More than a century ago, the American researcher George M. Stratton devised a contraption that rotated his visual field 180 degrees, so that he saw the world upside down and with left and right reversed. Stratton sensed feet above his head and had to look for them when he wanted to see if he could walk without stumbling. The hands moved in and out of his field of vision from above instead of below.
At first, he could barely eat due to difficulties with motor skills, and it was difficult for him to recognize familiar places. But from the second day, his brain started to get used to it. At five, his usual way of doing things had radically changed. In fact, it was difficult for him to remove the device when the experiment was over. This was a pioneering test on habits, those automatisms that are so difficult to change.
Research from Duke University has provided clues about the biological reasons for this mental imprint. The basal ganglia of mice that had been induced bad habits changed. The neural pathway through which the activation signal traveled had more circuits than the one that interrupted the habit. And, in addition, there was a change in the activation speed: the one that corresponded to the fixed habit was alerted earlier.
