All right let’s move on to
Habituation and Dishabituation.
So here’s the principle that you’ve
probably encountered almost every day
but never really thought about it.
What is habituation?
Well, it’s a form of learning when you decrease
or no longer respond to a repeated stimulus.
In English, what we are talking about here?
This means when you are being hit
with the stimulus over and over.
And the first few times you encounter that stimulus
you start responding to it like you should.
But then overtime, you kind of realize
well this thing keeps coming up.
I don’t think to it every time.
So in the world of sensory perception, we try to
detect changes in stimulus not constant stimulus, okay.
So something to remember
or come up again.
but constant really doesn’t
require a lot of our attention
as supposed to in things are changing
we move our attention to that.
So we say that we stop responding to a stimulus
which is no longer biologically relevant.
Now, I don’t want you to think that,
that means it is not important.
It just means biologically. In this moment
right now is this really impact to me.
Do I need to allocate resources, to understand?
Is this something that I really need to focus on.
And we are talking about usually
a reduction in innate behaviors.
Innate behaviors means things
that are found from within.
So this are learn behaviors,
this are innate behaviors meaning
nobody really teaches you
than you have them automatically.
Then, dishabituation is the
opposite of this process when
something that you’ve been
previously habituated to is removed.
So we’ll go through some examples
cause this makes a little more sense for you.
Think of you sitting of your
desk right now studying for the MCAT.
And all of the sudden in your
condo building the alarm goes off.
And the alarm goes off, you have to get up,
you have to run into your apartment.
and you are panicking. Then you
are grabbing your MCAT study notes,
and you are grabbing your
teddy bear, and you run outside.
All those things that are important to you.
You stand outside in the cold for 20 minutes
and you realize it was a false alarm.
So you run back in.
Then it happens again next week
and you run outside again.
And this happens over and over and
over, over an extended period of time.
Weeks, months, whatever you want.
But you seemed to have, to keep, getting up and
going outside and every time it’s a false alarm.
At some point you are going to say,
“Well, this false alarm keeps happening.
I’m really not to going to respond in to this.”
And you just keep working at your desk
because the MCAT exam is coming up.
So you are saying, “I’m not going
to waste another 20 minutes of my life.
Im just going to keep working.”
Another example might be
something much simpler than that.
Its just wearing clothes.
Do you ever think of the fact,
that right now I am wearing clothes?
Hopefully, you am wearing clothes.
But if you are not, watching this video
in the nude, that’s not what I am talking about.
What I am talking about when you get up
and go to work and you put on your clothes,
Do you think of the fact that
you are feeling close on your body?
If you are wearing a watch right now, are you thinking
of the fact that you are feeling a watch?
Probably not. Because you have been
habituated to the fact that,
that sensation of having a watch
on your hand is there
you don’t even to keep telling yourself
watch is there, watch is there, watch is there.
You just know it’s there.
Now if you are to take of your watch
and then after about after a month
put on a watch again for the first time.
after a month, you might be like oh yeah I got a watch on.
And you really think about, you really feel it.
Okay if you are away for a vacation for a week,
and in the whole week you don’t wear a shirt.
And then its time to go back home
to your freezing country
and you put on your shirt again for the first time
you might notice, "Oh, I have a shirt on.
We have another example here
if you notice on this graph
we have a snail, and we have the snail with in each
shell or out of its shell based on the stimulus.
So on the bottom access you can see
the number of times that a stimulus is given.
It could be you hitting the snail
with the hammer on its shell,
it could be shocking it, It could be doing anything.
And in the other access we have the amount of times
we have actually to goes back into its shell.
Now the first time you hit that snail,
of course they are going to withdraw
and its reaction they want to be safe and
so they hide and they are warming cuddly shell.
Now as you continue to do this the snail realizes,
this guy that keeps on hitting me on my shell with a hammer
Its really not hurting me. Its not doing anything.
So why would I run away?
And it keeps out of the shell.
You can think a lot of examples like this.
If you think of the time so you are at the park
and there is birds around you
versus the time that you go for a nature walk
and you are in the forest and there is birds.
Now when you are in the forest and
you have all this birds around you
as you walk the birds keep a lot of distance and
they will fly away first flick of your hand.
as supposed to if you are feeding penguins in the park
that around people all the time and
are used to that interaction
they realize that they have been habituated to people
they will actually come right up to you
and almost eat out in your hand.
And they are not strangled and
they are not running away.
So this are all the examples of
habituation and dishabituation.