For those of you who are my age, you may remember the title phrase as the advertising claim of purity for Ivory Soap. This is not my intended use for this number.

From recent research I have come to the conclusion that we humans behave according to conditioned response and that we make very few choices in actual practice. I’ve talked before about the Skinner Box and how it has been used to discover the principles of conditioning. But before their parents ever get started on our social conditioning babies are already taking advantage of their innate ability to condition their own behavior.

Babies are born with the natural reach and grasp response, and a natural kick response. In the first few months of mostly laying down babies normally focus on refining the reach and grasp maneuver to picking up objecst and bringing them to the face and mouth. As time progresses the kick response grows from crawling to build strength into walking and running. My son didn’t crawl until after he was walking. But did spend some time after learning to walk, exploring the crawling maneuver.  I suspect there are refinements there that are not gained from simply walking…

We call this learning, but this type of learning is specific. Skills learned by these methods become second nature. In practice that means that very little, if any conscious thought is applied to the task. For the most part, when walking, we can think about anything we wish and not interfere with the process of walking. These types of learning are typically called body memory because the conscious mind is not involved in the process.

Riding a bike is a similar learning experience, with one exception, like walking, there is a period of failure where everything you do with the bicycle ends up with you falling down. This can go on for a frustratingly long time before you mind/body turns a switch. After that your mind doesn’t let your body do any of those things that made you fall down, and, surprise, the behaviors that are left allow you to ride the bike. There is often a specific kind of accident the happens soon after this. My daughter learned to ride a bike on a winding path through the woods. After she stopped falling down her next experience was target lock on a tree, that she promptly collided with. After such an experience you learn about brakes and stopping. Sort of strange that it isn’t steering… The rest is refinement on these principles.

I submit that driving a car is also learned at the muscle memory level of learning and quickly becomes a conditioned behavior. I’m sure we have all had the experience of getting in the car on a weekend to go to the beach, and suddenly find ourselves in a car that is headed to work instead. We usually offer the car as a scapegoat for our behavior, saying IT wanted to go to work. A more striking example is that while driving a regular route, or on a long trip without route changes the driver’s mind can often drift from focus on the road to contemplation of some life situation or idea that draws you conscious mind away from attention to the road. At some point in your ruminations you again become aware of the road and your driving, usually with a start, some confusion, and thanks that you didn’t have an accident. I submit that in that state of contemplation you were less likely to have an accident than if you had been paying attention. Your conditioned responses were all that were necessary to keep you on the road and out of the way of others. Under normal conditions, when you are paying attention to what is going on around you as you drive, you are actually only supervising the conditioned responses, making sure there is no problem that need your attention. Until something unexpected happens. If the occurrence is too far outside you past experiences, you will likely end up in an accident. Defensive driving is a conditioned response that will tend to keep the driver out of experiences they don’t know how to handle. Both of my kids got their first car into a substantial accident, and then never had even a minor fender bender after that experience. Both accidents were matters of learning limits. We are so lucky that nature is forgiving about failure to the extent she is, otherwise, none of us would survive to adulthood.

One of the things that convinces me most of our behavior is conditioned, is that conditioning can create error correction routines that take no conscious thought, speeding up the correction process by not requiring a slow methodical correction. I’m a knitter, and knitting is also a conditioned skill. But, for instance, when making a new stitch, the needle is positioned in an old stitch and the yarn is “thrown” over the tip of the protruding needle, sometimes the loop of yard doesn’t catch the point of the needle. There is no pause to consider the problem, and what the solution might be. This has been determined long ago during the learning process. The yarn is automatically thrown over the needle again, until the result is successful. I am certain that in every pattern skill like knitting, sewing, typing, wood working and many others there are examples of these conditioned corrections.

I have been using the word conditioning, in many places where you might prefer the word learning. Learning, training, teaching, practicing, and performing, and all terms that can be viewed as one aspect or another of the act of conditioning. I believe that even the ways in which we think about the world are mostly conditioned thoughts. We learn the rules of logic and they become a method of thinking about the world around us. Most of our thought processes are conditioned by our experiences. It is our experience that makes us each different from one another in how we think and approach the world. Since the world is mostly consistent, we all have mostly consistent ideas about how the world works and what is and is not correct behavior. Conflict comes from the differences in each world view.

This research grew out of an understanding that we are still being enslaved by the Roman Empire. It is the conditioning imposed by the social remnants of this empire that is not delivered to us by the natural world, but is instead imposed upon us by the rules and social forces around us that have little to do with the natural world and nothing to do with our individual welfare. Why do we work from morning til night? Not because we as individuals need that much work to survive, but that society demands our energy output for its own desires. Most animals don’t work more than two hours per day to ensure their survival, the rest of the time they enjoy just being alive. The fact of the matter is that we do, at some level, do this to ourselves. But I believe that the largest factor here is that the structure we live withing is based upon a small society that took over the world by force and still promotes that broken ideology.

So I began looking for ways to break that conditioning, both in myself and in others. Since completing this research, and discovering that the percentage of our behavior that is conditioned is that value expressed in the title to this article, it is absolutely necessary to be able to separate good conditioning from bad. I’m still studying this problem, but I think I know what I’m looking for now. I suspect that most of the Roman social conditioning is mental conditioning. This suggests that it is time to closely examine all of the social myths that “guide” our lives and intentions. I will be sure to let you know what I have found. What I suggest in the mean time, is to try to expand the percent of time you actually use your free will instead of following your conditioning. Expand that use of free will first in your thinking. Impose your own will on your own thoughts and break free of the conditioned ruts of thought. I will have more to say on this subject soon.