Likewise, say one has just eaten lutefisk and then vomited. The smell and taste of lutefisk will then be associated with feeling nauseated, and no amount of telling one that they shouldn’t be nauseated will be very effective. Say the lutefisk that made one vomit was covered in poison, so that we know that the lutefisk wasn’t the root cause of the  sickness.[23] Having this knowledge won’t dislodge the association. In essence, associative structures are functionally defined as being fungible based on counterconditioning, extinction, and nothing else. Thus, assuming one sees counterconditioning and extinction as types of associative learning, we can say that associative learning does not necessarily eventuate in associative structures, but associative structures can only be modified by associative learning.