Classical conditioning is the psychological concept of repeating a series of actions or stimuli designed to elicit a certain response or behavior in the test subject. The physiologist, Pavlov, probably best illustrated this idea with his “conditional reflex” experiment performed on a dog. The dog was “conditioned” to salivate whenever a bell rang. Pavlov and his assistant achieved this by ringing the bell for the dog to hear, and then immediately afterward feeding the dog. Eventually, Pavlov would ring the bell, not provide the dog with food. However, since the dog had been successfully “conditioned”, it salivated in anticipation of the meal it had come to expect with the sound of the bell.

In a way, I have often times conditioned myself. I have a habit of creating a playlist of new music I have bought, and then listening to that playlist on repeat for several consecutive days. After this extended period of time, I return to listening to my music on shuffle or in a different order than was set in the playlist. If a song from the playlist is randomly played, I find that by the end of the song, I am expecting to hear the next song in the playlist. And if I don’t hear that song, I am still “singing” or imagining it playing in my mind, regardless of what song is actually playing.

My experience demonstrates classical conditioning because by playing the same set of songs on a loop, I conditioned myself to hear those songs in a certain order. Each song acted as a stimulus to make me anticipate the following song, just like the bell acted as a stimulus to teach Pavlov’s dog to anticipate the food. My reaction probably wasn’t as drastic or visible as the dog’s salivation, but my conditioning did still cause me to feel surprised and even a little disappointed when I didn’t hear the anticipated song, and sometimes the song unconsciously invaded my thoughts.