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M.I.T. Explains Why Bad Habits Are Hard to Break
Ant writes "CNET News.com says habitual activity (e.g., smoking, eating fatty foods, gambling, etc.) changes neural activity patterns in a specific region of the brain when habits are formed. These neural patterns created by habit can be changed or altered. But when a stimulus from the old days returns, the dormant pattern can reassert itself, according to a new study from the M.I.T., putting an individual in a neural state akin to being on autopilot... The neural patterns get established in the basal ganglia, a brain region critical to habits, addiction and procedural learning."
Disclaimer: posting on slashdot is a hard habit to break... I can't stop.
Interesting article, but a little thin on details. But if true in some ways I sigh in relief cuz it helps explain:
Another mystery solved perhaps.
My followup question is, is it possible to break these patterns, ever? Or are we destined for eternity to be creatures of our own habits? Should we stop buying self-help books?
Prolly not. I read an interview with Brian Eno many years ago where he said he tried to break his habit of watching so much TV by opening the TV set and unscrewing and disconnecting the power cable and by disconnecting the antenna.
He said he didn't watch any less TV, he just got *really good* at re-wiring the power and antenna cables.
"It's a wonderful idea. But it doesn't work." -- Tad Danielewski
I would like to know what can break a habit without any obvious reason.
I used to be a quite heavy smoker and tried to quit many times with no success, but about a year ago I suddenly started to dislike the whole smoking thing and I just dropped the habit. I haven't yet figured out, what could have caused that. And I haven't yet had any desire to start again. However, now I have picked a habit of eating greasy foods and I would like to get rid of that in the same way I dropped smoking.
This came out of alzheimer's research about 15 years ago.
Your brain optimizes to think what it thinks about a lot. (Why Slashdot readers don't morph into female genitalia or came controllers shows that human thought can't change matter.)
When you try to "break" an old habit, it's easy at first. After a few days, the brain realizes the optimizations are starting to disappear and it works to reinforce those structures.
The good side of this is that you don't have to re-learn how to use the toilet, eat, talk, etc. The bad side is you can't choose which thoughts are reinforced other than brute force to get past the recovery period. Even so, it's easy to go back to old optimizations. Think of it as being similar to a fold in a piece of paper. The fold can't ever be removed, just made less prominent. The paper will still have the tendency to fold at that position.
In fact it's one of the aims of certain forms of training, martial arts like karate etc train repetitively in order to get you into the habit of standing certain ways, moving, hitting, kicking certain ways on autopilot without thinking. I came back to it after 17 years away and apart from almost lethally bad fitness (yeah that's you) I fell right back into it like riding a bike.
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I hate to bring it up for fear of Xenu's revenge, but as I understand it this is the basis for Scientology's "auditing". The idea is to break up those old neural paths so they don't re-assert themselves inappropriately - like telling your boss to f*ck off because he reminds you of your father, for instance.
I always thought this made some sense, although the rest of their, umm, presentation was pretty scary.
The revolution will NOT be televised.
The best programmer in my undergrad was a skinny asian dude with drug habits that would've made Hunter S. Thompson blush. He never developed any addictions or problems and graduated near the head of his class. I still believe that the reason he never got in trouble was that he never took the same thing twice in a row.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
I used this to help me get through that first week, when the bodies getting over the worst of the nicotine withdrawal. It satisfied my habit of the ritual of smoking, but did nothing to satisfy the addiction, which not only helped divorce the ritual from the effects of the nicotine in my mind, but it also provided some damn effective negative reinforcement to boot.
I never did finish that pack...
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You were modded funny, but I think there's great truth to what you say. Everybody have this big void in their lives. You can fill it with boulders or pebbles. Most people latch onto one thing fanatically, drinking, religion, family, TV, heroin, etc. Often when people give one up, they latch onto another, just as fantically (born-agains are a great example, try finding one without a very troubled past). I find it better to have a 1000 different addictions so that I never have enough time for just one and I don't feel like it's the end of the world to give one up. Most people just choose a single "safe" addiction, but that does nothing to help with the sense of imbalance in their lives.
Not all habits are bad, and by repeating various activities (exercise such as evening walks, or regular gym visits, etc) one would think they could also engrain themselves upon one's psyche. Does this work as well, and what happens when you formula a good habit, fall out of habit, and form a bad one? Do the two conflict?
Ignorance of the last 60 years of psychology research is one of the embarrassing secrets of cognitive neuroscience. These researchers have spent their careers becoming competent in methods for obtaining data (MRI, PET, EEG) and are largely ignorant of paradigms, theories, and findings of the experimental psychology literature. At the university level, it is difficult to hire a cognitive neuro person, who is well trained in psychology and whose primary focus is on psychological processes and who see brain imaging only as a tool. This article is a good example of what's lacking.
WARNING: I suspect that it only works with substances that are do not have strong physical addiction components. I wouldn't know anything about that since I have never consumed them.
The example in my life has been smoking. I used to smoke a pack a day. I tried to quit many times but then I would light one cigarette after months and would be back at one pack a day overnight.
On my latest attempt, I just decided that I love smoking and would like to continue smoking for years. Solution: cut back to one cigarette a day. It has been working incredibly for over 4 years now!!!
The most amazing thing is that I can't smoke more than 3 cigarettes in one day, my body just can't tolerate it. The key here is that for my brain, smoking one cigarette does not mean smoking 30 cigarettes anymore.
But that theory goes head to head with the traditional protestant morale: substances are bad, they are evil, and once you get them in your system, they control you (evil is something separated from the human nature that can go inside or outside of you, like a spirit).
Since the American culture is based on that morale, those ideas are pervasive in the US. Some psychologists have suggested that the American cultural myths about addictive substances reinforce addictive behaviors, i.e. the substance controls me, so if I take one drink I can't help drinking the whole bottle/smoke the whole pack.
Of course the American "experts" will say what you are saying is very dangerous, the first step is to accept that you have an alcoholism/tabaquism/whatever problem . . . blah blah blah.
But take a look at Europe and how Alcohol is not considered such an evil in a lot of countries. Italians take wine with meals, even in workdays. In the US, if you take two drinks, you are supposed to do something stupid. So you do in a lot of cases.
Bottom line: a lot of substances are not that evil. They cannot control you, the better way to kill addictions is to reduce intake to a minimum and then your brain will be retrained to take these small dosages normally.
After reading this article, not only I think that smoking my one cigarette a day is nice, but I think that it is actually way a better method to prevent me from going back to one pack a day than not smoking at all.
Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I've done it thousands of times...