Train your brain to form good habits through repetition

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New York: If you want to form good habits -- like going to the gym and eating healthy -- then you need to train your brain by repeating actions until they stick, a new study suggests.

The researchers have 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.

"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 what we want versus what we do," said Amitai Shenhav, Assistant Professor at Brown University.

"Our model helps to answer that by suggesting that habits themselves are a product of our previous actions, but in certain situations those habits can be supplanted by our desire to get the best outcome," Shenhav added.

For the study, published in the journal Psychological Review, 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 a 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 a reward.

The rodents preferred to stick to the repeated action that they were used to, rather than have the chance for a reward.

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