'oh! the fire alarm is going off '.......'Don't bother. It just happens all the time'

The title itself is what we’re going to discuss. No, not the fire alarm but the process of habituation. It’s the phenomenon where our response to a particular event gets weaker by repeated exposure to the same stimuli. When the fire alarm goes off all the time, our response to it won’t stay the same.

During the first four to five times, we must have gone to check if there was a fire outbreak, but are we going to check it repeatedly if all those previous rings were just false alarms? No, and this is, in simple words, how we can explain the phenomenon of habituation. Leave the fire alarm aside, and let’s talk about your alarm clock. Does that make sense? I know almost all people can relate to this one example. If you’re habituated, I mean to say you feel like you don’t hear the ring to an alarm tone, try changing that, and you’re most likely to listen to your alarm tone (not ensuring you’re going to wake up, it’s a big step to promise that). And this is because of dishabituation—the phenomenon where we attend to a change in previously habituated stimuli. So one thing we can understand from this is that habituation is stimuli-specific. There are a lot of real-life examples that we can think of to explain these phenomena. Cause it’s there in almost all of our responses, from simple reflexes such as blinking responses to complex, multiple synapse reflexes.

Habituation is one of the basic kinds of learning. As it happens in all sorts of systems and functions, there must be organizational or structural specificity of the nervous system that causes this. Let's dive into the neuronal-level particularities of habituation and the sensitization phenomenon in upcoming posts.

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