Archive for What Are Habits
November 26, 2007 at 5:24 pm · Filed under The Habit Code, What Are Habits, Napoleon Hill
Cosmic Habitforce. What is it really?
Napoleon Hill describes it so:
“Cosmic Habitforce is the greatest of all natural laws. It is Nature’s comptroller through which all other natural laws are coordinated.”
However you think the universe was created, you cannot deny the underlying march of time and the precise way that all things within the universe seem connected. The creation of stars, galaxies, planets and ultimately life seems to be on automatic pilot. Whether you believe in a God or not you cannot deny the sheer beauty of the way the laws of nature work and how they all seem to mesh perfectly, stopping for nobody.
Nothing is needed to keep the universe on it’s course, it does so without a care, as if it was a clock so perfectly ballanced, that it needed the mere first winding to set it on it’s way.
As nature set it’s physical laws it also set it’s biological ones, the absolute continuation of life and how it evolves to match any change in it’s surroundings, again, automatically, and without any external help. Habit is a neccessity of life, and habitation seems to be a mechanism where the changes in an environment for a species causes a habit to form. This habit formation causes brain patterns to be hard wired, and this in turn causes habits to become heredetery. The passing of one habit to the next generation can help the next generation to survive, it allows for changes in evolution.
Cosmic Habitforce is the law that fixes habits. It is the conductor that keeps the universe in time but changing all the time, making sure that everything evolves, that night follows day, that oaks will come of acorns, that life will evolve and thrive to it’s natural environment.
April 19, 2007 at 3:04 pm · Filed under The Habit Code, What Are Habits, Good Links, Habit News
Scott Young has a great series on his blog about mastering your habits.
I do not agree with the fact that he says quote
“Habits can’t be removed. They must be upgraded or replaced.”
Don’t think that’s true, I gave up smoking nearly 12 months ago. The technique was to contact my subconscious directly, and it’s not been replaced with anything, well, not consciously anyway!
Check out the link, you will find Scott’s series interesting…
http://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2006/05/09/
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 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 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.
December 19, 2006 at 3:41 pm · Filed under What Are Habits
Orison Swett Marden’s ‘Pushing To The Front’ arrived yesterday. A tattered, leatherbound book. I can just imagine the people that have held it. I’ve quickly read through the book (it is nearly 900 pages) and the habit code is s l o w l y falling into place. Sheesh… if I’d have known it was going to take this long I’d have been pleased. You see, Napoleon Hill toiled for 30 years to bring out Law Of Success. But even he got the foundation of his philosophy from other authors like Swett Marden.
The habit theme does cross over from Marden to Hill, in fact, there is a whole chapter on Habit within Pushing To The Front. There is another on The Habit Of Hapiness. All good stuff. All going into the final book, whenever that is finished.
It is amazing reading the book too and seeing where Hill got some of his ideas from. Marden writes about Concentrated Energy, Enthusiasm, Persistence, Decision, One Unwavering Aim, Power of Suggestion, Doing More than Paid For and a whole host of other realated chapters that remind me so much of Napoleon Hill. Oh, before I forget, there is another chapter on The Self Improvement Habit.
Marden wrote countless books in his time, I think I’m going to get a few more and see what Habits I can draw from his other books. His ’success magazine’ is another source of information that I will be persuing too.
November 16, 2006 at 6:38 pm · Filed under What Are Habits, Habit Quotes
Habit is a cable; we weave a thread of it each day, and at last we cannot break it. -Horace Mann
This quote is attributed to Horace Mann (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace_Mann).
As such, Horace Mann has got the formation of habit down to a near perfect explanation. The cable can be related to the firing of neurons in the brain. Each repetition of an action produces another neuron pathway and the strengthening of the action and hence the habit.
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
