I'll get to the hardware aspects in a later section. First I'm mostly concerned with the software aspects of the human brain. Imprinting is involuntary by nature. These are programs built onto the imprints. They are looser and fairly easy to change with counter-conditioning.
Conditioning is relatively more voluntary than imprinting.
This is even looser and 'softer' than conditioning. Learning is relatively more voluntary than conditioning. An imprint is a type of software that has become built in hardware, termed 'firmware' in computer jargon, being impressed upon tender neurons before they were fully developed, or modified at some point when they are singularly vulnerable. Imprinting is extremely difficult to change once the imprint has been made. Some think that imprinting is impossible to change, period.