Andrew Huberman· PhD
So in the context of so-called Pavlovian conditioning, these things have names like conditioned stimulus, and unconditional stimulus and responses. People often get these mixed up and it can be a little confusing, but I'm just going to make it really simple for you. The unconditioned stimulus is the thing that evokes a response unconditionally. So food is the unconditioned stimulus in the example I just gave. A foot shock or a loud bang would be the unconditioned stimulus in a... For instance say, an experiment geared toward exploring fear. That unconditioned stimulus is unconditional. It unconditionally evokes a startle or in the case of food salivating. The bell in the previous example is what we call the conditioned stimulus or the conditioning stimulus. Sometimes people mix these up. The condition stimulus is paired with the thing that naturally creates a response. And then eventually the condition stimulus creates the response itself.