20 March 2006

Pavlov's Conditional response and me

So I went to bed pretty late last night actually about just past balls locally. I had spent an earlier part of the night listening to my radio from about 2100 to 2359 listen to an FM station that has a show which replays old radio programs. Things such as Gunsmoke, Dragnet, The Shadow, etc. I really enjoy sitting in my bed listening to them as I also read a book or just relax and get ready for the weekend. These shows seem to have more action and adventure packed into a 30minute show then about 85% of the things I see on TV today. Anyhow, to keep from going off on a tangent.
Ninety precent of the time I am able to stay up and remember to turn off my radio, bed light and roll over and sleep. The other ten precent, is I wake up with my book across my chest, the radio is on, and my light on. Well last night even after the show finished I still couldn't sleep so I stayed up a little longer reading my book and turned my radio to over to an all news AM station. That was the last thing I remember before waking up to the EBS alert test tone was a dream sequence about being haze gray and underway. So here I was dead asleep and I heard that tone and it sounded just like the GQ alarm that I use to hear about once a night every 3 nights while on cruise. So the first thing I did was come out of a dead sleep and start to look for my boots, coveralls, and flash gear. That to me was pretty amazing in the first part since normally at home and to a point when I am on the ship I am a heavy sleeper. I slept once through a drunk taking out 4 different cars in front of apartment while being chased by the police. That is how hard I can sleep. So here I am waking up and moving to get out of bed while in the back of my head there is a little nagging voice trying to identify first off what in the world that sound is and then where the blazes am I and why aren't there more people moving. I had gotten my eyes open and realized I was still at home in bed but was now sitting a pair of uniform pants that I had left off on my to be ironed pile at the foot of my bed and was trying to button them over top of pyjama bottoms that I normally wear to bed. I went to turn off the radio, got undressed and went back to sleep. Just before I rolled over though I looked at my clock and realized that it was about 2am.

Oh and for those of you that don't know Ivan Pavlov was a Russian scientist that won the Noble Prize for Medicine and Physiology in 1904 for study of the digestive sytem. He was one that learned through scientific testing that a dog could be conditioned to respond to an outside stimuli. The classic story is that he trained his dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell even though there wasn't any food present.
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