Over time the mental activity in the brain decreased – as the route became ore and more automatic, it thought less. Instead they zipped through the maze faster and faster. Slowly the rats stopped sniffing corners and making wrong turns. The scientists studied how it changed after they ran through the maze hundreds of times, building habits. It was processing information in the times it meandered. Each time a rat sniffed the air the brain exploded with activity. The probes in the rats heads showed that while each animal wandered through the maze, the brain and in particular basal ganglia worked furiously.

They put rats in mazes and tracked the brain.

They noticed that animals with injured basal ganglia suddenly had problems with tasks like learning to run through mazes and opening food containers. Researchers began wondering if this basal ganglia effected habits as well. If you picture the human brain as an onion, it is close to the scalp – generally recent edition from an evolutionary perspective. The Power of Habit shows how MIT researchers started working on habits in 1990s – they were curious about a numb of neurological tissue known as the basal ganglia. Though each habit means very little on its own, over time, the meals we order, what we say to the kids each night, what we spend and the way we organise our thoughts have enormous impacts on our health, productivity, financial security and happiness. Most of the choices we make each day may feel like the products of well-considered decision making, but they’re not – they’re habits. William James wrote in 1892: “All of our life so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits”. Did you brush your teeth before or after you toweled off? Tie the left or right shoe first? What did you say to the kids on the way out the door? What route did you drive to work? When you got to your desk, did you deal with email, chat with a colleague, or jump into writing a memo? Salad or hamburger for lunch? When you got home, did you put your sneakers on for a run, or grab a beer and watch TV? When you woke up this morning, what did you do first? Did you hop in the shower, check your email, or grab a donut from the kitchen counter. The Power of Habit – by Charles Duhigg What do you do automatically?

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