a metronome before the dogs were being fed so they would associate the metronome with food. Eventually, he could show just a metronome and no food, and the dogs would still salivate. The metronome became the conditioned stimulus and saliva was the conditioned response. 

Essentially, Pavlovian Conditioning states that you can create conditioned responses using sensory activation and association. Your brain can be trained, and since the brain is a predicting machine, you will respond accordingly. The other night I was driving home and realized the last 4 nights, at the same point when the road curves around a blind-spot, I looked left around the bend, double checking that the car parked there wasn't a cop. I must've done it unintentionally the first time or two but I know I acknowledged that it was not a cop at least twice, so it was odd to me to catch myself repeating the habit multiple times afterwords. 

That got me thinking about Pavlov's Dog. My past experiences with cops sitting around blind spots had created a conditioned response in me. But even after I'd consciously realized it wasn't a cop, I still repeated the behavior. Am I the dog or am I Pavlov? Is it possible to be both? If you condition your brain to do something, but your brain is you, then what or who is doing the conditioning if the brain is the receptacle being conditioned not the exactor of the conditioning? Is it indeed both the receptacle and the exactor?

In other words here is the question. Can a person condition themselves, consciously, and if so, how is it possible that you can hack your brain, using your brain? 

I don't know the answer, I'd need to see some studies on it. The modern line of thinking is that the mammalian brain, the prefrontal cortex is a sort of managing force for the reptilian brain. System 2 manages system 1. Consciousness manages subconsciousness. Thoughts manage emotions. In other words, behavior is a regulated output of conscious choices influenced, but not controlled by, unconscious variables. 

That being said, my thought is that if you develop a conditioned behavior, also known as a habit, then your subconscious brain influenced your conscious brain enough times to produce a consistent behavior, triggered by a stimulus. This line of thinking results in the conclusion that if you want to develop a conscious habit, that is not done by choice every time, but by behavioral conditioning, it must be derived from a subconscious mechanism and cannot be ingrained by conscious phenomena. 

To use an example, person A is someone who exercises frequently. One day, person A recognizes that when they skip exercising, they become anxious about eating food that night. Person A has developed a conditioned response to food, where the conditioned stimulus is exercise, and has also formed the inverse, a conditioned response to anxiety where the conditioned stimulus is not exercising. How did these conditioned responses form? If person A had told themselves they wanted to lose weight and become healthier by exercising more, then one could make the argument that they conditioned themselves to have these positive and negative responses to the food based on the exercise, since exercising in the first place was of their own volition. However, they know, and we know, that they did not ask for the anxiety about eating when and if they could not exercise. That was subconsciously developed. Which confirms my hypothesis, which is that if a person develops a conditioned response, it has to be done subconsciously, it cannot be done consciously. 

But now we have to test that theory with the idea of breaking the conditioned response. If person A wishes to break the conditioned negative response to food that arises from the times when they cannot exercise, can they break it consciously? If person A manages to rationalize through internal dialogue, that it is okay to eat despite not exercising, and thus they reduce their anxiety, they've allowed their conscious system to manage their subconscious system, but they've not used Pavlovian Conditioning to do so. They've used the power of system 2 to break system 1's behavior. And this proves that only system 1 is subject to Pavlovian Conditioning. 

At this point we can answer the question above; can a person condition themselves, consciously, and if so, how is it possible that you can hack your brain, using your brain?

The answer: a person cannot condition themselves optionally using Pavlovian Conditioning. A person can be manipulated using Pavlovian Conditioning, with the stipulation being it will have to be done unknowingly. But, a person can break Pavlovian conditioning using Conscious Rationalization. In short, system 1 can be hacked using subconscious stimulus and association, while system 2 can use rationale to override conditioning. 

I'm not just Pavlov and his dog. I'm both. We're both consciousness and subconsciousness. Ultimately, we're the publication who publishes Pavlov's study, capable of observing system 1 and system 2. Capable of thinking about both. Capable of putting ourselves into both. And yet, removed from being either.