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Piece of cake
We’ve all heard something about Ivan Pavlov, although it’s his dog that made him famous. Pavlov noticed that the dog would salivate at the prospect of food, so he experimented with various stimuli and eventually trained the dog to salivate at the ringing of a bell. He called it a “conditioned response.”
And partially out of that research grew the field of “aversion therapy,” which is designed to wean patients away from responding to some sort of narrowly pleasurable but broadly harmful stimulus (such as a piece of cake), by interjecting a negative stimulus (such as a jolt of electricity) in order to forestall giving in to the pleasurable stimulus.
All of that is a rather convoluted way of introducing a hot new product. The Pavlok is, to put it succinctly, a wearable, self-administered, selfharming device. Can’t resist the urge for a late evening piece of cake from the fridge (perfectly understandable, knowing the Raptors will surely blow a 22- point lead in the final five minutes and you’ll need the cake to help you through the stress)? Just set your Pavlok to 100 volts and you’ll receive a zap of electricity that can feel like anything between a vibrator and a bee sting. Still want that piece of cake? Set your zapper at a higher intensity.
The Pavlok website claims that its product is “the first device that breaks habits by deleting temptation.” Users are asked to “continue doing the bad habit…for five days, making yourself do the bad habit, on purpose if necessary. The longer you continue, the more permanently the habit is broken.” Well, any medical device that claims to offer a “more permanent” rather than a merely “permanent” solution to a problem has certainly got my vote, even if it would have a tough time winning over a member of the grammar police.
The website also claims that the pain sensation can be triggered automatically or manually, and that “manually is as effective as automatic.” This leaves me puzzled. If I have to consciously turn the device on and set its intensity level, isn’t the device acting as a sort of unnecessary middleman between me and my bad habit? Wouldn’t it be a more direct route to just consciously tell myself not to eat that piece of cake? If I were weak-minded enough to say, without my Pavlok, that one piece of cake won’t hurt me, wouldn’t I likely be equally weak-minded and tell myself that, just this once, I’ll leave my zapper off when I reach for that piece of cake?
To that query, satisfied users of Pavlok state, as the New York Times reports, that they don’t care how or why it works; they just know it is working for them. And professionals? The consensus seems to be that aversion therapy should only be used under trained guidance, especially when there are milder types of therapies available.
The Pavlok sells for over $100. At that price, I think there might be a chance for me to enter the market with a lower-priced alternative. How about the MASOCHISMO, which to all the world looks like an ordinary household fork. You don’t have to worry about power failures or batteries: you just hold it in one hand or the other and plunge it as gently or fiercely as you choose into the palm of your opposite hand, or into your arm or thigh—you choose. And the best part of it is, it retails for just $39.99, plus shipping and handling. So confident am I that the MASOCHISMO will (permanently) cure your bad habit, I’ll guarantee that it can be used as an ordinary household fork afterwards. Come to think of it, readers of this newspaper could equally come up with their own homemade aversion therapy devices. One bound to be effective would be to imagine reading one more article about the debate over council size.
But wait, there’s more. The makers of Pavlok have been on Indiegogo, crowdfunding the Shock Clock, the wakeup trainer that means you will “never hit snooze again.” Instead, you will “train your brain to wake up naturally, alert and become a morning person.” What’s next? A zapper that hits you when you drift over to the other side of the marital bed?
Should we be at all concerned that we are slipping into the bad habit of using gadgets as a substitute for that great fundamental willpower we all have? Isn’t our willpower going to grow flabby on us, like a seldom used muscle, if we start to rely on our Pavloks and Shock Clocks? And isn’t the human condition all about our imperfections and our quest to recognize and overcome them through acts of will? Do we want the human condition to become an arsenal of conditioned responses instead?
So I say a considered “no thank you” to the Pavlok. Actually, they had me talked out of it at “more permanent.” After that, the decision was a piece of cake.
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