Don’t settle for lazy old habits says brain expert
LONDON: Diligently sticking to old routines may feel comfortable, but for your brain, it might be the idle option, and could increase your chances of dementia.
“Habit is so ingrained in our biology that it is mediated by a separate brain system,” said leading neuroscientist Raymond Dolan, a professor of neuropsychiatry at University College London.
“We are creatures of habit, believing it to be an effective way of freeing up mental capacity, so we can think of other things. But the habitual can also be the lazy option.”
Habit means people might be sleepwalking through their daily routines, not drawing on their mental resources and not making goal-directed decisions.
While habitual behaviour was cognitively less demanding, it also provided for less flexibility, said Professor Dolan during a recent Australian visit.
“I don’t think we would do anything new or inventive unless we continuously make the effort to break our propensity to be habitual.”
So, how does this highly decorated scientist, who is also director of the UCL-Max Planck Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing, break his routines?
“I try to change my environment as often as I can, to create new sensory experiences and not do the same thing every day. Even if it’s taking a different route walking home from work or moving rooms when I’m working.”
Is there a neurological benefit in doing things differently?
“We don’t know, but there is a strong intuition that people who continue to have an exploratory goal-directed life appear to be less susceptible to disorders like dementia and live longer,” he says.
While his answers are always a little tentative, his published studies have been cited by other researchers more than 190,000 times globally, giving him a citation index of 232. Usually, 60 is regarded as truly exceptional.
“Professor Dolan’s research metrics confirm his standing as the Don Bradman of neuroscience, with a near-perfect impact score for his work uncovering the neurobiology of cognition, decision-making and emotion,” says Scientia Professor Matthew Kiernan, director of Neuroscience Research Australia.
Professor Dolan delivered a lecture at Neuroscience Research Australia, together with UNSW, this month about the intricate mental maps of the world that our brains create over time, and how we carry these in our heads, unaware of their presence.
Crucial to his work is the concept of “neural replay”, a high-speed, unconscious process by which a memory trace is repeatedly rehearsed and consolidated in the brain.
The lecture hall was full of young students, including some working on machine learning and AI, hoping for clues and patterns to help them replicate how the brain works and what it does during sleep – which professor Dolan said was “not downtime”.
He says neural replay occurs when neurons from a part of the brain called the hippocampus spontaneously increase their firing rate during sleep and wakeful rest states.
The neurons that were active when encoding an experience during an awake state become reactivated in sequence during sleep or rest. It has long been known that sleep consolidates learning and an incremental increase in performance following a period of sleep has been seen across a range of tasks.
But this neural replay can be disrupted. Professor Nolan saidpoor sleep and factors such as alcohol and rumination (inescapable negative brooding) can be disruptive.
“We wonder whether replay and rumination are related. Replay happens at a much faster timescale but has some of the same characteristics. But then no problem is ever solved by rumination,” he said.
“Replay is important, although we can’t be certain it’s the only thing operating. There is now strong evidence that it is a time when we build, revise, update our working model of the world.”
Some, he said, postulate that this fast unconscious process is linked to dreaming.
When it comes to decision-making, there isn’t a single, chief executive-like decision-maker in the brain.
Professor Dolan said a decision arises out of complex interactions between three systems – impulsive, habitual and goal-directed – and it might be worth reflecting on which part of your brain a choice is coming from, how it can be optimised and what the most rational course of action might be.
“For the impulsive self, the attraction of reward and the repulsion of a punishment comes to dominate behaviour,” he said.
“The second is the habitual self, which thrives in environments that are unchanging.” It’s about keeping things largely the same.
The third is a goal-directed system that is based on that intricate mental map. It enables a long view without the excess discounting of the future that characterises the impulsive decision-maker.
“In some instances, such as drug addiction, one system hijacks the others. Attraction to the reward pulls the addict the way a magnet pulls a piece of metal towards it,” Professor Dolan said.
“But over time there is a shift towards the dominance of a habitual decision maker, that operates even when the drug no longer provides for a rewarding hedonic experience.”
In those with obsessive compulsive disorders, the habitual system is out of control.
