Habits

Habits are behaviors wired so deep in our brains that we do them without hesitation.  Recently MIT neuroscientists has discovered a small region of the brain's prefrontal cortex is responsible for the moment-by-moment control. The prefrontal cortex is where most of your thoughts and planning occur. Professor Ann Graybiel, a member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT said " that the value of a habit is one you don't have to think about it." If you dont have to think about doing that habit, it leaves space in your mind so you can think about other important things. Habits often become so serious that we keep doing them even though we do not gain anything. 
The MIT team preformed an experiment with rats. They let the rats run a T-Maze. When the rats got closer to the turning point the heard a noise telling them to go either right or left. When the chose correctly they was rewarded. After a while the stopped rewarding the rats and found out that the rats still ran the right way. This proves that their behavior was habitual. Using optogenetics, a technique that allows researchers to inhibit specific cells with light, the MIT scientists turned off IL cortex activity for a few seconds. As the rats neared the point in the maze where they had to go left or right, the rats forgot all about the previous turns and went a different way. This says that turning off the IL cortex switches the rats' brains from an automatic  mode to a mode that is more engaged in the goal.
This topic was interesting to me because everyone, including myself, have at least one habit that needs to be broken.


-Travis Farmer-