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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?
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.
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 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.
Yep, it's the same system. I teach a behavioral neurobiology class at a university and we just got done talking about addictions and addiction research. It's all the same basal ganglia system (particularly the neucleus accumbens, as someone previously pointed out). The dopamine-producing neurons there (and other parts of the dopaminergic system) respond to anything pleasurable (food, sex, etc.). When drugs make people feel good, they are activating this system. Good habits would be formed through this same system (although it might take more work with exercise for example, because many people actually do not like to exercise - they may like the effects of it but how many people actually love how running a marathon make them feel (I'm not talking about some sense of accomplishment)? How do you feel after doing strenuous exercise? Usually not that great initially). So I should qualify my remarke and say that if the good habit truly produces physical pleasure, then those habits would also be formed and intensified in this circuit.
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.