Airports, Coffee & Pavlov’s Dogs

June 22nd, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink

Have you ever wondered why certain environments, music and even scents inspire you and stimulate creative thought and ideas? To expand on this question even further. Why do we come up with the greatest ideas when we’re not coming up with ideas? When we play, ideas happen.

We’re in a constant cycle of growth and learning. As we move through life, we unconsciously develop ways to make our life more efficient by creating habits and routines. We find shorter ways to get from point A to point B. We develop new systems to get things done. And, we often learn efficiency and fall into habits without thinking. Our learning and growing is never without influence; whether the influence is a person, a story, an idea or an internal drive.

One of the forms of learning is Associative Learning. We often refer to this as Classical Conditioning (yes, the story of Pavlov’s dogs!) In a nutshell, if the brain is presented and conditioned with stimuli that evokes a specific response, then anytime a similar stimuli is presented, the same response is triggered. Over time, our minds develop an association between the stimulus and the response.

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