Monday, October 19, 2009

Talk about Mind Games!!! A Clockwork Orange

In "A Clockwork Orange", Alex DeLarge is a murdering, sick-thinking individual who takes part in an extreme version of Pavlov's Classical Conditioning called the Ludovico technique. At the testing facility, DeLarge is placed in a straight jacket and has his eyelids clamped open as he is shown gruesome and horrific acts of violence similar to that of which he has done to others. At the same time, he is given drugs that make him feel incredibly sick. As a result, DeLarge now associates any inclination to commit murder or rape to feeling ill, making him unable to even think of going back to his old ways. Here is a link to a video to show the experiment DeLarge went through that turned him into a different person: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NMzepSePD4&feature=related

One might ask, "Why does this experiment lead to the change in DeLarge?" The answer is that the experiment followed Pavlov's elements. The drug was used as a unconditioned stimulus in helping to sicken DeLarge. The images on the screen are the controlled stimulus because they provide something for DeLarge to view while starting to feel terrible. The unconditioned response of the test is that the prisoner starts to feel nauseous and ill over time. Finally, DeLarge believes that he is becoming sick from the awful images he is watching and associates violence and sickness together as the neutral stimulus. Now if DeLarge attempts to commit any of the same crimes he did beforehand, he will be immediately become terribly sick because of what he went through in the experiment.

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