Train your brain through repetition

You can get your brain to form good habits—like going to the gym and eating healthily—simply by repeating actions until they stick, according to interesting new psychological research.

The researchers created a model which shows that forming good (and bad) habits depends more on how often you perform an action than on how much satisfaction you get from it.

The new study is published in Psychological Review.

What the researchers say:The researchers developed a computer simulation, in which digital rodents were given a choice of two levers, one of which was associated with the chance of getting a reward. The lever with the reward was the ‘correct’ one, and the lever without was the ‘wrong’ one.

The chance of getting a reward was swapped between the two levers, and the simulated rodents were trained to choose the ‘correct’ one.

When the digital rodents were trained for a short time, they managed to choose the new, ‘correct’ lever when the chance of reward was swapped. However, when they were trained extensively on one lever, the digital rats stuck to the‘wrong’ lever stubbornly, even when it no longer had the chance for reward.

“Much of what we do is driven by habits,” commented the lead author. “Yet how habits are learned and formed is still somewhat mysterious. Our work sheds new light on this question by building a mathematical model of how simple repetition can lead to the types of habits we see in people.”

“Psychologists have been trying to understand what drives our habits for over a century, and one of the recurring questions is how much habits are a product of reward rather than repetition,” said one of the co-authors. “Our model helps to answer that by suggesting that habits good and bad are a product of our often repeated actions, but in certain situations those habits can be supplanted by our desire to get a reward.”

The research leads to a better understanding of conditions like Obsessive Compulsive Disorder which are characterized by repeated behaviors which bring no obvious reward.

So, what? The next obvious stage will be to conduct similar experiments in a real-world scenario, observing human behavior in action-based versus reward-based tests.

If the outcomes are the same, we will have to re-consider much of how we train people, teach people, how we tackle addiction and to an extent how we lead people and choose leaders. Much of what we do now is based on the action of thedopamine reward system. If most of our actions are based on habitual response as a result of repetition, then that will have to be rethought.