My articles from 2021

the power of habits

note(I used examples from the power of habit but only the first chapter but it's in my own words I honestly thought this was bad but  maybe some people think it's ok)

In the fall of 1993, Eugene Pauly, or EP for short, had a strange incident. When his wife said their son Michael was coming over, he asked "who is Michael?" The next day, EP was vomiting and writhing with stomach cramps and his dehydration made his wife Beverly take him to the emergency room. The nurse inserted an IV (they use IV to inject vital fluids or anesthetics ) in his arm. EP was kicking and swinging his arms at the nurse who was inserting the IV. After he was sedated they inserted a long needle and extracted a few drops of his cerebrospinal fluid (the fluid that connects the brain to the spinal cord).

The doctors sensed trouble because EP had a disease. He was suffering from viral encephalitis, which is usually not a deadly disease. It just causes cold sores, fevers, blisters, and mild skin infections. But in rare cases, it can make its way to the brain, and it will infect the fluid surrounding the brain and the spinal cord, which usually flows quickly. But the sample taken from EP was cloudy and sluggish. They could not treat or undo the damage that was done by the virus but they could maybe stop it from spreading, by inserting through the IV a large number of antibiotics. After a few weeks, EP was swallowing normally, and later he was discharged. But there was a problem! If he woke up he would cook breakfast then go back to bed and repeat. So eventually, Beverly asked a memory loss expert to help, which led to scientists thinking maybe habits were formed in the basal ganglia.

So the scientists did an experiment on mice and put them in a T-shaped maze with a door. In the experiment, a bunch of wires was connected to the mice's skull and brain. Afterward, the animal was placed into the T-shaped maze with chocolate at one end. At first, they heard a click and the door opened. All they saw was something changing, and it would scratch the walls and sniff the corners then eventually find the chocolate. After a week, when they hear a click, they go forward, turn left and eat the chocolate. This was because the mice's basal ganglia affected it. As the scientists saw in the neural activity, the basal ganglia stored all kinds of information. In other words, it stored habits even while the rest of its brain went to sleep.

But how does a habit form? Let me introduce the habit loop. What is a Habit loop? There are three elements in a habit loop: cue, routine, and reward. Let's say for example you check your phone a lot, why? Usually, because you have a habit stored in your basal ganglia. But, ask yourself why you want to check your phone? What do you do when you're looking at your phone? What is the reward you get when you check your phone? If the first answer was "when I'm bored", a pattern has emerged. The cue is when you are bored, and the routine means checking your phone, and the reward is that you do not feel bored. This kind of habit loop also happened with mice in the experiment: the cue was the click sound, the routine was going forward and going left, the reward was the chocolate. 

2. The craving brain

An experiment puts some monkeys in a room and makes click sounds whenever they see the right shapes. When they pull the lever they would get grape juice. In the beginning, they were doing bad but after a few weeks, the neural activities in their brain changed. The activities were not like the mice's but rather they're more like this. At first, they would have a spike in neural activity when they got the grape juice but after weeks this changed. When they saw the right shape then they would have a spike and if they did not get the juice they would get mad.

3. The golden rule of habit change

In the summer of 2006, a 24-year-old graduate student Mandy walked into the counseling center at Mississippi State University. For most of her life, Mandy bit her fingernails and gnawed them until they bled. Lots of people bite their nails due to their chronic nail-biting. However, Mandy's problem is of a different scale. Mandy would often bite her nails until they were pulled away from her skin. A psychologist who knew the golden rule asked her what she felt when she was about to bite her nails. She said felt a little tension in her fingertips. It soon became clear to the psychologist that it happened when she was bored, so she ended the session and told her to go back home with an assignment. When she felt the cue or tension in the fingertips, put a check on the index card. When she came back she got 28 checks, and she was aware of the problem.  Then she needed something to get a quick stimulation like slapping her arm. After some weeks, she gave up the habit. This is the secret: the cue is the same and the reward is the same but the routine has changed. That's the golden rule of habit change.