Humanity and nature in general, live by a set of rules that we do not even know, or recognize. We are programmed from birth to respond to a certain set of stimuli and act a certain way once those stimuli are broadcast. I will give you a very good example, and a good comparison. In 1903, Ivan Pavlov introduced the idea of “conditioned response”. A conditioned response is a response that develops over a period of conditioning, or training. In his experiment, he used a dog, and a metronome. When he fed the dog, he would sound the metronome. Over time, the dog developed a response to begin salivating when a metronome sounded, as if food were present.
We have a similar condition. It is called the alarm clock. We all know it. And we all hate it. When it sounds, we are supposed to awake happily and cheerfully to face the new day. I have noticed though, that this conditioned response is starting to be anticipated by me, because I am waking up at 5 freaking 30 in the morning every day, an HOUR before my alarm is supposed to go off. My proposition is simple. Destroy all alarm clocks. Remove the device that conditions us to not only wake up, but also wake up EARLY expecting to be woken up. If this string of events continues, I am afraid I will go insane and destroy something valuable in the process. This just goes to show you that work is slowly killing us all, one by one, hour by missed hour of sleep.
I think I may publish a scientific paper on “super conditioned response”.
