Practical Freedom - Conditioning and Unlearning

Conditioning
Piaget once said in a lecture: ''Every time you teach a child something you keep him from reinventing it.'' From the time we are born we learn to live within boundaries and patterns. We are conditioned by our physical environment, by what our parents and others tell us, by events that impact us emotionally, and by the subtle social structures that surround us. Conditioning allows us to live together, to work together, and to find our way home after work. Most conditioning occurs through watching what other people do: their practices, rituals, and unconscious actions. Conditioning is like a reflex, with an automatic quality.

Thorndike (1913) performed extensive experiments in 'operative conditioning' on cats. By putting a cat in a box, rewarding it with food upon escaping and timing its escape over successive tries, Thorndike charted the progress whereby the cat learned to escape to access the food. At first the cat was slow, finding the escape by exploration and chance, but eventually it immediately and consistently found freedom and food. These experiments were the source of what we now call the learning (conditioning) curve. At first the results would seem positive for the cat, and indeed they are. After conditioning, the cat could access the food more quickly. But what if the food was placed behind a trap door, or worse yet, in another box the cat could access only with an act of creativity or great luck? Often the cat would stick to the old plan, sure that there was a reward waiting. How many times have we humans found ourselves repeating the same old patterns hoping for a better result?

Slowly and relentlessly we build a 'box' around ourselves. While we're inside the box, we're dependent on its windows to see outside. We also might think of the window pane as having a distortion effect, filtering the information that passes through it. The windows could be bright, or of stained glass, or difficult to see through. They might make the outside look distant or frightening, playful or complex. In extreme cases they might not let any light through at all.

It has been said that fish living in two parts of an aquarium separated by a glass partition generally continue to stay on their original half even though the partition is removed. Adults quickly become comfortable inside their individual box and continue to live on 'autopilot'. We become unaware of the filter on the window and even the shape and size of the box. We learn to adapt to its constrictions. We therefore forget that there are boundaries; only if we tried to stretch ourselves would we notice they are there at all.

Unlearning
Conditioning is inevitable and at times even appropriate. It helps us to function more effectively in the environment that we live in. We develop our own perspectives and interpretations of the world as we interact more and more with the environment and in small ways, we also influence the environment around us by our actions, words and beliefs. In fact, Skinner believed that we should just focus on conditioning people with proper stimuli and reward people when they develop desired behavioral patterns (Skinner, 1958). But just as we cannot plant new crops without first uprooting the old roots and giving the new seeds a chance, we need to unlearn before we can learn anew. In other words, while normal learning is facilitated by conditioning approaches, no new learning or breakthroughs take place with this approach. Unlearning is the key. How then do we unlearn our patterns and develop new patterns? How do we escape the box?

There is an old fable about a frog in a pond. A new frog arrived from the ocean. He asked this visitor how big was the ocean. "The ocean is very large and the pond is so small compared to the ocean," the second frog responded. The frog in the pond could not imagine anything bigger than the pond it lived in and therefore it went away thinking that the second frog was the biggest liar it had ever met. Escaping our self-created box before there is an emergency, requires a definite intention. When we travel by plane, how many of us pay attention to the instructions the flight attendants give on the right ways to buckle up, and where to find oxygen masks and flotation devices? The ritual bores us. However, if the plane developed serious engine trouble in mid flight, everyone would suddenly pay very close attention indeed. Although such motivation could hardly be higher in survival terms, because of the stress of the situation some people would still miss many of the instructions given. Because there is no inherent pleasure in learning about the equipment itself, the mind still finds itself wandering.

What if we were to develop a conscious desire to explore possibilities outside our conditioned thinking? We might become aware of what lies outside the box, we would perhaps see and hear things we were previously oblivious of. We would gradually develop a creative tension between our desire to change and our resistance, which is a fear of the unknown; we could confront the old model, unlearn what was holding us back, and begin to open up enough to dissolve the old box, and create anew. When this occurs, it is a moment is one of breakthrough and great awareness. For a while there is reduced attachment to the past and reduced anxiety about the future. Such transformations lead to dramatic increases in openness and create a space, a gap between current reality and the future vision. This is the foundation for 'meta cognition.' Thinking about one's thinking creates the foundation for 'learning to learn.' (Bateson, 1972)

Feedback: What did you think of this article? We'd like to hear your thoughts. (Please mention the name of the article to which you are responding.)