On conditioned conversations

Associations, perceived between entities. Facilitated by proximity in time and space.. they are the building blocks to our tendencies to anticipate, act, avoid. Psychologists are funny people. They have gone to great lengths to prove and disprove this. They went around collecting cocroaches. Found good comfortable boxes to keep them in. Painstakingly made arrangements to give them electric shocks every time light was let into the box. :-) the cockroaches were kind. They rewarded the psychs with obedient learning. Every time they saw light they ran away. Apparently they had associated light with the electric shock soo to follow..

Us, a number of classes, families genera and species apart from the bugs, are the same.. You flex your hand a little up when you hear a name. Then you try pressing it down when you hear someone else's. Apparently the name you heard when ur hands were flexed up will seem more appealing the next time you hear the names .. Why? Because the mind , readily follows an association between the pleasure of stretching muscles with the sound of the name.A simple association..

Magnified, Integrated, can you imagine how powerful such small associations are in determine our attitudes and behavior?

Lately I have realised that I have conditioned to talk more when there is silence.

Usually how is it? You talk. Some one talks back. You talk again. That's the rule of conventional conversation.

Strange circumstances made me talk on and on when there was silence from the other side.. Conversation to fill in the other's silence became the habit. Soliloquy became the conditioned response.

Months later, I see the same dynamic operating in my soliloqy with the silent other. I find the silence makes me talk more than his words ever does. Is it conditioning that is at play here or is it just because silence offers a more fertile ground for interpretations of the other, there by making us talk in all the way to respond to all the 'interpreted' comments of the other?

:-) I better not befuddle myself too much thinking about this while am sitting next to my new text book to be read.. would end up associating it with befuddlement too.