Archive for January, 2007
January 26, 2007 at 11:00 pm · Filed under What Are Habits, Good Links
I remember posting about the Basal Ganglia before in this post:
http://www.thehabitcode.com/2006/09/22/its-all-in-the-basal-ganglia/
In fact it was my second post…
Well after my other post today about the Insular Cortex I found another posting about the Basal Ganglia. What intrigues me about this post is the effect of Parkinsons Disease and the fact that many patients find that they cannot ’start’ an associated group of movements such as walking. We already know that the actual act of walking can be carried out autonomously by the spinal column alone. What is intriguing is the starting of the sequence. maybe it is that that is controlled by the higher brain functions such as the Insular Cortex and Basal Ganglia.
Another thing about the post on the Insular Cortex is the fact that the smokers had no craving or even recolection that they smoked. The trigger of smoking never actually occured. Although the motor reflex action is probably stored somewhere the actual visual/emotional stimulus did not trigger the urge to smoke.
Read more about Habit Formation in the Basal Ganglia at :
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2005/habit.html
Or Here:
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/bb/neuro/neuro05/web1/mmcgovern.html
January 26, 2007 at 9:29 pm · Filed under What Are Habits, Smoking
Smokers Quit After Damage to Brain Region
“Nicotine Addiction Depends on a Healthy Insula” Say Researchers From the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California (USC).
Smokers with a damaged Insula – a region in the brain linked to emotion and feelings – quit smoking easily and immediately, according to a study in the Jan. 26 issue of the journal Science.
The study provides direct evidence of smoking’s grip on the brain.
It also raises the possibility that other addictive behaviors may have an equally strong hold on neural circuits for pleasure.
The senior authors of the study are Antoine Bechara and Hanna Damasio, both faculty in the year-old Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California, in collaboration with graduate students Nasir Naqvi, who was first author on the study, and David Rudrauf, both from the University of Iowa.
“This is the first study of its kind to use brain lesions to study a drug addiction in humans,” Naqvi said.
In the 1990s, Antonio Damasio proposed the insula, a small island enclosed by the cerebral cortex, as a “platform for feelings and emotion.” The Science study shows that the pleasure of smoking appears to rest on this platform.
“It’s really intriguing to think that disrupting this region breaks the pleasure feelings associated with smoking,” said Damasio, director of the institute and holder of the David Dornsife Chair in Neuroscience at USC.
“It is immediate. It’s not that they smoke less. They don’t smoke, period.”
The finding raises the question of whether damage to the insula also could cause a person to quit other addictive behaviors. Can a brain lesion cure someone of their bad habits?
The answer is not yet known, Bechara said, but he suggested the phenomenon could be “generalizable” with respect to alcohol abuse, overeating and other addictions.
The discovery of the insula’s role in addiction opens new directions for therapies, Bechara said, including possible drugs targeted to a region that “no one paid attention to.”
“There is a lot of potential for pharmacological developments,” Bechara said.
Any treatment would need to preserve the beneficial functions of the insula. But Bechara noted that the region appears to be involved specifically in “learned behaviors” rather than the fundamental drives necessary for survival. As a result, it might be possible to target one without disrupting the other.
Hanna Damasio, co-director of the institute and holder of the Dana Dornsife Chair in Neuroscience, also stressed the difference between habitual and instinctive behaviors.
“Because the insula is now recognized as a key structure in processes of emotion and feeling, the fact that insular damage breaks down a learned habit such as smoking, demonstrates a powerful link between habit and emotion or feeling,” she said.
The finding that one small region could be the Achilles’ heel of smoking addiction is especially surprising, given the brain-wide effects of nicotine on the nervous system.
The study considered smokers with damage that did not include the insula, but the likelihood of disrupting the smoking addiction was many times greater when the insula was involved.
Funding for the research came from the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. The University of Iowa provided access to its extensive database of patients with brain lesions.
The mission of the Brain and Creativity Institute is to study the neurological roots of human emotions, memory and communication and to apply the findings to problems in the biomedical and sociocultural arenas.
The institute brings together technology and the social sciences in a novel interdisciplinary setting. For more information, go to www.usc.edu/schools/college/bci/index.html
Link to the Science Journal article: http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2007/125/1
January 24, 2007 at 12:35 pm · Filed under The Habit Code
The Habit Code is based on the Habit Cycle. This cycle is very similar to biorhythms. In biorythms you are governed by three cycles. The Intelectual, The Emotional and The Physical.
In Biorythms these cycles are based on when you were born and a number of days between cycles.
The Intellectual Cycle is 33 Days Long
The Physical Cycle is 23 Days Long
The Emotional Cycle is 28 Days Long
Now, the Habit Cycle is not dependent on a set point in time, doesn’t rely on a set cycle time and isn’t set in stone. It is you that decides on where your ‘levels’ are…or should I stress it is throught your ACTIONS that decide where the level is in each of the three parts of the CODE.
Your Mind, your BODY and your SOUL. These three parts can be named the same as in biorythms namely:
Body = Physical
Mind = Intellectual
Soul = Emotional
And because you can injure yourself in the blink of an eye, or you can get emotionally charged by some outside incident (i.e. seeing your wife give birth to your baby) these three levels are in constant flux and so the graph of the habit code looks more like this:
January 22, 2007 at 11:02 pm · Filed under What Are Habits, William James
In a previous post I mentioned about ordering a copy of ‘The Principles Of Psychology’ by William James. It arrived yesterday and I’ve just started flicking through the book. It does have some interesting things to note within it’s pages. In the very first chapter (in this version) named ‘The Scope Of Psychology’ James talks about experimenting on a frog. Stay with me on this one…here is an extract from that chapter…
“The physiologist does not confidently assert conscious intelligence in the frog’s spinal cord until he has shown that the useful result which the nervous machinery brings forth under a given irritation remains the same when the machinery is altered. If, to take the stock-instance, the right knee of a headless frog be irritated with acid, the right foot will wipe it off. When, however, this foot is amputated, the animal will often raise the left foot to the spot and wipe the offending material away.
Pfluger and Lewes reason from such facts in the following way: If the first reaction were the result of mere machinery, they say; if that irritated portion of the skin discharged the right leg as a trigger discharges its own barrel of a shotgun; then amputating the right foot would indeed frustrate the wiping, but would not make the left leg move. It would simply result in the right stump moving through the empty air (which is in fact the phenomenon sometimes observed). The right trigger makes no effort to discharge the left barrel if the right one be unloaded; nor does an electrical machine ever get restless because it can only emit sparks, and not hem pillow-cases like a sewing-machine.
If, on the contrary, the right leg originally moved for the purpose of wiping the acid, then nothing is more natural than that, when the easiest means of effecting that purpose prove fruitless, other means should be tried. Every failure must keep the animal in a state of disappointment which will lead to all sorts of new trials and devices; and tranquillity will not ensue till one of these, by a happy stroke, achieves the wished-for end.
In a similar way Goltz ascribes intelligence to the frog’s optic lobes and cerebellum. We alluded above to the manner in which a sound frog imprisoned in water will discover an outlet to the atmosphere. Goltz found that frogs deprived of their cerebral hemispheres would often exhibit a like ingenuity. Such a frog, after rising from the bottom and finding his farther upward progress checked by the glass bell which has been inverted over him, will not persist in butting his nose against the obstacle until dead of suffocation, but will often re-descend and emerge from under its rim as if, not a definite mechanical propulsion upwards, but rather a conscious desire to reach the air by hook or crook were the main-spring of his activity. Goltz concluded from this that the hemispheres are not the seat of intellectual power in frogs. He made the same inference from observing that a brainless frog will turn over from his back to his belly when one of his legs is sewed up, although the movements required are then very different from those excited under normal circumstances by the same annoying position. They seem determined, consequently, not merely by the antecedent irritant, but by the final end,-though the irritant of course is what makes the end desired.
We can conclude then that most automatic motor functions are controlled by the spinal cord, and that these unconscious motor functions are seperate from conscious thought.
January 17, 2007 at 4:58 pm · Filed under Napoleon Hill
In the original version of The Law Of Success, Napoleon Hills Philosophy of success contained 15 principles. The Master Mind was put down as an introduction to the whole philosophy and not included as one of the principles but as an all encompassing method of gathering the skills and tapping into the unconcious minds of it’s participants.
Eventually The principle of the Master Mind was installed as the first of the prionciples of The Law Of Success, as below:
1. The Master Mind
2. A Definite Chief Aim
3. Self Confidence
4. The Habit Of Saving.
5. Initiative And Leadership.
6. Imagination.
7. Enthusiasm.
8. Self Control.
9. The Habit Of Doing More Than Paid For.
10. A Pleasing Personality.
11. Accurate Thought.
12. Concentration.
13. Co-Operation.
14. Profiting By Failure
15. Tolerance.
16. The Golden Rule
Eventually Napoleon Hill came to believe that Cosmic Habitforce, which he sometimes referred to as the Universal Law, was the final lesson in the course that finally took him 20 years to complete. By then Cosmic Habitforce was part of the whole philosophy and given 17th place in the table.
Hill spoke of the Cosmic Habitforce as the Greatest Of All Natural Laws.
“Cosmic Habitforce is the medium by which every living thing is forced to take on and become part of the environmental influences in which it lives and moves.”
January 16, 2007 at 12:24 pm · Filed under Procrastination
Hmmm… Procrastination is such a hard habit to break completely. You know you want to switch into the Action stage of a project but as soon as you sit down to work, the slightest distraction will take you off the task in hand. I was so after a solution to stopping this and did a search. Up came this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Now-Habit-Overcoming-Procrastination-Guilt-Free/dp/0874775043
It does have some excellent ways to stopping procrastination. I found it to be very helpful. Instead of making time for work, you make time for the other things in your life that are not being done…
January 10, 2007 at 12:23 pm · Filed under Smoking, Habit News
I’ve now been stopped for 8 months and I’m still fascinated about the addictive effects of cigarettes. For example. In a news item from the Black American Web about a doctor that treated really bad drug addiction said “I once had a patient, a smoker, who had multiple addictions to cocaine, methamphetamines and heroin. The patient got into a treatment facility, “but he told me the reason he almost walked out was because they wouldn’t let him smoke. That will tell you how powerful the addiction is.”
See the full article here: Still Smoking Cigarettes
January 10, 2007 at 12:04 pm · Filed under Good Links
Instead of trying to stop your bad habits, why not just start new habits that will eventually replace the bad ones. Take a healthy habit such as walking for half an hour before breakfast. If you start by just getting out of bed and just getting out of the house no matter what the weather is like, within weeks it will be installed as a habit. Will power is required for this of course, but try these resources to help.
Installing a new habit
Boots change one thing - Instead of changing seven things about yourself - just start with one!
January 9, 2007 at 4:19 pm · Filed under What Are Habits, William James
William James talks of the Laws of Habit. Napoleon Hill talks of Cosmic Habitforce. I talk of The Habit Code. They all try to explain the natural course of action of LIVING and even inanimate things within the universe.
It is very important that we realize the importance that habit plays within our lives. Take for example the act of walking. It takes a human baby nigh on four months to go from a crawling state, to a walking state and then several more months (even longer) to finally perfect the act of walking.
During the learning stage the bedding down of neural pathways within the brain produce a range of movement and cause electrical activity within thousands of muscle fibres. The accurate timing for each nerve firing is embedded in the brain through repetition.It then needs only the initial thought of walking to trigger the nerve firings to cause your legs to move and feedback to tell you where your leg needs to move several times a second.
It is amazing when you think about it.
If your brain had to calculate how to walk everytime you needed to it would have no time to calculate anything else, never mind running all your other autonomous tasks like making your heart beat faster, or even the blinking of an eye.
The following passage ‘The Laws of Habit’ is taken in part from ‘Talks to Teachers’ by William James.
We speak, it is true, of Good habits and Bad habits, but, when people use the word ‘ habit’ in the majority of instances it is a bad habit which they have in mind. They talk of a smoking habit and the swearing habit or the drinking habit. They never speak of the abstention habit or the moderation habit or the courage habit. But the fact is that our virtues are habits as much as our vices. All our life, so far as it has definate form, is but a mass of habits, - practical, emotional, and intellectual, - systematically organized for our weal (prosperity) or woe (suffering), and bearing us irresistibly toward our destiny, whatever the latter may be.
January 9, 2007 at 3:03 pm · Filed under People, William James
In the Law of Success by Napoleon Hill, Hill relates back to William James. William James was a Psychologist and Philosopher. He wrote ‘The Principles Of Psychology’. He wrote about habit and instinct. Just before christmas I ordered ‘Psychology’ (an edited version of his greater work) and ‘Talks to Teachers’ ( a book created from a few public lectures on Psychology to the Cambridge teachers). Both books arrived yesterday and I’ve been devouring them over the last 24 hours.
More info on William James - William James at Wikipedia
William James Photos and Bio
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