When asked to point at the door leading to the kitchen from his living room, he couldn’t do it. Just consider Eugene, a man with severe brain damage caused by encephalitis. In some cases, people with extensive brain damage can still adhere to their old habits. Your overall brain activity increases again as your brain registers the successful completion of the activity and reinforces the link between the cue and the routine. You march into the bathroom and brush your teeth with your brain virtually on autopilot.įinally, you get a reward – a feeling of success and, in this case, a minty-fresh tingling sensation in your mouth. Next comes the routine, meaning the activity you’re used to performing when faced with this particular cue. This creates an overall spike in your brain activity as your brain decides which habit is appropriate for the situation. In general, any habit can be broken down into a three-part loop:įirst, you sense an external cue – say, your alarm clock ringing. In fact, according to a 2006 paper by a researcher at Duke University, as many as 40 percent of the actions we perform each day are based on habit. Hence, even a complicated act that demands concentration at first, like finding a piece of chocolate in a maze or backing out of the driveway, eventually becomes an effortless habit. Its evolutionary role is clear and crucial: it allows the brain to save energy and perform common tasks efficiently.

This process of turning a sequence of actions into an automatic routine is known as “chunking,” and it forms the basis of all habit formation. When the researchers repeated the experiment, however, they noticed something interesting.Īs the mice gradually learned where the chocolate was and memorized how to get there – go straight, then turn left – their brain activity decreased. They could smell the chocolate and they began searching for it.

When the mice were first put in the maze, their brain activity spiked.

Using special equipment, the researchers could monitor the brain activity of the mice as they sniffed their way to the chocolate. The mice had to find their way to a piece of chocolate that’d been placed at the end of a T-shaped maze. In the 1990s, a group of researchers at MIT were studying mice to learn more about how habits are formed in the brain.

The power of habit charles