Conditioning

When we're young, we are inundated with new information all the time.
In a monumental effort to keep up, our minds hurriedly assign
relationships to objects for later recall. I am not a neuroscientist,
but I think it works exactly like taggig pictures in Facebook. Most of
the time it works well, but it can go horribly wrong, like tagging you
schnauzer as your Aunt Margaret.

For instance, when I was young I associated Cobb salad with corn. I am
certain this is becaus of the corn on the cob link, and I suspect my
dad lent some positive reinforcement to the mental mixup. He does
things like that.

So now every time I think Cobb salad I see lettuce, chicken and corn.
And every time I get a Cobb salad without corn (which happens to be
every...damn...time) I am a little disappointed. Which is a shame.
Cobb salads are delicious.