It’s All in The Basal Ganglia

September 22, 2006 at 6:14 pm · Filed under What Are Habits

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

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/1999/habits.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basal_ganglia

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Welcome to the world of The Habit Code…

September 21, 2006 at 2:42 pm · Filed under The Habit Code

This is just a quick post to start this Blog…

 The Habit Code

It all starts from the realisation that Habits are mentioned as the fundamental things you need to change if you’ve read any of the personal developments stuff and self help books that I have.

 Habits play such an important part and it only occured to me after three years of study.

Read any self help book.. Success Book.. Personal development course or visit any seminar and you will notice that the term habit crops up way too often.

By changing a habit or should I say developing a new habit to replace or overwhelm the old habit, your life can change overnight.

This blog has been set up because I’m trying to write a book about the things I have learnt over the past three years, in particular, the last 6 months on how simply starting some key new habits in your life can make a dramatic effect.

 Welcome along for the ride. I hope I trigger the spark inside of you that can make you a better person.

Thanks.

John 21st September 2006

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