Introduction

You're outside in the park on a hot day. In the distance, you hear a familiar song - the music of an ice cream truck! You're excited about all the different flavors of ice cream you could get, and your mouth starts to water. Even though you haven't even seen the ice cream yet, you're already thinking about eating it. This is an example of a way we train brains, and it's called classical conditioning.

Classical conditioning happens when the brain makes a connection between two things that would generally be unrelated, such as a song and ice cream. This happens all the time in your daily life. Good and bad experiences teach us to expect things, and to feel or react a certain way when we see, smell, or hear certain things.

Learning helps humans and other animals predict what might happen next based on past experiences. It helps us recognize and avoid danger. Suppose you ate a red berry that made your stomach hurt, for example. The next time you see a red berry, you might remember that bad experience and hesitate to eat a red berry again.

Classical conditioning was first discovered by Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov. Pavlov was originally studying the digestive system of dogs. He was measuring how much a dog's mouth would salivate, or give off extra fluid, when it saw food.

Partway through that experiment, Pavlov noticed that the dog would begin to salivate when it heard the sound of the lab assistant arriving, even though the dog hadn't seen any food yet. The dog had learned that the lab assistant brought food, and now expected to be fed every time it heard the lab assistant.

To test this, Pavlov came up with a new experiment. He used the sound of a metronome, which is an instrument that makes a regular ticking sound often used by musicians. In the experiment, Pavlov turned on the metronome every time he was about to feed the dog. At first, the dog had no response to the metronome. But after a while, the dog began to expect food every time it heard a metronome. The dog had learned, or been conditioned, to begin salivating once it heard the metronome, even without seeing the food!

Now, let's say you want to run your own experiment, like Pavlov did. But you are going to focus on a much tinier subject: bees. There are many good reasons to study bees.

First, bees are important pollinators. This means they help plants reproduce by spreading pollen from flower to flower. Pollination is important for all flowering plants, and for the plants that grow the food we eat. Studying and understanding bees can help us better protect them, and the plants that depend on them.

Let's take a step back and think about experiments for a moment. An experiment is a fun and organized way to learn new things. Experiments help us understand the world around us, answer questions, and find out how things work.

The scientific method is a series of steps that scientists use in their research. It's the formula for a clear and good experiment, and can include the following seven steps: Observation, Question, Hypothesis, Prediction, Testing, Conclusion, and Communication. Some of these steps are repeated during the process. This happens most often when your test leads you to more questions, or to a dead end. Then you would go back to see if you have a slightly different hypothesis to test.