Classical Conditioning: Why I get sick in my car

 


Classical conditioning doesn’t just happen in labs, it happens to all of us in real life, sometimes in ways we don’t even realize. Take my own experience with it.

My parents were avid travel enthusiasts. Every vacation during my school days in Hyderabad meant traveling back to my hometown of Kerala by car. My dad would drive the entire way, and because of how often we did these trips, something strange happened.

The smell of our car became strongly associated with long-distance travel. Now, for someone like me who is not built for long car journeys and who gets motion sickness quickly, this wasn’t great news.

So what happened?

Every time I smelled the car’s interior, my brain went: Uh-oh, here we go again. Since I had repeatedly experienced motion sickness during car rides, my brain decided that the car smell = feeling sick. Soon, I couldn’t even sit in the car while it was stationary without feeling restless and queasy. My brain had linked a completely harmless smell to nausea and headaches through classical conditioning. Pavlov’s dogs got food; I got motion sickness. Not fair.

Classical conditioning is sneaky. Sometimes it’s helpful, like when your body learns to wake up at a certain time without an alarm. But sometimes, it backfires:

Food poisoning: You eat bad sushi once, and now you can’t even look at sushi without feeling queasy. Your brain has wrongly associated all sushi with that one bad experience.

Bad experiences with a song: If you went through a breakup while “Wrecking Ball” by Miley Cyrus was playing, guess what? You’ll feel pain every time it plays forever. 

Luckily, classical conditioning can be undone through extinction by repeatedly exposing oneself to the conditioned stimulus (bell, sushi, songs, car smell) without the expected outcome (food, nausea, heartbreak, motion sickness). Over time, our brain gets bored and unlearns the association.

Or we could just keep avoiding sushi and car rides. Your call.

References

Principles of Learning and Behaviour, Michael P. Domjan (2014)

Image source: https://en.ac-illust.com/clip-art/845918/bus-sickness

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