Do Not Become Driven by Ego and Stress. It Causes Dysfunction

Do Not Become Driven by Ego and Stress. It Causes Dysfunction

Charlie: “Everyone recognizes that sudden stress, for instance from a threat, will cause a rush of adrenaline in the human body, prompting faster and more extreme reaction. And everyone who has taken Psych 101 knows that stress makes social-proof tendency more powerful. In a phenomenon less well recognized but widely known, light stress can slightly improve performance—say, in examination—whereas heavy stress causes dysfunction. But few people know more about heavy stress than it can cause depression. For instance, most people know that an ‘acute stress depression’ makes thinking dysfunctional because it causes extreme pessimism, often extended in length and usually accompanied by activity-stopping fatigue. Fortunately, as most people know, such a depression is one of mankind’s more reversible ailments. Even before modern drugs were available, many people afflicted by depression, such as Winston Churchill and Samuel Johnson, gained great achievement in life. Most people know very little about man’s depressive mental breakdowns influenced by heavy stress. But there is at least one exception, involving the work of Pavlov when he was in his seventies and eighties. Pavlov had won the Nobel Prize early in life by using dogs to work out the physiology of digestion. Then he became world-famous by working out more—association responses in dogs, initially salivating dogs—so much so that changes in behavior triggered by more association, like those caused by much modern advertisement, are today often said to come from ‘Pavlovian conditioning.’ What happened to cause Pavlov lost work was especially interesting. During the great Leningrad flood of the 1920s, Pavlov had many dogs in cages. Their habits had been transformed, by a combination of his ‘Pavlovian conditioning’ plus standard reward responses, into distinct and different patterns. As the water of the flood came up and receded, many dogs reached a point where they had almost no air space between their noses and the tops of their cages. This subjected them to maximum stress. Immediately thereafter, Pavlov noticed that many of the dogs were no longer behaving as they had. The dog that formerly had liked his trainer now disliked him, for example. This result reminds me one of modern cognition reversals in which a person’s love of his parents suddenly becomes hate, as now love has been shifted suddenly to a cult.

“The unanticipated, extreme changes in Pavlov’s dogs would have driven any good experimental scientist into a near frenzy of curiosity. That was indeed Pavlov’s reaction. But not many scientists would have done what Pavlov next did lxxxvi.”

Peter: “Oh that is me. That is all about me,” said Peter smiling. “I am not so proud to confirm it in myself, I tell you frankly. I like you so much, especially when you were telling me these practical tendency stories. Even before you make such a serious face, if I am a dog, I am an aggressive one, Charlie. I bite very strongly if somebody would like to steal my food or I lose my money. But why am I telling you all this stuff? Maybe it wasn’t what you came here with a single aim to teach us, but that is what it is. You amaze me! You know I hate to lose, especially to people like you over intelligence, over perfection.”