Habits are normally triggered off by a certain trigger, such as lighting up a cigarette after eating a meal, or waking up and starting your habitual routine to get to the office. But where are your habits stored, where are they created in the brain?
Scientists from MIT have been studying the brain and finding out how habitual movement or learned behavior is stored. They found that the Basal Ganglia is tied to much more than motor control. When a learned behavior is stored in the brain (or becomes a habit) it need only be triggered by a certain cue which will see automatic ‘replay’ of the stored movements.
The study on rats by Ann M. Graybiel, Walter A. Rosenblith Professor of Neuroscience at MIT, and colleagues support the idea that during habit learning, the brain codes whole sequences of behavior as units or chunks that can be triggered by specific contexts. For instance, a green light will trigger a driver to depress the gas pedal and start to drive.
As the rats’ ability to navigate the maze became more automatic, their neural response to the left or right turn was downplayed, while the start and end of the sequence evoked a stronger neural response. This accentuation of the beginning and end may relate to Parkinson’s disease, in which patients have difficulty starting and stopping movement sequences or in breaking into one sequence with another.
For further info try the following links:
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/1999/behavior.html
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