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."

Comments

mystery solved, I hope this isn't hopeless

[yagu]

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:

• why I always jump to make an early slashdot post
• why I always used bulleted lists in my posts (check it out!)
• why "You" always mod me troll or flamebait
• dupes
• why I edit everything with vi(m)
• why crime show dramas beget crime show dramas (just how many nights a week are CSI and Law and Order on these days?)
• why the Yankees are a perennial playoff team
• why the Cubs never make the World Series
• why Larry King marries wife #X
• why Donald Trump fires Apprentice #X
• why Steve Ballmer throws chairs across the room
• why Bob Dylan mumbles instead of sings (kidding)
• why people wait at all costs and discomfort to get home and take a dump

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?

Re:Kicking the Slashdot Habit

[nekoniku]

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.

But what can break a habit?

[Masa]

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.

Re:But what can break a habit?

[chromozone]

Most habits are a product of conditioning which have elements of hypnotic reinforcement that are broken by awareness and objectivity. Concentration itslef can be a hypnotic function, and when people worry and struggle with a problem they are actually deepening the psychic hold it has. If a person gets upset about their smoking and struggle with it willfully, it often just makes them want to smoke more. A person who can step back from a compuslion and become objective to it can find themselves free of any habit without having withdrawl symptoms. One reason I don't like the MIT article is that it takes secondary, descriptive elements and gives them causality. It's like a study that finds depressed people cry more, so a claim is made that there must be something about tears that makes people sad. This is how psychological studies are foisted around these days.Ridiculous "brain scan" research is given enormous credibilty while something like hypnosis is poorly understood and yet dismissed because hypnotists themselves abuse it. People have a type of "body memory" called conditioned reflex response and people with Post Truamatic Stress Disorder especially can find compulsive thoughts and feelings taking away their control. When people react and respond sharply to something, the shock suspends their own "critical factors" and the sub-conscious is accessed. Suggestions and impressions get in under the consciousness and can continually over-ride it. Mental tapes and cues more closely tied to the body and its urges will play over and over again in the mind, and fighting them actually feeds the mechanism. People give in to them from exhaustion because it's like driving with the breaks on. A bad habit like smoking is often used by people to cope with an obverreactive nature. people get stressed and upset and they want a smoke. If they get super ennervated and happy they can want to smoke from that extreme as well. But the smoking is also a denial mechanism that keeps awareness of any failing at bay and and so objectivity becomes a hard thing to cleave to. It's a chemical hypnosis that tames the tiger within and keeps peple fixated away from harsher realites. Yet this also produces guilt and people who need to smoke to asuage the guilt of being angry and upset will need to then need to smoke to assuage the guilt os smoking. People who can see their compulsive nature and not react to it defensively are often the ones who will go for a cigarette one day and it just wont look interesting anymore - then the spell is broken. An unfortuante thing about modern psychology is that it just doesn't see people as people anymore but as machines. The magic of awareness just doesn't count for much. The ancients knew human beings had two natures - a lower and higher one. When people fall from their center and their innocence its like a conductor falling into an orchestra and they get entangled in the impulses of their lower nature. A craving for a smoke is an animal nature crying out for more of what created it. That's why when people give up smoking they can get addicted to other things like food or even gambling that had no "substance"

Nothing new, just not commonly known

[FredThompson]

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.

Scientology engrams?

[bobalu]

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.

Re:I can stop anytime...

[Pxtl]

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.

Neural imprinting can be a real bitch some time

[multiplexo]

Sure, it's nice not to have to relearn how to wipe your ass every day but on the other hand I've met amputees who had serious damage to their legs and after years of surgery they finally elected to have an amputation so that they could have a fully functional prosthesis rather than a non-functional and painful leg. But the bitch of it is that the chronic pain they suffered rewired their brains to feel chronic pain and a lot of them still have quite a bit of pain after their amputations, even though the affected limb is gone.

Re:What we already knew

[ReverendLoki]

Here's what helped me quit - after finishing my last pack of "real" cigarettes (funny how that last pack lasts longer than any other pack you've owned), I went to the tobacconist's and bought a pack of what sounded like the nastiest herbal cigaretes I could find. I think the brand name was "Magic" or something sad like that. Hell, the first two ingredients were marshmallow and "cherry flavoring", with absolutely no tobacco whatsoever. Then, for the next week, whenever that urge got to be so strong that I couldn't resist it anymore, I stepped outside (even if I was somewhere that allowed smoking, 'cause I couldn't force this stench on anyone) and forced myself to smoke an entire one of these. Nastiest crap ever - it tasted like I was smoking over-sweetened Kool-Aid. In fact, I think mixing Kool-Aid powder and dried lettuce leaves might be a good equivalent for hand-rolled.

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...

Much agreed

[sRev]

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.