How our habits are wired into our brains

[That coffee or sugar habit you have goes all the way to your basal ganglia. / Thinkstock]

So, it’s a month into the new year, and into any New Year’s resolutions you might have made. Did they involve habits? Cookies or potato chips? Too much time on the Internet?

If you’re finding – again – it’s easier to intend to change than to actually do it, here’s a recent bit of science that might help explain things.

A research team at the Duke University Medical Centre in North Carolina has found a new way to read how habits actually work within the brain.

And it’s really cool.

“We’re seeing the code, and how we get habits,” says Nicole Calakos, associate professor of neurology and neurobiology at Duke.

“We’re seeing what the language of that code is. It’s very changeable. There’s nothing immutable about it.”

So, in a very real way, our habits are written into the basal ganglia section of our brains.

Lab mice were given simple tasks, like pushing a lever and getting a treat. The treat was sugar, and the task became a habit.

“All the different mice could do that little task,” she says.

“But the ones that became habitual, and kept doing it even when they got the treat, if you look at this one brain region, the scales were tipped to favour of the action being more likely to happen.”

Calakos explains there are brain cells that act like green lights and red lights. Habits become ingrained because the green lights start firing before the red ones.

“We combined several state-of-the-art tools together to look at brain plasticity in this way for the first time. This unique view let us look and see these cells firing in real time.

“By looking that way, we saw a level of brain plasticity that hadn’t been previously suspected.”

This helps explain how habits can become stubborn and persistent. But within our brains they can, in fact, be rewritten.

“If you just started engaging a competing habit, you could become habitual about avoiding the place where you over-indulge,” Calakos speculates.

“You could develop habit of taking a time out before your hand reaches for the cookies.”

She stresses there is a huge difference between habit and addiction. Chemical dependencies are much deeper rooted, and cannot be so easily reprogrammed.

Calakos says she is excited about the possible applications of this research, going forward.

“I think when you get curious about how the brain works, it’s very natural to start to think about how we can use this information in a helpful way. And just knowing the language and the circuits that influence our behavior, we may be able to tap into them in severe cases.

“You first have to know the salient code. What’s the language that matters for the individual? And then you can decide in what context to help out.”