Conditioning

I think of conditioning as a long-term conversation between decentralized components.

After breaking my foot, I’ve been working on conditioning all of the tiny ligaments to properly support movements and impacts I haven’t practiced in months. I can’t just say “hey foot, you’re not broken anymore, go back to normal.” I have to slowly and incrementally reinforce each change.

Similar to learning a musical instrument by training our fingers to move a specific way, over and over – we’re telling all of the related “muscle memory” that this is an important motion we need to be good at. Like lifting weights, we’re telling the muscle “you’re going to continually exceed your capacity, so get bigger and stronger.”

It’s not just a one-and-done: Conditioning takes time and repetition, because the channel is low-bandwidth and lossy, and the micro-changes required are many and sequential.

When we train our dog to not be reactive about visitors (or to salivate when the bell rings), we can use positive reinforcement to rewire the brain with the help of oxytocin signals. Treats, “good dog”, or even hugs can all be forms of communicating that the precursor to some stressor is actually okay. Just like humans working with a therapist, we try to condition the sources of our anxieties to take on different frames (or acclimate to our fears).

Similar to positive reinforcement with oxytocin, there is cortisol and dopamine and other hormones/neurotransmitters which communicate desirable/undesirable conditioning between different aspects of our minds and bodies.

I really like the model that we’re not monoliths, but rather a bunch of disparate components who are stuck together. Our brain can’t simply tell our body to shed fat and build muscle, our tic disorder to chill out, our ligaments to support wider range of motion… but our brain can slowly and methodically facilitate these changes by communicating them through conditioning!

What does this mean for society?

If we break out of the monolith mindset of our bodies, we can also think of communities, corporations, nations, species as “mega organisms” who suffer from inefficient/indirect communication.

We may condition our societies towards democratic practices or into accepting authoritarian rule. To justice or inequity. It can happen slowly through reinforcement, or it can snap like a bone breaking from ever-increasing pressure. Those suffering may ache like a festering infection, but we can acclimate (or amputate).

What’s the difference between Jeff Bezos and a rando who woke up with a hundred billion dollars?

Bezos has preconditioned infrastructure to achieve his endeavours. He can take on logistics, media, space exploration, investment, and who knows what else. What can rando do without spending months/years “conditioning” their assets to support their endeavours? Just think of how long it would take to even hire a sizeable team of good people! This is conditioning.

In many ways, the peripersonal space of powerful individuals expands far beyond their wealth. It extends to that which they have conditioned to advance their pursuits.

I want us to condition ourselves out of thinking like monoliths. How do we do that?

We should condition ourselves to think in terms of conditioning, rather than quick drastic swings that bring injury after injury. (“We need to be good at lifting heavy weights, so we should lift the heavy weights immediately.")

We can set ambitious goals that are beyond the ability of a single component, or even a single person or nation, and we need to figure out how to communicate them properly to all participants–repeatedly, consistently! All participants need to practice them, repeatedly and consistently!

Let’s not ignore our pains, but take time to listen and understand where the pain is really coming from and why, and how to address it.

But most importantly: Recognize when we’re being conditioned into something we don’t want to be.