It is not always what you think

We are a conditioned lot. Let's start with that fact (and see if we can work towards a fallacy). Decades of traversing the cyclic rut of routine have ensured that.

In saying so I am reminded of an amusing scene from the comedy My Family where the adolescent son has just begun driving lessons and finds himself on a roundabout that he has no idea how to exit, locking himself thereby into endless circling.

Years and years before humans became targets in conditioning experiments, scientists like Pavlov tried out their ideas on canines, with degrees of success. These 'best friends of man' were in a way programmed to associate the ringing of a bell with the advent of food, which set them salivating.

Ringing of a bell

Later, simply the ringing of a bell (even with no food accompanying the pealing) elicited the same conditioned response.

Much later, when music in the 70s was in its glam rock phase, an Australian band known as The Skyhooks put out a song entitled Horror Movie.

Some of the lyrics went: Watch a horror movie right there on my TV/Shocking me right out of my brain.....It's bound to be a thriller/it's bound to be a chiller/it's bound to be a killer.....the planes are a-crashin/the cars are a-smashin/the cops are a-bashing.....the kids are a-fightin/the fires are a-lightin/the dogs are a-bitin...

And so it went, until near the end of the song you realised with a fair degree of surprise it's not a movie that the band was singing about. Horror movie and it's blowin a fuse/Horror movie it's the six-thirty news.

Nothing has changed, as I see it, although the members of The Skyhooks themselves have aged a bit and glam rock, like a rare perfume of yesteryear, has been bottled and set on a shelf alongside other sub-strains of rock music.

What I feel, however, is that when we become conditioned, as it were, we are also prone to apathy. In time we tune off, we cease to hear, or even if we do hear we perhaps get to that other important line in Horror Movie: Maybe you don't care who's gonna lose or win.

Maybe. Living as I do in the west of Sydney, I am now getting used to hearing either a police squad car or an ambulance speeding down the road behind, it's blazing siren cutting a swathe through the traffic.

Earlier on, I sat up alarmed. Mind you, I still feel worried for whoever's safety may be at risk, but something in the degree of intensity has lessened.

But I tell you this: When you are face to face with a situation, the aforementioned apathy peels off like moulting skin and anxiety grips you once again around the throat.

Suddenly you realise this is not the TV, this is not The Skyhooks, this is not the rut of conditioning, this is not the roundabout you cannot get off. This is serious because someone is screaming.

I hear it. A girl. Once. Then repeated. No, not a repeat. It sounds like two screams. Two girls in trouble. I am passing a house I am unfamiliar with. The hackles on my neck rise as the screaming intensifies.

Loud, long, almost wailing. I learn exactly what petrifaction means. My feet could be cast in solid rock they refuse to move.

The heart is lodged somewhere in my larynx and the vocal cords are paralysed, for which I am thankful; the fading evening light can do without a third screamer.

Somehow I arrive at the low backyard wall from whence the horrific sounds are emanating. My thoughts are dark. Murder, I am thinking. Or, rape. But the first thing I espy is a large placard.

On it, written in blood red: 'Screaming for Australian Idol'. Standing before it, a set of teenagers practising seriously. My own throat is parched and, vis-Ã -vis conditioning, I realise the whole theory needs some determined revisiting.

Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.