Thread by @celestelabedz

Want to hear about the time when some physicists accidentally classically conditioned me? Of course you do.

Thread:

In undergrad I worked part-time as a lab assistant in a condensed matter physics lab. It was awesome; I learned a ton of new things, the two grad students supervising me were really great, and our professor was fantastic.

Some of my tasks in the lab were a little mundane at times (vacuum pump maintenance, preparing sample substrates, etc), but it never bugged me. Except for one, which I didn’t even know was burrowing its way into the deepest nooks of my brain.

One test on our samples required very timely minding, and there were a few months when I was performing this test a lot. The timely part was changing an input voltage on our system; you had to manually adjust it at a precise time every few minutes.

It took a few hours to test a sample, but activity was only required every few minutes, so I would read or do homework. In order to not space off and miss an adjustment, the grad students had cleverly built an alarm into the test's software.

That was my job in lab: do my homework and adjust the voltage every time the alarm sounded. The alarm was a soft, gentle “ding-dong”. The sound seemed vaguely familiar to me, but I couldn’t place it. It wasn’t quite like any doorbell, but I felt I had heard it somewhere before.

I let the routine sink in:

Homework. Ding-dong. Voltage.
Homework. Ding-dong. Voltage.
Homework. Ding-dong. Voltage.

I was doing this test for a few hours at a time, every week or so, for several months. I stopped trying to place the alarm’s familiarity in my mind. I had forgotten it ever belonged to anything else.

UNTIL THAT FATEFUL DAY.

I was traveling (I forget where to) and had a rather early flight out. As soon as the plane took off, I was in and out of a doze, trying to make up for my early awakening.

We reached altitude and there was no turbulence, so the seat belt light turned off. If you’ve ever been on a plane, you may know that a change in the seat belt light status is accompanied with a noise. You can guess what it was on this plane:

Ding-dong.

I snapped awake from my semi-conscious state and sat bolt upright. My heart raced. The guy next to me gave me a concerned look. I had the uncontrollable feeling that there was SOMETHING I just HAD to DO.

I was wildly confused: Why did I feel like that? Why so suddenly? What was it I NEEDED to do? Did I forget something at home?

I was half-asleep for the actual sound, so I wasn’t able to register what had happened. The strangely urgent feeling nagged at me for most of the flight, until it was time to descend and the seat belt light went back on.

Ding-dong.

The “time to do something” feeling struck me again, but I was conscious enough to hear the sound and put it together. I almost burst out laughing right there on the plane. I was Pavlov’s dog, and it was time for a treat.

When I returned to the lab after my travels, I told the grad students what happened. They were a little apologetic and a LOT amused, and our professor thought it was hilarious.

So, moral of the story: be careful with repetitive sound effects, otherwise you may make a tired lab assistant sincerely freak out the people next to her on an airplane.