We can learn from the dogs (and rats).

Know your Master's voice, so that you are not mastered.

The little terrier was a terror.

Though he loved his master, Mark Barraud, he too often occupied himself by nipping and biting at the ankles of anyone who came close enough. He was the kind of pet only the master would love. His name was Nipper, and it was fitting.

When Nipper’s master died, he was sent to live with Francis Barraud, the brother of Nipper’s master. Though we don’t know for sure how Francis felt about being the new owner of Nipper, we do know he noticed something interesting about the pooch.

Mark had recorded himself talking on a cylinder phonograph, and whenever Francis played that phonograph, Nipper would sit up, ears pricked, and head tilted in the direction of the horn of the phonograph. All else came to a stop for Nipper when the voice popped and hissed through the horn. He would come and listen to the voice of his beloved master whenever it floated in the air.

After Nipper died, Barraud painted an image of the dog listening at the horn. The original title, “Dog looking at and listening to a Phonograph,” was eventually switched to “His Master’s Voice.”

You probably know it as the RCA Victor logo, and perhaps, like me, you remember it on records, cassettes, CDs, and in TV commercials. Just like a catchy slogan or jingle, we quickly recognize something we’ve been exposed to a lot, even if it’s been years since we last heard it.

Nipper recognized his master’s voice because he had heard it often. Even with a new master, that voice was engraved in his brain, like a groove on a record.

The voice you most easily recognize or want to hear is your true master.

Ivan Pavlov, a Russian scientist, began conducting his infamous experiments on dogs around the same time as the painting was created. He intended to study digestion and salivation in dogs, but noticed something interesting: the dogs started salivating before the food was even present. They had learned that the sight or sound of the lab assistant’s approaching meant food.

Pavlov realized that if he presented a stimulus (for example, a bell) before the food, he could get the dogs to respond to the stimulus as they would to the food. This was the idea of conditioning, in which the dogs were conditioned to respond to a stimulus instead of the actual food.

Anyone who owns a dog or cat knows this from real-life experience. My own cats run to the door when the garage door opens, because they know they will get treats when someone comes home.

But Pavlov didn’t just prove that ringing a bell could get the dogs thinking and responding to the soon-coming food. He also experimented with how that conditioning could change under different circumstances.

A stimulus presented shortly before the food was more effective than one presented after, for example. We see this in our own lives; consider how you crave certain junk food from a commercial or seeing it on the shelf, and even though you know after you eat it you’ll feel queasy or tired, the after-stimulus isn’t as strong as the before-stimulus and so it doesn’t keep you from eating the junk food even though in an hour you’ll swear to yourself that you’ll never do that again.

Of particular interest was the discovery that a simple stimulus was better than a complicated one. For example, Pavlov gradually made an ellipse more circular as the stimulus before presenting food, which created agitation and barking in some dogs, while others stopped responding altogether. The agony of the wait was too much.¹

The key takeaway from Pavlov is that behavior can be shaped by the associations paired with it. Our phobias, emotional responses, and behavior can be triggered in different ways depending on what we’ve learned to associate with a particular stimulus.

Of course, there’s also B.F. Skinner’s rat experiment, which was about forty years after Pavlov and Nipper. He put hungry rats in a box that was equipped with a lever and a food dispenser. When the rats discovered that pressing the lever gave them food—a reward for a particular behavior—they got carried away pressing the lever. The key takeaway from Skinner is that behavior can be shaped by consequences.

While Pavlov’s experiments were what are known as classical conditioning, where the subject learned that one stimulus predicts another (bell=food=salivation), Skinner’s experiments are what are known as operant conditioning, in which the subject learns that a particular behavior leads to a particular result (lever press=food=more lever pressing).

We can be controlled by outside forces training us to respond, if we allow it.

Nipper’s story shows us that we will recognize the voices we hear the most. Pavlov and Skinner showed us that our reactions and behavior can be influenced and programmed by external stimuli or reward or punishment mechanisms, unless we are aware of it and choose to respond otherwise, rejecting the external control of our behavior.

I say “choose” because we are not animals.

We are humans. We are not mindless products of evolution, driven by biology. We have free will. We do not have to be controlled by a ringing bell or a reward. We can choose whose voice we will respond to.

Unfortunately, more often than we’d probably like to admit, we function on habit and autopilot instead of making decisions, and therefore, allow ourselves to be controlled by outside mechanisms.

Making decisions has a high energy cost, and that’s why the habits we form matter so much. Every conscious decision we have to make takes mental and emotional energy, and it’s tiring. We only have so much energy in a day, and if other areas of our life are eating into it—family needs, emotional distress, depression, physical weariness—we have less energy left over to make decisions. The more weary we are, the more we revert to default habits and unconscious behavior to offload the energy suck. It’s just easier.

Those habits end up being our autopilot, our coping mechanism. They steer our actions, and even though we might think of ourselves differently because we know our own intentions, our actions are who we become. Our actions are what people see. Our actions are how people understand us. We can have good intentions, but we know what road those pave.

Followers of Christ have the grace and hope knowing that God knows our hearts and our failed actions don’t erase what Jesus did to save us, but even so, our actions matter very much to God, as you’ll see in a moment.

Our habits determine our actions, which become who we are.

This is why the formation of our habits is so important, and so terrifying.

I think about this a lot. Every time I experience joy or have a nice time, I worry my brain is already registering that reward for a new, troublesome habit.

We create habits that function as stimuli and rewards. The reward might simply be freeing up time, brain power, or energy to get other things done. It might be the “treat yourself” or “self-care” trap, where emotional pain and weariness are popping out as a need for treats. Perhaps our job requires so much self-control (i.e., I will not punch my boss today, totally legit) that we have none left after work when we drive by Starbucks.

Seriously, dogs and rats are no worse at wanting treats than we are.

Repeated behaviors get grooved into our brains and, once encoded there, become locked in as normal behaviors.² These are habits. This can be useful in some ways (you don’t have to think hard to drive home after work because you’ve done it so much), but also dangerous because we end up doing things—like constantly checking our phones or doom scrolling or snacking—with minimal conscious decision. This is especially concerning if the stimuli and rewards that form our habits are coming from outside sources, such as social media, a podcaster, or marketing trends.

There’s no shortage of studies and articles about these kinds of topics. Scientists and neurologists—and influencers selling their latest coaching course—are all out there acting as if these are shocking discoveries into the brain and human behavior, but God told us this all along.

“Be careful of who and what you allow into your heart. Be careful of what you think about. Be careful whose voice you learn to listen to. Don’t walk the way the wicked walk, or hang out where sinners hang out, or spend time with mockers, because they’ll change you. Train up a child early on so his habits are set rightly. Don’t be a slave to sin and let it master you. Take every opportunity to renew your mind and reset the grooves. Focus on what is godly and good, and keep that as your goal,” he tells us over and over. And if we feel discouraged at how we’ve made bad habits, he shows mercy. “Put on the new self through your identity in Christ.”

What that means, though, is being careful, being aware.

There is no “just background noise.”

There is no “I’m just zoning out and need some white noise.”

There is no “I’m not really paying attention to it.”

There is no “I’m just listening for fun.”

The TV shows, the podcasters, the videos, the audiobooks—they are forming grooves regardless of whether we’re purposefully trying to get them to do that or not. Constant exposure to crudities, slander, gossip, illogical thinking and fallacies, mockery, hopelessness and doom, speculation, and marketing is forming a groove in our brains. It’s normalizing poor thinking and logic and training our brains accordingly. Perhaps having things in the background that we’re not paying attention to is even worse than purposefully choosing them; we are not actively defending our thoughts and mind, but letting them flow in freely with no gate.

One of the unfortunate aspects of our modern technological age is that so much entertainment and information is passively acquired.

We don’t have to go to the movie theater, rent a video at Blockbuster, subscribe to a newspaper or magazine and sit down to read it, pick up a book and turn pages, all of which require a purposeful decision to go and seek something and then consume it. No, today it’s all easily woven in and consumed without much effort or decision-making, just clicks in apps and on devices we use for other legitimate purposes. The same device that lets you talk to your mom also lets you consume porn.

Justine Bateman wrote a post last year discussing how today’s films are made to serve as the “secondary” focus, since we often have our phones out while streaming.³ Her point was that it was negatively affecting the quality of films today—and she has a good case for it—but I think there’s more. It’s not just the adaptation of entertainment and information to attract splintered minds and attention spans, and it’s not just the fact that we continue to splinter those minds and attention spans, but I have to wonder if our tendency towards passive consumption while multitasking our attention has left us susceptible to grooves forming in our minds that we’re not aware of because we’re not actively gatekeeping our thought life.

Everything we expose ourselves to or do repeatedly creates grooves that will either become our default or will make future decisions cost more energy if we want to go against them. These are grooves we didn’t even realize were formed, in some cases, insidious in that they’ve changed how we think, or our ability to think, and therefore, changed what actions we take.

“I think, therefore I am,” is what Descartes said (cogito, ergo sum). Today, it should probably be modified to “I don’t have to think, so you tell me what to become.”

I often feel tremendous sympathy for law enforcement or journalists who have to look at or listen to things that are evil and vile in order to do their job. They are sacrificing something to do that; they are opening themselves up, potentially scarring their minds, and have to carry what they’ve seen around forever. For some, it only takes one taste to discover an addiction.

We rarely believe any of this when we’re young.

Oh, those stupid older people who tell me not to listen to my favorite tunes, who tell me not to watch the hottest debauched TV show everyone is talking about, who try to warn, those killjoys. Who wants to listen to boring music, who wants to listen to godly sermons, who wants to listen to someone reading the Bible, who wants to consume longform content that’s not spicy or inflammatory, who has time to not only touch grass but also touch paper and read in solitude and focus—there’s so much better and more interesting stuff, and besides, I have to stay informed and up to date on things, right?

I’m telling you, it accumulates.

You’re letting outside stimuli and reward/punishment—the infinite scrolling, the algorithm that decides what you will see and hear—control your mind and your behavior.⁴

You’re training yourself to hear a different master’s voice.

1. This is well-harnessed by marketers who know that simple methods—a catchy jingle, fewer clicks to buy, and so on—are better than something more complicated.

2. Why Resolutions Fail by February: The Neuroscience of Habit Loops, Cognitive Load and Motivation Fatigue,” SFI Health, January 15, 2026, accessed March 4, 2026, https://sfihealth.com/news/why-resolutions-fail-by-february-the-neuroscience-of-habit-loops-cognitive-load-and-motivation-fatigue.

3. Even going to a movie in the theater is ruined. The number of times I’ve seen people pull out their bright phone in a dark theater to do a 45-second scroll on social media, put it away, and do it again later—it’s shocking. I don’t think they realize they’re doing it.

4. There’s so much fixation on conspiratorial takes on mind-control, MK Ultra, etc., and all I can think is how ironic that mind control of masses of people has already been achieved, including those who believe they are awakened to conspiratorial truths. Maybe the latter, even more so, because they do not realize they are in danger of what I’m talking about in this article. Their secret knowledge isn’t so much knowledge as conditioning, preventing them from determining what is true and what is not.