Don’t you love it when your school work/reading applies nicely to your life? Well, I do. And thus, imagine my joy when I stumbled across something in my psychology book that explains a very real problem that I have. In order to fully understand, we have to go back a few years:
Picture it, Brianne is a senior in college and is challenged to drink an entire bottle of Absinthe. (you know, the sort of illegal green substance that Jack the Ripper drank before killing?) And, being the extremely competitive person that she is, she accepted the challenge and drank it all. And it was not a small bottle. It was about a liter of this green beverage. Needless to say, later than night, terrible nausea, vomiting and blacking-out occured. (In fact, I can only tell you these facts because John has told me, not because I actually remember any of that day). Since then, the taste or smell of anything like Absinthe (black licorice, star anise, fennel) makes me suddenly very nauseated. It was once so bad that I thought I was going to throw up on the subway and had to change cars at the next stop.
Now, back to the lesson at hand. Yesterday I was reading about conditioning and Pavlov’s dogs and learning theories and came across a section entitled: Conditioned Taste Aversion. This section talked about how strong a stimulus nausea is for us that we immediately and almost forever will associate it with what we percieve caused it and stay away. The theory being that even if that is the only time that particular taste/smell made me throw up that I will be conditioned for the rest of my life to avoid it. They did research with animals and learned that the same thing is true of rats. If they do something that makes them nauseated, they will avoid that at all costs and they learn to do so quickly. They think it might be evolutionary in origin: “Animals that consume poisonous foods and survive must learn not to repeat their mistakes. Natural selection will favor organisms that quickly learn what not to eat”.
I like that my aversion to black jelly beans, fennel salads and some peoples gingerbread cookies is not the fault of my excessive drinking, it’s evolution’s fault. I am a sad victim of the products of natural selection. What can you do, I ask?
