Hey ! Who moved my Cheese ?

You must have noticed this peculiar trait about human beings. (of course not
you !)

If humans find something they can do that doesn't work, they do it again.

And again...



And again...



And again...



ad infinitum



Eminent psychologist and behaviorist B. F. Skinner once had a
group of students who had done a lot of research with rats and mazes. And
somebody asked them one day "What is the real difference between a rat and a
human being?"

Now, behaviorists not being terribly observant, decided that they needed to
experiment to find out. They built a huge maze that was scaled up for a
human. They took a control group of rats and taught them to run a small maze
for cheese. And they took the humans and taught them to run the large maze
for five-dollar bills. They didn't notice any really significant difference.
There were small variations in the data and at the 95% probability level
they discovered some significant difference in the number of trials to
criterion or something. The humans were able to learn to run the maze
somewhat better, a little bit quicker, than the rats.



The really interesting statistics came up when they did the extinguishing
part.

They removed the five-dollar bills and the cheese and after a certain number
of trials the rats stopped running the

maze....

However, the humans never stopped!... They are still there!

... They break into the labs at night.



This probably explains why we are never completely cured of our addictions,
or why we

never let go of our obsessions, or why I listen to the same few songs on my
iPod even though I have 20 GB and more of (cough 'pirated and illegal'
cough) songs,

or why I write the same things over and over again !



Sadly without even realizing it !



It is not history that repeats.

But It is we,

who are condemned to repeat our mistakes.



So

Tell me when you get bored of me.

I'll try to change.


Received: from C6XB2 at Globe Wireless; Sun, 23 Nov 2008 15:26 UTC
Message-id: 701397235S169