Our brains are brilliant at making associations. That’s how we learn. We associate cake with yummy goodness, and then when we see cake, we automatically eat it. If we get food poisoning at a restaurant, we quickly learn to avoid that establishment. In fact, the association between that restaurant and yuck can be so strong that we may even feel nauseated when we simply pass by the store. Yet this brilliance goes only so far. A restaurant sign isn’t poisonous in itself, but we learn to associate it with a DON’T GO THERE sign in our minds. And our minds—being the good associative learning
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