← The Craving Mind Why We Get Hooked and How We Can Break Bad Habits
The Craving Mind Why We Get Hooked and How We Can Break Bad Habits Chapter 1. Introduction
Author: Judson Brewer Publisher: Yale University Press. New Haven, CT. Publish Date: 2017 Review Date: 2022-8-14 Status:📚
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Highlight(pink) - Location 286 our learning patterns even resemble those of single-celled organisms like the protozoa
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Highlight(pink) - Location 288 single-celled organisms have simple, binary mechanisms for survival: move toward nutrient, move away from toxin.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 288 It turns out that the sea slug, which has one of the most basic nervous systems currently known, utilizes this same two-option approach to lay down memories, a discovery that earned Eric Kandel the Nobel Prize in Physiology in 2000.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 297 one of the most evolutionarily conserved learning processes currently known to science, one shared among countless species and dating back to the most basic nervous systems known to man.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 299 This reward-based learning process basically goes like this: We see some food that looks good. Our brain says, Calories, survival! And we eat the food. We taste it, it tastes good, and especially when we eat sugar, our bodies send a signal to our brains: remember what you are eating and where you found it. We lay down this memory—based on experience and location (in the lingo: context-dependent memory), and we learn to repeat the process the next time. See food. Eat food. Feel good. Repeat. Trigger, behavior, reward. Simple, right?
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Highlight(pink) - Location 339 Skinner introduced a simple explanatory model that was not only reproducible but also broad and powerful in its ability to explain behavior: we approach stimuli that have been previously associated with something pleasant (reward) and avoid stimuli that have been previously associated with something unpleasant (punishment).
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Highlight(pink) - Location 336 These approach and avoidance behaviors soon became known as positive and negative reinforcement, and they became part of the larger concept of “operant conditioning”—the more scientific-sounding name for reward-based learning.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 313 The earliest descriptions of this trigger-behavior-reward habit loop were published in the late nineteenth century by a gentleman named Edward Thorndike.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 321 Thorndike took dogs, cats, and (seemingly less successfully) chicks, deprived them of food, and then put them in various types of cages. These cages were rigged with different types of simple escape mechanisms, such as “pulling at a loop of cord, pressing a lever, or stepping on a platform.” Once the animal escaped, it was rewarded with food. He recorded how the animal succeeded in escaping and how long this took. He then repeated the experiment over and over and plotted how many attempts it took for each animal to learn to associate a particular behavior with escape and subsequent food (reward). Thorndike observed, “When the association was thus perfect, the time taken to escape was, of course, practically constant and very short.”
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Highlight(pink) - Location 327 Thorndike showed that animals could learn simple behaviors (pull a cord) to get rewards (food). He was mapping out reward-based learning!
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Highlight(pink) - Location 331 In the mid-twentieth century, B. F. Skinner reinforced these observations with a series of experiments on pigeons and rats, in which he could carefully measure responses to single changes in conditions (such as the color of the chamber, which became known as a “Skinner box”).2 For example, he could easily train an animal to prefer a black chamber to a white one by feeding it in the former and/or providing small electrical shocks in the latter. He and other scientists extended these findings to show that animals could be trained to perform a behavior not only to gain a reward, but also to avoid a punishment.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 344 Skinner became convinced that much of human behavior beyond simple survival mechanisms could be explained by this process.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 303 After a while, our creative brains tell us: Hey! You can use this for more than remembering where food is. The next time you feel bad, why don’t you try eating something good so that you will feel better?
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Highlight(pink) - Location 305 It is the same learning process, just a different trigger: instead of a hunger signal coming from our stomach, this emotional signal—feeling sad—triggers the urge to eat.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 310 Later, feeling stressed out triggers that urge to eat something sweet or to smoke. Now with the same brain mechanisms, we have gone from learning to survive to literally killing ourselves with these habits. Obesity and smoking are among the leading preventable causes of morbidity and mortality in the world.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 308 each time we perform the behavior, we reinforce this brain pathway, which says, Great, do it again. So we do, and it becomes a habit. A habit loop.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 404 if we can understand these processes at their core, we can learn to let go of bad habits and foster good ones.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 353 subjective biases—individual conditioning set up through reward-based learning.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 356 the more that a behavior is repeated, the more we learn to see the world a certain way—through a lens that is biased, based on rewards and punishments from previous actions. We form a habit of sorts, the lens being a habitual way of seeing.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 357 A simple example: if we eat chocolate and it tastes good, in the future, when given a choice between it and some other sweet that we don’t like as much, we will likely lean toward the chocolate. We have learned to wear “chocolate is good” glasses; we have developed a chocolate bias, and it is subjective because it is particular to our tastes. In the same sense, someone else might have a bias for ice cream over chocolate, and so on.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 360 Over time, the more we get used to wearing a particular set of glasses, subscribing to a particular worldview more and more, we forget that we are wearing them. They have become an extension of us—a habit or even a truth.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 363 For example, many Americans who grew up in the 1930s learned that a woman’s place is in the home. They were likely raised by a stay-at-home mother and perhaps even were negatively reinforced by being scolded or “educated” if they asked why mom was at home and dad was at work (“Honey, your father has to earn money for us to eat.”).
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Highlight(pink) - Location 365 Over time, our viewpoints become so habitual that we don’t question our reflexive, knee-jerk reactions—of course a woman’s place is in the home!
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Highlight(pink) - Location 370 we spend much of our lives mindlessly and reflexively reacting in accordance with our subjective biases, losing sight of changes in ourselves and our environment that no longer support our habitual actions—which can lead to trouble.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 410 We develop all types of learned associations that fail to address that core problem of wanting to feel better when we are stressed out or just don’t feel great. Instead of examining the root of the problem, we reinforce our subjective biases, prompted by past conditioning: “Oh, maybe I just need more chocolate, and then I’ll feel better.”
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Highlight(pink) - Location 413 Eventually, when we have tried everything, including overdosing on chocolate (or worse), we become despondent. Beating the dead horse only makes things worse. Unnerved and feeling lost, we no longer know in which direction to look or turn.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 421 Stopping and reexamining the subjective biases and habits that we have been carrying around to ease our predicaments helps us see what might be weighing us down (and getting us more lost).
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Highlight(pink) - Location 423 When learning to backpack in college, I had to navigate in the wilderness for weeks without the help of technology such as my smartphone, and one of the first and most critical skills I learned was how to read a map. Rule number one is that a map is useless if we don’t know how to orient it correctly.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 425 we can use a map only if we pair it with a compass to tell us where north is. When our map is oriented, the landmarks fall into place and begin to make sense. Only then can we navigate through the wild.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 427 Similarly, if we have been carrying around a this-isn’t-quite-right feeling of dis-ease, and we lack a compass to help us orient to where it is coming from, the disconnection can lead to quite a bit of stress.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 429 We fumble around and take extreme measures to shake off the feelings of frustration and dis-ease
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Highlight(pink) - Location 431 What if, instead of trying to shake it or beat it, we joined it? In other words, what if we used our feeling of stress or dis-ease as our compass? The goal is not to find more stress (we all have plenty of that!), but to use our existing stress as a navigation tool.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 433 What does stress actually feel like, and how does it differ from other emotions such as excitement? If we can clearly orient ourselves to the needle of “south” (toward stress) and “north” (away from stress), we can use that alignment as a compass to help guide our lives.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 449 If I got lost while backpacking, I was taught to stop, take a deep breath, and pull out my map and compass. Only when I was reoriented and had a clear sense of direction was I supposed to start moving again.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 436 definitions of mindfulness.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 436 Jon Kabat-Zinn’s operational definition from Full Catastrophe Living, which is taught in MBSR classes around the world: “The awareness that arises from paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally.”
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Highlight(pink) - Location 438 As Stephen Batchelor recently wrote, this definition points toward a “human capability” of “learning how to stabilize attention and dwell in a lucid space of non-reactive awareness.”
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Highlight(pink) - Location 440 Put differently, mindfulness is about seeing the world more clearly. If we get lost because our subjective biases keep us wandering around in circles, mindfulness brings awareness of these very biases so that we can see how we are leading ourselves astray.
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Highlight(pink) - Location 442 Once we see that we are not going anywhere, we can stop, drop the unnecessary baggage, and reorient ourselves. Metaphorically, mindfulness becomes the map that helps us navigate life’s terrain.
Notes
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