Habituation and Dishabituation

00:00 All right let’s move on to Habituation and Dishabituation.

00:04 So here’s the principle that you’ve probably encountered almost every day but never really thought about it.

00:09 What is habituation? Well, it’s a form of learning when you decrease or no longer respond to a repeated stimulus.

00:16 In English, what we are talking about here? This means when you are being hit with the stimulus over and over.

00:24 And the first few times you encounter that stimulus you start responding to it like you should.

00:29 But then overtime, you kind of realize well this thing keeps coming up.

00:33 I don’t think to it every time.

00:35 So in the world of sensory perception, we try to detect changes in stimulus not constant stimulus, okay.

00:43 So something to remember or come up again.

00:45 but constant really doesn’t require a lot of our attention as supposed to in things are changing we move our attention to that.

00:52 So we say that we stop responding to a stimulus which is no longer biologically relevant.

00:58 Now, I don’t want you to think that, that means it is not important.

01:01 It just means biologically. In this moment right now is this really impact to me.

01:05 Do I need to allocate resources, to understand? Is this something that I really need to focus on.

01:10 And we are talking about usually a reduction in innate behaviors.

01:15 Innate behaviors means things that are found from within.

01:18 So this are learn behaviors, this are innate behaviors meaning nobody really teaches you than you have them automatically.

01:25 Then, dishabituation is the opposite of this process when something that you’ve been previously habituated to is removed.

01:32 So we’ll go through some examples cause this makes a little more sense for you.

01:36 Think of you sitting of your desk right now studying for the MCAT.

01:43 And all of the sudden in your condo building the alarm goes off.

01:47 And the alarm goes off, you have to get up, you have to run into your apartment.

01:52 and you are panicking. Then you are grabbing your MCAT study notes, and you are grabbing your teddy bear, and you run outside.

01:56 All those things that are important to you.

01:58 You stand outside in the cold for 20 minutes and you realize it was a false alarm.

02:03 So you run back in.

02:04 Then it happens again next week and you run outside again.

02:07 And this happens over and over and over, over an extended period of time.

02:12 Weeks, months, whatever you want.

02:14 But you seemed to have, to keep, getting up and going outside and every time it’s a false alarm.

02:20 At some point you are going to say, “Well, this false alarm keeps happening.

02:25 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.

02:30 So you are saying, “I’m not going to waste another 20 minutes of my life.

02:33 Im just going to keep working.” Another example might be something much simpler than that.

02:38 Its just wearing clothes.

02:40 Do you ever think of the fact, that right now I am wearing clothes? Hopefully, you am wearing clothes.

02:45 But if you are not, watching this video in the nude, that’s not what I am talking about.

02:48 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.

03:08 You just know it’s there.

03:10 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.

03:16 after a month, you might be like oh yeah I got a watch on. And you really think about, you really feel it.

03:22 Okay if you are away for a vacation for a week, and in the whole week you don’t wear a shirt.

03:27 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.

03:35 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.

03:45 So on the bottom access you can see the number of times that a stimulus is given.

03:49 It could be you hitting the snail with the hammer on its shell, it could be shocking it, It could be doing anything.

03:57 And in the other access we have the amount of times we have actually to goes back into its shell.

04:02 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.

04:12 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.

04:25 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.

04:35 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.

04:45 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.

04:58 And they are not strangled and they are not running away.

05:00 So this are all the examples of habituation and dishabituation.