Why the same scene comes back

Work on conditioning, conducted in animals and then in humans, has shown that a signal associated with a striking event continues to trigger a response long afterwards. The mechanism is banal and useful: it allows anticipation.

A less well known point concerns context. The learned response is strongly tied to the place, the moment, the configuration in which learning took place, and it reappears preferentially in a similar context. That explains why the same person reacts violently in one precise configuration and not elsewhere.

When the signal stops being followed by the event, the response diminishes: that is what is called extinction. The available work indicates that this is not an erasure but the superimposing of a new learning on the first, which remains available.

Hence three documented phenomena: spontaneous reappearance after a delay, return in the original context, and reactivation after a striking episode. A reaction thought to be settled can come back without anything having failed.

Not everything reduces to conditioning. The same remark does not have the same effect depending on the meaning given to it, and that meaning depends on a history: what was said before, by whom, from what position.

That is why a reaction seems disproportionate to the observer and proportionate to whoever produces it. The observer sees the last episode, the person is answering a series most of whose terms the observer does not know.

The exercise that informs most is not looking for a distant cause, which belongs to work this review has no business advising, but describing the configuration: where, with whom, at what time of day, after what.

The patterns that appear are often disappointingly banal and perfectly operative: at the end of the day, in front of several people, when the remark touches on competence, when it comes from someone whose opinion counts. A described configuration is information; a supposed cause is a hypothesis.

The limits of this text must be clear. It describes documented mechanisms of learning and context, applicable to the ordinary reactions of everyday life.

It does not deal with situations where a reaction becomes overwhelming or prevents one from living, which call for professional support and not a review article. The distinction is not a stylistic precaution: the mechanisms may be neighbouring, the appropriate responses are not.