so, i am guessing most people, unless you have been hiding under a rock away from good cinima, have seen the kubrik film “a clockwork orange”. i was just wondering if you would think it possible that governments have actually tried the kind of brainscrambleing video kind of “rehab” on prisioners to deter and change their violent ways? and if so, did it work or did they just go completly insane when they heard Beethoven’s 5th?
bush = :wally
The idea behind it is conditioned reflex - do a Google on Pavlov’s dogs.
Burgess got his idea for the novel from reading a news story about a government-funded study in Great Britain to use operant conditioning (AKA Skinnerian conditioning) to rehabilitate violent offenders. IIRC, one experiment concerned a “pram smasher”–a man who had a compulsion to attack baby carriages.
thanks guys. 
By the way, operant conditioning is a different phenomenon than Pavlovian conditioning.
In Pavlov’s famous experiment, when the dog saw meat, it salivated. Pavlov rang a bell whenever the dog saw meat. In time, the dog would salivate when a bell was rung, whether meat was shown to it or not.
Pavlov caused took a natural stimulus and response, and conditioned the dog to transfer the natural response to a learned stimulus.
In operant conditioning–a subject in which B.F. Skinner was a pioneer, a new response is taught to a subject by causing the subject to associate a new stimulus with the old one.
Burgess found this objectionable as means of social control as it would inhibit free will. Actually, though, a person could have the same attitudes and desires as before, he would just not find it as easy to act on them. I
t may be that governments no longer actively pursue such means of control very actively because of the concerns of people such as Burgess. Mostly, though, it was found that operant conditioning wasn’t really very successful in modifying complex behavior, in part because–as said before–people can still retain the same attitudes and desires. In the 1970s, for instance, there were psychologists who claimed they could “cure” homosexuals by giving them a pleasant physical stimulus when they saw a photo of a naked woman, and an unpleasant one when they saw a photo of a naked man. It didn’t work.
::::…drool…::::
Will someone answer that phone?!?
so, i am guessing most people, unless you have been hiding under a rock away from forum rules, have seen the very first thread on this page.