All customs, as well as repetitive acts and discipline, are controlled by thebasal ganglia, a nervous structure that is characterized by being more connected to the rest of the brain than any other. In fact, their neurons seem to hate anything that smells new. It may seem like a conservative attitude, but it is a simplequestion of survival, since if we had to process every task we perform during the day, the brain would collapse. Ultimately, we need to carry out most of our daily activities on autopilot while the rest of the mind concentrates on more pressing matters.
A few years ago, Ann Graybiel, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), analyzed how the aforementioned basal ganglia behave. He concluded that if we skate, ride a bike, or even walk our way home without having to think about which corner to turn, it is thanks to hishabit file. When we practice something new, the nerve cells in that region go into full effervescence and consume a lot of energy. At the same time, large amounts of dopamine are released in the reward centers and the cortex is activated to keep us fullyfocused on learning. But once the consolidation phase is complete, the new behavior is internalized and can be repeated indefinitely with discipline with little mental effort.
Knowing how the basal ganglia work is helpful when we voluntarily decide to engage in healthy habits, such as eating fruit every morning, exercising, and brushing our teeth three times a day. Phillippa Lally and her colleagues at University College London found that, as we reiterate an action, theautomation level increases. The time it takes for people to make a behavior routine and dispense with our will – that is, the prefrontal cortex – to carry it out varies a lot, between 18 and 254 days, although on average 66 days of repetition are required to that the task is automated, as explained by Lally in the magazineEuropean Journal of Social Psychology.
Photography: Mannat Sharma
