The brain also controls habits

Habits are deep-seated behaviors in our brains that we perform automatically. This allows you to follow the same habits to work everyday without thinking about it, leaving your brain free to think about other things, such as what to cook for dinner.

However, the brain is not completely out of control of habit behavior. A new study by MIT neurologists has found that most thoughts and planning happen in a small area on the prefrontal cortex.

"We always think, and I still think the value of a habit is that you don't need it, " said research institute Professor Ann Graybiel, a member of MIT's McGovern Research Institute for Brain Research. to think about it. It frees your brain to do other things. 'However, not all are released. There are a few pieces of the cortex still devoted to controlling habits.'

This new study gives hope to people who are trying to eliminate bad habits, Graybiel said. Graybiel is the main author of this new study. The study is published in the Proceedings of the US National Academy of Sciences this week.

It shows that although habits can be deeply ingrained, the brain's planning center can eliminate these habits. It also increases the ability to intervene in the brain region to treat people with disorders related to behavioral behavior, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder.

The main author of the paper is Kyle Smith, a research scientist at the McGovern Institute. Other authors are MIT graduate student Arti Virkud and a professor of psychiatry and behavioral science, Karl Deisseroth, Stanford University.

The habits are often ingrained in the mind that we still do them even if we don't benefit from them.

The MIT team experimented with simulating this condition with mice. Trained mice run in a T-shaped labyrinth. When the mice approach the decision point, they hear a guiding sound that turns left or right. When they choose right, they receive a milk chocolate as a reward (turn left) or sugar (turn right).

To show that this behavior was a habit, the researchers eventually stopped giving rewards to trained mice. They found that these mice continued to run in the labyrinth correctly.

Scientists intervened in the infralimbic (IL) cortical region of mice to test their behavioral habits. The findings show that IL cortex is responsible for the time when habitual behavior will be expressed.

Jane Taylor, a professor of psychiatry and psychology at Yale University, said."We have always thought that habits are inflexible, but this shows that you can have flexible habits, in a sense."

Graybiel said, although it is too early, in the future scientists can use interventions to cortex to treat behavioral disorders.

This study was funded by the National Institutes of Health, H. Stanley and the Sheila G. Sydney, R. Pourian and Julia Madadi, the Agency for Advanced Research Projects of the Ministry of Defense and the Gatsby Foundation.