There are some phases in this learning
and as we'll see, some types of learning
happen in one trial. Doesn't happen that way
when you're trying to get a dog to slobber to food, or when you're trying to get you to
learn material for a test,
or you're trying to get people to learn behaviors for their job. It takes time,
over and over and over again. I ring the bell, I give food,
then I ring the bell, I don't get slobber the first time. Ring the bell, give food, ring the bell,
give food, ring the bell, give food, ring the bell, give food, ring the bell, give food, I do it over and
over and over
during this period of acquisition, acquiring this
association, and at its peak level
I can ring the bell, not present the food, and I get
salivation. Therefore
I have acquired a classically conditioned response.
But the dog's not dumb,
right? If I keep ringing the bell and I keep giving no food, eventually the bell
doesn't predict food anymore, right?
Ring the bell, no food, ring the bell, no food, ring the bell, no food, ring the
bell, no food,
on and on until the dog has learned not to salivate
to the bell anymore, right? This is a period
of extinction. So it seems like
our conditioned behavior is gone. And I'm going to show you how this is important in
other areas of your life besides dogs but sometime in midst... alright,
it gets gone by, time goes by, could be two
days, two weeks, two months, two years,
whatever the case may be. I have time going by, and I can ring that bell again.
Now this is assuming I haven't rung the bell and given food again and that dog will
salivate one more time,
spontaneously.
Seems random. The recovery of the conditioned reaction.
Spontaneous recovery of a conditioned behavior.
Ring the bell but you'll see I don't get
full on.. you see that? I don't get a full response like I did
at peak conditioning but I get a response. Now at this point there is a critical distinction. If I
do not
provide the unconditioned stimulus, if I do not give food,
then the next time I ring the bell it goes away and stays away longer.
Go away quicker and stay away longer. However
if I give the unconditioned stimulus,
if I give it here at this point, a spontaneous recovery,
ring the bell, dog salivates, a half response or so,
I give the food, then the next time I ring the bell I'm back to
pre-extinction levels of behavior. It relearns it more quickly,
which is adaptive, right? It doesn't have to go through this long old process of
relearning everything. It instantly returns to that peak state of conditioning
which means it acquires that behavior again rather quickly
and you'd have to extinguish it through the same procedures. Now, here's the thing,
drug addiction is a terrible problem
in our society. I know of addicts. I used to be
an alcoholic and a pothead, gave that stuff up,
but that wasn't easy to do. A lot of the people I know are
addicted to all kinds of other things. I was addicted to cigarettes and nicotine and
things of that nature as well
and nobody that I ever knew, and myself included ever said, man I can't wait to
be an addict when I grow up!
I want to be the best addict that you ever seen, I'm going to trash my family, lose my job,
have everybody hate me,
and get arrested if I can. People just don't operate like that, right? They don't
see it
that way. They don't think they're going to get addicted, right? If they
knew it was coming, they wouldn't do it. And when we get them
to the point where they are ready for treatment, they admit there's a problem,
you get them convinced to go do something, we take them
into a rehab facility. But here's the thing,
classical conditioning matters, a lot. Man, we're getting right up on the end here.
You know what thought, that's alright.
When you're in your daily state of affairs, up and down is happening all the time,
in little bits and there and there,
you get a little up, you get a little down, but you stay in your little bounds that's normal for
you, right?
What happens if you take
cocaine. Whoo! Way up!
Way, way up! What happens if you take heroin?
Ooooo, way down baby!
Way way down! Now I never did those two drugs but I hung out with
people who did
and that seems to be a pretty accurate representation to me.
But you don't stay up, do you?
You come down! You come down, not to where you started,
right, but below where you started.
In other words, you start having a hangover.
You start getting cravings. This is an opponent process.
Your body is now counteracting the drug's effect by taking you
physiologically
into the opposite state which feels
bad. But what happens if you take more of the drug? That badness goes away.
Feels better, but maybe you don't get as high
next time and your body then starts anticipating.
Now let's say you stop partying, you've recovered, and you go on about your
business
and you wind up in a very similar situation to where you did
the drug, whether it's nicotine, caffeine, heroin, or cocaine, or alcohol,
and guess what your body starts doing? Makes you go in the opposite direction
anticipating that you're about to administer the unconditioned stimulus
and we'll talk about it in depth next time and y'all
have a good day!
Here we go back into this other material that's so important to your daily life and I know
it seems hard to understand that sometimes. I start talking about
acquisition, extinction, spontaneous recovery,
these both apply to classical and operant conditioning. We talked about slobbering dogs,
we talked about neutral stimuli becoming conditioned stimuli
and now let me give you a little bit of a stronger point. Started talking about
drug addiction
and how that works and ultimately
why relapse is so common. In other words, why it's so hard to get people
successfully off of addictions once they've
become addicted. Let's see if I can get it to
brighten up there. Come on light! There it is!
Alright!
So, I started drawing you a pretty little drawing,
looked something like that. That's your arousal level. That's your mood. That's your state of consciousness
on any given day. A little up, a little down, from one day to the other.
and we talked about if you did cocaine, you'd go
whooooo! Up, right?
If you did heroine, you'd go oooooo down.
Both associated with some pleasurable experiences which is why people tend to
do them again
but also when you go up, you must come down,
right? You ain't going to stay like that. As the dose wears off,
the dose-dependent effect, you don't go back just to normal,
you actually go into the opponent state,
opposite, and it doesn't feel good. So if you're going from high to low,
now you've got people being really agitated, really irritable,
very unpleasant feelings physically,
and that's a state of craving, right? And if you
know anything about, I mean, people who have had
alcohol, too much of it, will understand that to be what phase?
Hangover! What gets rid of a hangover,
aside from water and aspirin and time?
Hair of the dog that bit you, a little bit more of the unconditioned stimulus.
That's what we're talking about. That's the UCS. It'll bring you back up,
maybe to normal, but your body starts to
associate the unconditioned stimulus, the actual administration of the drug,
with other environmental stimuli that were previously neutral,
and over time, because of this opponent process,
you know you use more, if you use the same amount you might not get as high,
and then you're down even further, and you may not get as high,
and then you're down even further, and now you're using the drug not to get high
but to get
normal, right?
Normal! So what's happening?
The base brain involved in classical conditioning is starting to predict
when you're going to take the drug by
associating environmental factors that become conditioned stimuli to trigger
cravings which are then alleviated by administration of the drug. So, you take
somebody,
and you take them into rehab. Bring back up our other thing here.
What have they got? Acquisition phase, just like
ring the bell, give food, ring the bell, give food, ring the bell, give food, right?
We're taking the drug in an environment, taking the drug in an environment, taking the
drug in an environment, eventually the environment itself
starts off the craving. Why? Because the body doesn't like to be out of homeostasis
so it tries to prepare by taking you in the other direction
before you administer the drug so that when you take it,
you won't go so far out of homeostasis in the other direction.
So you go to rehab, if you go to rehab,
and you don't get any more of the unconditioned stimulus, right?
If I ring the bell, no food, ring the bell, no food, ring the bell, no food, eventually
the dog stops salivating, right? But if I take you into rehab and you have the
internal stimuli, it may be the way you feel about yourself,
or for people who use drugs, certain kinds of other kinds of enviromental stimuli, people
who smoke cigarettes, for example,
feel powerful craving maybe after a meal, or maybe when they get in their car.
In other words, the meal itself then triggers the craving, getting in the car
triggers the craving.
The environmental stimulus that used to be neutral with regard to
cravings now causes the craving and the use of the drug
alleviates the craving. So you have all these cravings get
extinguished. And at the end of 28 days or whenever it is that you get out you don't have
people going, man
I can't wait to be an addict again, any more than they said that to begin with.
Usually,
assuming that they want to get better, they are empowered, they are encouraged,
they have people telling them, man you've done it!
Look at you go! You've been a month. Now, don't go back to any of your old haunts or any of your old
friends,
which seems a little insane as a piece of advice.
They don't explain why. They just say don't hang out. Well,
that'll be a trigger to set you off on relapse but they don't explain why.
Why is this. Because when you go back to the place that you used to do the drug,
you haven't extinguished those cues, and
you get a spontaneous recovery of that craving,
right? So, ring the bell, no food, ring the bell, no food, some period of time goes by,
I can ring the bell and I'll get salivation even though it's been extinguished and
as I said the other day,
right, if I don't give food, it'll go away quicker and stay away longer.
But, if I give the unconditioned stimulus, the next time I ring the bell, I'm going to get a
full-blown
salivation response. Yep? Now,
after rehab, some period of time,
I go home and I get the craving but I don't know what it is
and I don't know why I am experiencing it. I just got out of rehab, aren't I over that by
now?
And all of the sudden I get feeling that feeling again
and what gets rid of that feeling? A little of the unconditioned stimulus, the
drug. Most people don't go, man I'm going to get up,
become an addict again. They go, I just need one bump
or one drink or one hit or one toke to get me through this rough patch and then
I'll be okay,
and what they don't know is this,
if they can resist it, willpower is involved because
if they didn't cave and they didn't use the unconditioned stimulus, that craving
would go away quicker and stay away longer in more situations.
But not being taught this information at all,
they naively assume that they'll just get past this little rough patch and they'll be OK
cause they got all that sobriety behind them. But if they have that craving and they
administer the unconditioned stimulus, which is the drug,
the next time in that situation BAM it comes back as though they had never been
to rehab,
and then they don't know what the hell happened to them. They think they're a
failure,
they think they're no good, they come up with all these self-fulfilling
prophecies ultimately to say,
well I can't do it obviously, so I might as well not even try,
and it becomes easy to justify
falling off that wagon, right? But it's interesting. It happened to me with cigarettes.
I saw it and didn't know what it was. It was before I went to
to community college. I smoked and I smoked and I smoked and I smoked and I drank and
I had a cross addiction so, in other words, drinking made me want a cigarette.
Having a cigarette made me want to drink, and eventually I was able to give up
the cigarettes without giving up the drinking.
That was different kind of problem but I went a while without
smoking and I could be around people that I knew that smoked and I didn't feel
the craving anymore.
The cravings had been extinguished to all kinds of things because I'd gotten over the
them.
I hadn't gratified with a cigarette and months and months would go by,
maybe even a year, and my friend Boo comes back in town. He'd been gone because his band
went out to California. They got signed. They went on a tour. And they came back and it was his
grandmother's basement,
loved Boo, used to hang out and party with Boo in his grandmother's basement. Grandma was cool as
could be.
And all the sudden,
visiting him, just sitting there drinking, he's smoking Marlboro Lights which is what I
used to smoke predominantly,
and I get this craving, this overwhelming sense that I want a cigarette, and I'm like, man
let me get one those cigarettes from you. He's like, dude, have all your want.
I'm like, no, no, no, I don't smoke.
I don't smoke. I'll just take one. He's like, whatever.
Gives me one. About 20 minutes later I'm like,
let me get one more of those if you don't mind. Oh, have all you want. No no, I don't smoke
and the next day I found myself buying a pack of cigarettes,
had no idea what the hell had just happened and I'm a smoker again.
What happened was, I had extinguished all those cues but
Boo and grandma's basement. Now I went back into a situation that hadn't been extinguished.
It brought about a craving and I administered the unconditioned stimulus
such that I was back to cravings in all of the other circumstances in which I had
extinguished them,
and found myself powerless to do anything. So when people try to
explain drug addiction and why people don't get better,
they like to go for the easy explanation. Well, they don't want to get better,
or they are just no good. But it's far more complicated than that,
far more complicated than that, and I hope you get an appreciation
for how that applies. Let me put one more example out there for you in terms of
conditioned stimuli and how powerful this
phenomena is in this particular context and it's this.
Bunch of addicts in New York were having all these
near-death experiences, overdoses at unusual proportions.
Those who survived it, you could interview, those who didn't survive, you couldn't
interview obviously, but you could interview people that knew them.
Researcher goes and finds out from these interviews that most of these addicts,
they're using heroin, are not using amounts that they had not previously used.
They're using
similar amounts, right, and
you can't control for what the content is, you don't know how much it's been stepped
on or how pure it is, but it doesn't seem like there's really any
difference in the distribution of the drug, so it should be about the same
stuff
in terms of its quality and quantity. And all of the sudden, they're having these
overdoses. Well,
if you know tolerance, once you've tolerated it,
it doesn't become deadly. That's the body counteracting it
and through other mechanisms, like increasing enzymes in the liver,
trying to eliminate the drug faster, and in the case of alcohol, cytochrome p450,
right? But what he did find consistent was
that when they had their overdoses they had taken the drug in places they had
never taken it before,
right, never taken it before. What does that imply?
Well, the conditioned stimuli that had been preparing their bodies in the place
they usually
took it was not present and in the new novel place,
their bodies weren't ready for it and they got a full drug effect.
Is it all in the mind? What the hell isn't all in the mind?
Everything's all in the mind. It's a complicated psycho-physiological process.
That's all nice and anecdotal. So he took it to the lab
and he took rats and he had these rats injected with
heroine, right? That's animal studies. Not pleasant, but it tells us something here.
He had them then titrated up from small doses
up to LD 50, lethal dose 50 percent, where if you administer that to
a population that had no experience with the drug, 50 percent would die.
He did it always in the same exact cage and then he took
one group and put them in a brand new cage that they'd never been in,
administered the same dosage and half of them died.
What's the power of the mind, right?
It was the conditioned reaction
that they didn't get because they didn't have those stimuli
triggering the body going into an opponent process which would be
experienced by humans as
craving for the drug to offset the actual effect of the drug and
physiologically
they died. So, it's a powerful thing we're talking about here. Slobbering dogs
doesn't really cut it for most people. But when you put it in that kind of term,
it makes a lot more sense.