Conditioned Reflexes
When you study a martial art, a sport, or a musical instrument, the majority of your study is repetitive practice. Sure, you may learn a new kata or a new kick, but then you practice it over and over and over, and you keep practicing the old one. You may learn a new play or strategy, but you don't continue to spend hours on the layups and free throws. You may learn a new sonata, but you still run your scales.
The point of the repetition isn't that you need to keep trying until you get it right, but that you need to keep doing it right until it doesn't take effort. After you've correctly assumed defense stance 7 a few thousand times, there's no pause when your opponent's saber takes a quick cut for your helmet. When you've run that same play for the last two months, you see the gap in the defensive pattern before either team has had a chance to think about it - you get the ball to the open man. A master musician doesn't have to play the piece from memory - they play it by feel, since memory is too slow.
The point is that through conditioning, we learn to respond automatically and correctly, without thought or conscious assessment. Of course, people have natural reflexes, too - some more than others. A real talent is someone who seems to have this conditioning already inborn - their reflexes and reactions are naturally reliable.
I think morality is along the same lines. Our family and parents model behaviour for us when we are young; when we are older, we learn to make snap judgements about situations - to know what is right or wrong. We value the moral athletes - our elders - who know the good and the bad of a situation without even having to know all of the details. They've learned to "feel" a situation without having to think about it.
Some of us train and refine our moral judgement, either by studying a school of morality until it is engrained into our person, or by throwing ourselves into all kinds of situations and finding our way through them.
So.... I'd like to decondition my reflexes, you know? I don't want to have a reflexive response to a moral quandry - I want it to be based on reason. I don't want to worry about how my initial reactions are coloring my decisions. I don't find myself in too many situations where I need a reliable snap judgement. So how do I unpractice?
Is that what zen is?
posted by Wray Davis @ 6:59 AM
7 comments
7 Comments:
hmmmm...interesting. and i have no idea. :)
I think the way you 'uncondition' is really to recondition to another behavior. Actually interesting that you would write about this now... I am reading 'yet another'business book that is actually about emotional intelligence and learning to condition yourself to the 'right' EI of a leader.
But that's exactly the trap I'm trying to avoid - moving from one conditioning to another. It's probably unavoidable to have no conditioning whatsoever - we have to be able to stop at red lights without first conducting an internal debate on the morality of unmonitored traffic laws. But I want to keep my skills dull, so that rather than "feeling" a reaction to a quandry, I take the time to think it through.
Actually that is what the book is all about (or at least the first part) how our limbic system is intimately connected with our frontal cortex so that feelings and intellectual reasoning are really very intertwined. In fact the book purports that our limbic systems are so strong that we can actually and measurably change those that are around us.. even if we don't know them well... but I digress- the point emotions and reasoning are not as easy to separate as you may think.
oh by the by... I like the deviant art cover for your novel
Thanks!
I don't think de-conditioning would be that easy at all... I think it has to be at least as hard as the training of conditioning, but while people have spent millenia developing ways of conditioning themselves and others, I don't think we've had so many attempts the other way (except for perhaps Zen - for some reason, with my limited understanding of it, it seems like exactly what de-conditioning would be).
I enjoyed reading this post.
I don't have an answer for you, though.
I imagine it would be more or less impossible to be completely deconditioned.
Even if you sat in a dark room for years and years and years and then finally came out to interact with someone--you would still have a reaction. Although, I imagine without years of human contact you would also have a whole lot of thoughts on that encounter.
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