There is no memory or retentive faculty based on lasting impression. What we designate as memory is but increased responsiveness to repeated stimuli.
Repetition of the same thought or physical action develops into a habit which, repeated frequently enough, becomes an automatic reflex.
People are so conditioned to take sides that a balanced analysis looks to them like hatred.
If you tell people something often enough, they will believe it.
I'll be Pavlov, you be the dog.
I spent half my life being hurt. The leftovers of hurt are an automatic gesture, like a dog that salivates.
The final war will be between Pavlov's dog and Schoedinger's Cat.
The truth is . . . you think what people want you to think.
Fear is always the result of an unquestioned past imagined as a future.
You know what I think you get scared of more - especially me, after touring for so long and being in bands for so long - you start to associate certain behavior with the music. It's like people associate having a cigarette with having a cup of coffee, or lunch.
What we call human nature, is actually human habit.
I remember when I was a kid, every time the Beatles were on the radio, my dad would say he'd give me a dollar if I could tell him what band it was. So by the time I was about nine, I knew to just say 'The Beatles,' and I'd get a dollar out of it.
You just can't take the doctor out of you.
Response-ability is the ABILITY to choose our response to any circumstance or condition.
When you do something all of your life, it's still ingrained in you.
Animals... don't have a sense of time. You just have to do things over and over with animals until they happen to do it right because they don't really know what you want.
So the question really is, Why doesn't that pain make you say, I won't do it again? When the pain is so bad that you have to say that, but you don't.
Emotions are the end result, the sum, of things learned
Where I come from, gettin visual is habitual...
I think once I made up my mind that I was allergic to alcohol, and that's what I learned, it made sense to me. And I think it was kind of pointed out that you know if you were allergic to strawberries, you wouldn't eat strawberries. And that made sense to me.
When the dog is repeatedly teased with the sight of objects inducing salivary secretion from a distance, the reaction of the salivary glands grows weaker and weaker and finally drops to zero.
The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage.
We are born into a world in which sexual possibilities are narrowly circumscribed. . . . We are programmed by the culture as surely as rats are programmed to make the arduous way through the scientist's maze, and that programming operates on every level of choice and action.
One study says that 90 percent of our everyday behavior is based on our habits. . . That means how we treat people, how we spend our money, what we watch, what we listen to - 90 percent of the time, we're on autopilot. We do what we've always done.
We don't just respond to things as we see them, or feel them, or hear them. Rather, our response is conditioned on our beliefs, about what they really are, what they came from, what they're made of, what their hidden nature is.
