Blob blob?

I am sure everyone is familiar with the term Classical Conditioning/ Pavlovian Conditioning. After his experiment, another one was carried out by John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner but now the focus of the conditioning was on emotions with an infant rather than dogs and salivation like Pavlov. Basically, what Watson did was first to determine that the infant, in the beginning has no fear of furry animals. Even when a dog bigger than the infant was placed beside the infant, the infant shows no fear of it, even up to the extend of touching it. Then a loud, horrifying sound was emitted when he as about to touch the furry creature. The child, which has a innate fear of this noise, naturally withdraws when the sound is heard. After a couple of repetitions, the child connect the terrifying sound with the furry animals and therefore, is "conditioned" to fear anything furry. A Santa Claus mask was put close to the infant and he fear it, as it has a "furry" white beard.

Now, the significance of this is the tapping of the child’s innate fear and associating it with the fear for furry animals. Now, what if…what if we can "condition" ourselves similarly? Imagine two rivers flowing down in parallel, one is marked as "furry animals" and the second one, polluted with the emotion of fear, is marked as "terrifying sound". What happens is that when the infant is "conditioned",  a small stream is dug to connect the two streams together polluting the other river too. Applying the same concept, is it possible to condition passion for something you don’t like by associating your passion from other existing sources? Say, for me, I actually enjoy chemistry, it’s those rare subject where I’d actually enjoy the subject. So, what if I can divert that "liking" for it to other subjects? It is possible to "condition" the affinity of mine to other subjects, say physics? I think the best way is to create transitional borders among the subjects, to blur the lines that separate the distinct subjects, in other words to let the "range of the liking of chemistry" expand its borders to engulf the other subjects. There a always overlapping chapters in science, for example, the subject of atomic structure are both discussed in physics as well as in chemistry. I suggesting that you use this as a connecting planks to connect your initial liking for chemistry with physics. By doing so, you mind will have associated the liking for chem with physics, though only a small part of it (as it has something to do with chemistry). but once that stimulus is reinforced by repetition and constant association of the subject, there will come a point where the mind will treat the "liking" emotion as a whole, as the mind couldn’t really differentiate the one from he other. So, the next time you open your thick physics textbook, the mind will jog your "like" for chem with physics, meaning that you will also like physics. =)

Links
Read the detailed version of Watson’s experiment here