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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?
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.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
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?"
You do realize CmdrTaco did this years ago to no availl?
...... 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.
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.
Deleted
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!!!
nicotine patches.
the first few days will still suck ass, but you can compensate by drinking heavily. then you just wind down the patches over the course of another 6 weeks.
i've 'quit' cold turkey before and i was surprised how much easier it was with a long, gradual decline in nicotine that the patches provided. no sense is quiting cold turkey and letting the nicotine fuck you in the ass just for a few less weeks of your quiting process.
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 kept kicking Peregrin Took out of my house every 5 minutes, but couldn't get rid of this bad hobbit in any way.
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
Definitely worth looking into . . .
I am not a crackpot.
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.
That should do the trick.
Or some last drastic variation that just kills the connections.
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
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...