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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."
So removing the Slashdot button from my bookmark bar might not be sufficient?
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?
an explanation of why I reload slashdot every 5 minutes and couldn't get rid of this bad habbit in any way.
I have a bad habit of missing the first post.
Will this make people convicted of crimes say they did it because s/goobbehavior/badbehavior/; pattern made her/him do it.
A day is lacking without the 7 S's:
1. Shower
2. Seminate (Sex or self)
3. Smoke
4. Shave
5. Starbucks
6. Shit
7. Slashdot
Note that the primes are all habits. Now permanently locked in my brain.
Trust me, this is a very accurate description of how some of these habits ingrain themselves into your mind.
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Admittedly, I haven't RTFA, but this also seems to support that old adage.
-- My hovercraft is full of eels.
See, this is why I like a little variety in my addictions: alcohol for a couple weeks, smoking the next, Starcraft after that, keeps me from getting pinned down to a single addiction for very long.
Drinking isn't on that list. I guess I don't have any bad habits!
Civilisation comes out, people obsessively play till 5am regularly so they can 'build this last final World Wonder'. This syndrome continues until the 5 1/4" disks wear out, the mouse cable is frayed, and the EGA monitor has CRT burn in.
People recover, move on with their lives...then the syndrome re-occurs when Civilization II comes out -- on CDROM!!! Most people feel grunge music was a cultural phenomonen driven by the recession, but oh no -- college kids obsessed with Civ quit their summer jobs and could only afford second hand flannel, sinking 10 hrs a day into a 486 game.
Advance a few years... Civilisation III late 2000. Dot-com crash late 2000. In this case correlation DOES mean causation.
And now... Civilisation IV. Fortunately due to MIT's intense investigations into this phenomenon, hopefully a cure is available for addiction. The economy can't take another Enron/Worldcom/Pets.com.
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
I'm on slashdot so often because, at work, I get to the point where I've browsed just about every website that I could possibly think of and I get so bored that I wind up refreshing slashdot every 5 minutes just to see if there is a new article posted. sighs
...... The need for Zonk to post dupes.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
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.
People with liver problems often stop wanting to smoke.
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.
I recently started vomitting again on a regular basis after seeing actual COBOL and FORTRAN code.
That may explain peoples' weaknesses to their ex-lovers. It would also explain my inability to resist sex. The brain just goes on autopilot. Hehe "don't blame me honey, blame my ganglia!". Hehe and she couldn't blame the ganglia, they're her favourite part of me...
------- "From bored to fanboy in 3.8 asian girls" ----------
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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yeah smoking is great for that. it increases concentration, focus, etc. but once it runs its course, you pay for it. the first week i quit smoking i litterly couldn't do anything at work. couldn't focus on a damn fucking thing.
nicotine is wonderful. too bad its addictive and you can't chew nicotine gum and drink a beer at the same time.
I'm glad they found this out.. Now HELP ME, I have been trying to quit nicotine for months now and sucking badly at it..
And if one more retard suggests that I practice deep breathing I'll kill them and make a pair of mocassins out of their arse skin...
I'd scream but my mouth if full of chewing gum..
Jimi Spier
www.jimispier.com - My tunes
This still doesn't explain that 'dirty feeling' I get when I post here.
Now I have to go shower.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
Here is a link to the primary article.
And here is the abstract:
Learning to perform a behavioural procedure as a well-ingrained habit requires extensive repetition of the behavioural sequence, and learning not to perform such behaviours is notoriously difficult. Yet regaining a habit can occur quickly, with even one or a few exposures to cues previously triggering the behaviour. To identify neural mechanisms that might underlie such learning dynamics, we made long-term recordings from multiple neurons in the sensorimotor striatum, a basal ganglia structure implicated in habit formation in rats successively trained on a reward-based procedural task, given extinction training and then given reacquisition training. The spike activity of striatal output neurons, nodal points in cortico-basal ganglia circuits, changed markedly across multiple dimensions during each of these phases of learning. First, new patterns of task-related ensemble firing successively formed, reversed and then re-emerged. Second, task-irrelevant firing was suppressed, then rebounded, and then was suppressed again. These changing spike activity patterns were highly correlated with changes in behavioural performance. We propose that these changes in task representation in cortico-basal ganglia circuits represent neural equivalents of the explore-exploit behaviour characteristic of habit learning.
First you animate. Then you SUSPEND!!!
I don't believe their results at all. If it were true then no one would have trouble remembering the multiplication table, math formula's, and grammar. All of which are repetitious things done from K-12th grade over and over again. If having 50+ math questions to solve every night 5 days a week isn't forming a habit then nothing is.
Gregory Bateson in his book Mind and Nature deals with examining one's presuppositions. Under minning one's presuppositions is, in one way, what the study of epistemology, as it pertains to theories of knowledge vs the methodology of science, is about.
Creative, or, if you prefer, inventive work is, in large part, about testing the presuppositions underpinning a theory or protocol, and, where possibly profitable, collapsing the presuppositions that underpin our habits and protocols, if for no other reason then to see what happens next.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
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.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
This probably explains why you were about to flame me when you saw the title. Its just habbit, anything pro-ms, FLAME!
Fascinating findings. I find that gathering information is a bad habit of mine. My dad once described himself as an encyclopedia of useless information. As they say, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. He drives a crosscountry rig now (no longer a computer field service technician repairing motherboards as he did in the early 80's and earning far more money) so he's avoided the terrible lure of the internet (except on weekends). I find myself abusing RSS technology to feed this habit of mine. I can't believe how much more info I cram into my brain because of RSS...
Of course, for many these scientific findings produce a "duh" response. Often science is filled with elaborate studies that simply prove what we already commonly believed or "knew". But no harm done. I think it's exciting to understand the process more fully. I wrote a blog about another study that was done on addictive behavior (ADD: Addicted to Information) - specifically drugs - last March. That research worked on showing how this effect of losing willpower to addictive behavior occurs physically/neurologically in the brain. Fascinating stuff. I related it to my addiction for information - an insight of my wife's, btw. I'm not nearly as insightful or clever.
What I'd like to see, however, is more work being done on how to unlearn habits. How to retrain the mind to not need whatever fix ails it. For instance, I'd like to reclaim an hour of my day without feeling compelled to read more and more news as is the problem this week, or watching too much TV as was the problem last month. My ADDled mind shakes off one habit only to pick up another. I try to build barriers, but as an earlier poster pointed out by example of Brian Eno, we simply bypass the artificial detours we construct. It would be better to retrain ourselves and eliminate those neural pathways that fire up upon familiar stimulus.
The Splintered Mind - Overcoming
I can stop any time I want...I just read it for the articles...and it keeps the weight off...yeah, that's it...
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
So to eliminate a bad habit I have to form an anti-habit that is mentally associated with a bad habit. I'll have to try it out. I'm a nail-biter and I've quit several times over the years, but something will set me off and before I realize it I'm back to my old bad habit.
10: PRINT "Everything old is new again."
20: GOTO 10
for our bad habits, remember, we subjected ourselves to the habit in the first place.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
I still see myself when I look in the mirror. If I could, I would mod this article redundant.
Oh, and of course I want scientists knowing how to change my behavior! We should live to see the day Slashdotting until 12AM is considered an "unhealthy" habit to be "behavior modified".
Does this include reading slashdot?
Linux or Mac OSX are just too different and they keep re-activating the ms-windows ways whenever they slip back just to do that little quick job that they haven't got the hang of in the other OS yet...
That's why duel-booting is such a bad thing really... as it's just too easy to boot back to windows rather than taking the trouble to learn how to do it in Linux...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
... that every time i happen to touch a mouse on a windows machine minesweeper and freecell windows will inevitably open themselves without me even realizing before i nearly finish the game?
It's worst while i'm on the phone, i will regularly stop in the middle of a sentence because i realize that i nearly solved a minesweeper field that wasn't there when i started that the sentence mentioned above.
[i have an opinion and i am not afraid to use it]
The neural patterns get established in the basal ganglia, a brain region critical to habits, addiction and procedural learning.
So that's why it's always the heavy smoker that sits on their lazy backend and tells people to do it again until they get it right...
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
Good thing I kicked that habit.
So could similar behaviors replace addictions? For instance, I used toothpicks to quit smoking. Was this somehow related (same muscle memory: reach into pocket for toothpick holder instead of pack of camels, put toothpick instead of cigarette in mouth, reach into pocket for lighter, take out lighter, feel like moron), or just an example of placebo effect? Can people quit drinking using soft drinks? Can I quit spending so much time on the internet by "typing " on the cover of my textbook during class?
I used to carry a bottle of whiskey for snake bite. And two snakes. -Nefarious Wheel
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Definitely worth looking into . . .
I am not a crackpot.
sorry for the worthless comment, but i have to say that this is SOOOOOOOOOO TRUE!! ( and i have known this for years... )
When skimming this, I thought "autopilot" was "slashdot" the first time through. Oddly, it didn't seem to change the meaning of the sentence.
Do you have ESP?
Funny that I have been reading today in Gregory Bateson's "Steps to an Ecology of Mind" that when we learn something and make a habit it sinks deep down to subconscious such a way that we can do it without even knowing explicitly. This is supposed to save the effort of applying the knowledge of how to do it every time. So we can walk and ride bike without even knowing we are doing it. Maybe this study shows where all this "sinks" to.
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?
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..
This is exactly what happens in Bushs brains.
If you tend to do it at the same time (or always after Starbucks, though that could be due to a little too much battery-acid coffee), it could probably become habit. Shitting is a necessity to life, but if you feel the need to go at a specific time per day, or after a certain activity, then it could also be a habit.
just give him some heroin and a guitar. He'll mutter something about Driveshaft and head for the hills. Or the jungle. Whichever.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
Dude, you need to go have a smoke
Really? Give us a hint--how much do truck drivers make? Maybe a lot of us should switch...
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
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.
That should do the trick.
Or some last drastic variation that just kills the connections.
Those may be reasons people start doing all of those things, but the study proved that they keep doing it because of other reasons. RTFA
"how can they call it a MINE if everything here is THEIRS?!?!" -Straight Jacket
This is yet another reason why abstaining from destructive habits in the first place is better than starting and breaking them (though the latter is obviously still better than starting and continuing them).
This article discusses one of the central points of the movie What the Bleep Do We Know?!" which uses lots of computer animation for us visual learners.
addiction science is pretty interesting. what gets me is that it's pretty common for an ex-opiate addict to start "jonesing" (go through the opiate withdrawal symptoms- cold/flu like symptoms, a lot of pain and have a desire for opiate to fix that) when he gets out of prison or starts to hang around with his old crew. heroin generally can be dropped, physically, in 3 days- or rather, the worst part of the withdrawal can be done in that time. other opiates are longer, but generally you're clean after two years of not using, time spent in jail or in treatment, etc. pretty interesting stuff.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
The CNS events add what to the account?
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.
Now we have a quick and effective solution to that nasty nail-biting habit. We simply will direct these three powerful beams of ionizing radiation into your skull, focussing them on your basal ganglia.
Just don't twitch, or you might forget how to talk.
Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I've done it thousands of times...
A man with no vice, has no virtue...Ben Franklin While the toothpick idea is a good one, it is just substituting one vice for another.... I shouldnt talk though, I have afew vices.... Ima go back to read /. now....
Bad habits are mostly fun.
What you do with a computer does not constitute the whole of computing.
Does this explain for my desire to sit around smoking weed all day and listening to dylan?
Sure do. Your mistress is one expensive bitch. I really gotta stop seeing her.
in a few days this this will be back
How exactly do bits of the brain corresponding to events in the world *explain* anything? The fact that "the brain does it" isn't that surprising!
Look what the article is saying. The quote says that our "intentions" are equivalent to rat "intentions". This is wild guessing, and I believe there is no justification whatsoever.
It amuses me to see the contortions that people go through in ascribing their behavior to the freely chosen action of a "rational" entity. Of course we can't easily give up habits... we're not in control. Our brains are continually keeping a scoresheet as to which experiences and responses triggered or are associated with it's primary objectives: survival and reproduction. In this light, habits can only be changed when a stronger association is made (you quit smoking because something associates it strongly enough with your experiences of death or loss).
A study like this will come along, and people will add it to the list of things the brain does on autopilot, but still believe that it is only "coloring" their behavior, when it in fact is their behavior. This study highlights the fact that when a situation or stimuli isn't novel, the brain works from its catalog of experience. Conciousness seems to serve mainly as a gateway to organizing new experiences. It's a mental room where we experience the process of our operators making connections between the stream of incoming stimuli and the database of stored associations for those stimuli. As the associations are made, it forms a "thought" or story about the stimuli, framing it in perspective to the past and in anticipation of an expected outcome in the future. It's a continual retelling of the story of our experiences. This is much like our dreams, though they are formed of freer associations in the absence of stimuli.
There are plenty of books on this topic.
*fantacizes about Indonesian Gudang Garam honey & clover cancer sticks* (I know where to get those, no info needed)
As for being a heavy smoker, don't know about that. I started out on cloves such a Djarrum and Gudang Garam (I think I still have a few tins lying around, now holding other items), and when those got too expensive and harsh on my lungs, I switched to Marlboro Reds for "something lighter". I was going through about a pack and a half a day at the end (though that wasn't the height of my usage). Now I don't know what you're criteria are to be a "heavy smoker", but every other smoker I knew at the time that got a whiff of those things agreed that they were some of the nastiest concoctions ever.
Anyways, I've read a few places that the bulk of the nicotine withdrawal takes place in that first week without it. That's not to say it's smooth sailing after that - this thread is testament that it is not. However, for most people a week is what it takes to get beyond the physical, clinically defined substance addiction to nicotine, which is what I used those herbals to get through. I'm not saying these made quitting easy, but it did make it easier. You know what else helped encourage me to quit? A family member died after a long, drawn out over several years battle with lung cancer, due to a life long smoking habit. Funny how that works.
I bought them at a local tobacco shop, just like I said. It was a place that sold all sorts of off-brand trendy smokes, hand-rolling supplies, pipes, loose-leaf, *ahem* "water pipes", and such. This was 5 years ago, and I have no idea if this brand existed 3 months before or after this time in my life, and I never really cared. I did try and do a quick Google search before my last post, but "magic cigarettes" isn't exactly the narrowest of search terms on today's Internet.
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yeah but the patch is fixed nicotine rate. i want to get high, not just fend off my addiction ;)
Then, just take a lot of them at the same time.
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They seem to be saying that the unwanted habits are the result of physical structures that have been "built" into the brain at some point.
How does this differer from other ways of altering the brain, say engaging in a "vice" or something that was considered "innocuous" at the time, but in a different situation, turns out to be "harmful"? If the unwanted behavior patterns are caused by biology, (Downs Syndrome), or by physical problems (tumors, brain lesions, strokes, blows to the head), or by exposure to some excessive shock (as in those that cause post-traumatic shock/stress syndrome), or purposeful shocks (electric shock-to-brain treatments), or 1st/2nd hand exposure to smoke/alcohol/drugs (as an adult or a fetus).
Doesn't education also physically change the structures in the same way -- and "miseducation" could also change the brain to have a child raised to have values that current society finds unpalatable (or at the very least, debatable).
This raises a question about the nature of our entire "legal" and "justice" system -- the idea about not holding people liable for crimes committed before a law was written -- what about an entire group of people who may have been "misprogrammed" by misguided or under-education or though no one caring - neglect -- should our laws be written to hold them responsible when the underlying cause of their behavior has its roots in the core of their brain and is may be very resistant to reprogramming. Drop an ancient Greek philosopher onto the American anti-pedophile landscape and explain to them that what they consider to be normal is now a criminal behavior.
In the same vein, matters criminal in one society (smoking pot, prostitution) or banned (gay marriage) may be legal in other less violent societies (Netherlands, Denmark? et al?).
How does our the US "moral" system of criminalizing violence, but allowing easy promotional access to incite or "train" in such behavior (violence on TV, Movies, computer games) to both youth and adults, compare and contrast with our laws around the perfectly legal, pleasurable, and necessary-for-life, activity of sex and access to materials (P0Rn, accessories, birth control), freedom to decide on nature of relationships (government legitimizes only the single, "[A|E]H[O][A]H"-type relationship, 1M+1W) which has made various types of sexual behavior, aside from the "1-approved-type", illegal at various times and in various ways (laws against sodomy, prostitution, adultery, "unnatural acts" (any sex not resulting in procreation), etc.)?
The laws controlling method and means to an essential, necessary - for - life - on - this - planet, legal activity of sex are almost entirely based on whims of the dominant religion-based "morals" of that society -- which change from generation to generation. Compare the standard set in the movie, "The Graduate", to the real life story turned upside down of 22yo, recent, female college grad, going to prison for what might appear to be the sexual advances of a student and her not trying to cause him problems as he was transferring out of the school. As the article mentions, the "age of consent" ranges from age 12 in Holland, to 16-18 in the US. In Wisconsin, they have a special state law applying to teachers and therapists that raise the penalties for "supposed" offenders to that of a felony instead of it being a misdemeanor. She was sentenced with the judges admonition of "'you're going to need to look deep into your soul' to change 'your character flaw.'" She was appealing.
Regardless, if it is constitutionally unethical to enact laws that apply in a matter that it would be judged harmful to an accused, how should laws be ethically applied to an entire generation of people that have been raised under one system, who later find their previous behavior "criminalized".
It is very hard for most to sympathize or understand this in what is may often be the majority mindset: that is
This is, of course, closely related to the Buddhist idea of Karma in the sense that you build your own way of viewing the world and reacting to the world as you go. If you build negative ways of acting or reacting into your brain, then you're basically building negative Karma. You can build positive Karma as well, and usually with little or no additional effort. I've also read elsewhere that a new habit usually takes about 4 weeks to establish itself, so if you can kick a habit for about a month, you're usually fairly clear of it. (Of course, this article seems to indicate that it may still have some small influence at a later date, but I think we all knew that already. :)