The Neutrinos from Dimension X, on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

From ScienceMag, via Slashdot

From YouTube, via Laughing Squid

If this doesn’t make sense, or if it made you want to hear the (awesome) song again:

Photo by Pawel Loj

The Anatomy Of A Habit

Habits have three parts:

• cue – the trigger to engage in the habit: hunger is a cue for you to eat.
• routine – the complex sequence of events that have been habitualized: eating involves many steps (finding food, preparing it, finding a place to eat it, etc) that are each pretty complicated
• reward – every habit has a happy ending, which in fact conditions us to repeat the routine and make it even more habitual; eating makes you feel full and content, so next time you’re hungry, the ‘eating’ habit kicks in to fix that.

The meat of the matter is the routine. It’s very interesting how extremely complex actions can become second-nature to the point where we do them on autopilot. Take showering, for example: you probably have that routine so ingrained, that were something to interrupt your shower, you would have trouble figuring out how to wash yourself consciously, because most of the time you do it unconsciously — as part of a routine you developed probably at some point during youth. And one of the most important keys to understanding habits is knowing that developing routines is difficult: you have to consciously think about what you want want to accomplish (e.g., to get clean), what the best way to go about doing that would be, and optimize for efficiency, so that you can shower as fast as possible, but come out as clean as possible too.

This kind of complex thinking is the opposite of what you want to do every morning, so once you’ve figured out a showering sequence that works, your brain saves it. Then, some cue triggers it: you feel dirty, or it’s the morning or night or whenever your normal showering time comes to pass. The cue makes you think “I need to shower”, after which you go into your zombie-like state, perform the routine, and then like a trained monkey, you get the reward: you feel clean. All because you already had a routine ready that would scratch the itch which cued it. Cues themselves tend to come in one of five flavors:

• time: it being 11pm might cue you to start your nightly routine: yawn, brush your teeth, get in bed
• location: passing by an ice-cream store might cue you to want ice cream
• mood: feeling sad might cue you to want ice cream
• people: if you always have ice cream with Donna, seeing Donna might cue you to want ice cream
• prior events: leaving work might cue you to call your wife

The way habits get created is that one of those kinds of cues will create a desire, and you’ll find an appropriate routine that will quench it, after which you’ll get rewarded by the desire being gone, and probably some additional happiness. Figuring out that mechanism took years of scientific research, which we can now put to work for us too — not just for Target.

Photo by Mark Mitchell

Making A Habit

The basic concept is pretty simple: if you want to, for example, make a habit out of exercising all you need to do is prepare a routine, find a cue and find a reward. The problem is that many people maybe don’t have an exercise routine, so they get up in the morning and the thought of having to figure out what to exercise and how is just too much, so they put it off for another day — people are fundamentally lazy, and figuring things out is very mentally taxing, so we don’t like to do it. Therefore, the first step is to figure out the exercise routine, then learn it to the point where you can do it without thinking. Maybe start with something simple, like running: get your running clothes, put them on, put your shoes on, strap on your iPod, head outside, turn the music on and run. Repeat that until it becomes second nature, and now you have a routine.

To turn routine into habit, you have to add a cue and a reward. For something like exercising, a “time” or “prior events” kind of cue would probably work best, since you want consistency regardless of where you are, what mood you’re in, or who’s available. So maybe every day at 8am or 6pm, or after you wake up or get home from work. The cue gets you started, but without a reward, the routine becomes a chore instead of a habit. Maybe exercising is enough of a reward, with the endorphins it produces, or maybe you need something more, like watching a really good TV show after, or eating some strawberries. Put all three parts together and it becomes a habit that you now have to ingrain: next time you get home from work, think about the strawberries, start into your exercise routine, then eat the strawberries. In the end, it all boils down to Pavlovian conditioning: eventually, just getting home from work will make you want to go running. But at least at first, you need the reward to make the habit stick.

Breaking A Habit

Doing the opposite actually takes some detective work to figure out the three parts of the specific habit. As an example, lets say you want to stop eating sweets. The ‘routine’ part is obvious because it’s the set of actions you’re trying to get rid of: sugar going in your mouth. To figure out the cue, every time you get a craving for sweets, ask yourself why you have that craving. Is it at a certain time of day like the mid-afternoon? Is it in a particular location, like the kitchen? Are you in a particular mood? Are people around you? What happened right before the craving? Sometimes the cue is not obvious, in which case it helps writing down your time, location, mood, people around you and what happened before; after the craving hits a few times, the common factor will reveal itself. The reward is not as straightforward to figure out, and can be tricky: it may be eating sweets gives you energy, relieves boredom, improves your mood, etc. To suss it out, take a trial-and-error approach: if you think you might eat sweets for energy, try caffeine instead; if it’s out of boredom, try nuts.

Once you’ve figured out the cue and reward of the bad habit, figure out an alternative routine. The key to breaking the habit is to realize that the itch must be scratched: the willpower required to keep yourself from craving the reward is extremely powerful. But, once you know what the cue and the real reward are, you can switch out the routine and still scratch the itch. For example, lets say your cue for sweets is a prior event: you’ve accomplished something, like cleaning the kitchen, and now you want sweets. What’s the real purpose (reward) of eating the sweets in that situation? Probably the ‘treat’ aspect of it — something nice to do at the end of an annoying chore. (Note that the dirty kitchen -> cleaning routine -> sweets sequence may be a habit of itself, so in this case our habits are nested, like Russian dolls.) If so, switching out the routine for a non-sugary treat should do the trick. Maybe eat some strawberries instead: they’re kind of expensive, they’re sweet and taste good, so it’s a good treat. Or maybe a treat that’s not related to food at all, like a cat nap. Find the cue, find the reward, keep them — but switch out the routine.

An interesting thing to note is addictions: the physical reward of doing heroin is not something you can really produce via another kind of routine, so this tactic of switching out routines doesn’t always work. Instead, counselors teach addicts to eliminate cues from their lives — to stay away from the people, places and things that can trigger their addiction. Generally this means a complete change of lifestyle, but even under the best of circumstances, all cues will never be eliminated and alternative routines (coping strategies) still have to be ready for the addict to use at a moment’s notice. For example, running into your old dealer should cue you to run in the opposite direction and eat a cupcake.

Photo by Lauren Mitchell

In both cases — making and breaking habits — you have to be aware of all three aspects of the habit. When trying to make a habit:

1. Internalize a routine
2. Find an appropriate cue and reward, that will motivate your brain to turn the routine into habit.

When trying to break a habit:

1. Find the existing cue and reward
2. Internalize an appropriate alternative routine, that will get you the same reward when the cue happens.

From The New York Times Magazine

Via FAIL Blog

Robert Lustig

A couple of weeks ago, Lustig and two other scientists from UCSF wrote an opinion piece in Nature (paid subscription required — Time has a good synopsis) arguing that sugar is dangerous enough that it should be regulated like alcohol: sale to minors should be curbed, a sin tax should be enacted, and vendors should be licensed for the sale of sugar.

It’s an unfortunate habit that America has gotten into:

1. Discover something is bad
2. Ban or regulate it
3. Problem solved

It definitely worked with the War on Drugs. But consuming half a cup (1/4lb) of sugar a day is also an unfortunate habit America has gotten into it. Of course, turning to the nanny state because we have no sense of personal responsibility is not the answer to kicking that habit. Education, however, is a good answer, and for example, is probably the sole reason smoking rates are half of what they were 50 years ago: no one ever quit because smoking was too expensive, just like no one ever gave up heroin because they ran out of money.

Morgan Spurlock ate over 30lbs of sugar while filming Supersize Me

People quit or cut back because most humans want to live as long as possible; and the ones that don’t care if they die tomorrow, that’s their prerogative as members of a free society. But while their political recommendations may be misguided, the scientists’ hearts are certainly in the right place: sugar is bad news, and it’s time to quit.

And if you’re still on the fence about the science, Lustig has a good hour and a half lecture on YouTube. It’s been viewed 2 million times.

See also:

• Sugar and High-Fructose Corn Syrup Might Be Causing Cancer
• Sugar Does Cause Heart Disease
• What Killed People In 2010
• The War On Drugs Is Officially A Failure

From Nature, via Time

From College Humor, via Neatorama

Autonomous Prius at the 2011 Tokyo Motor Show

In the past few months, three more states have been considering laws that would follow Nevada’s lead: Florida is poised to be next, followed by Hawaii and Oklahoma.

See also:

• Why We Need Driverless Cars
• Toyota Is Making A Driverless Prius
• Bans On Driving While On Cellphone Reduce Cellphone Use, But Not Accidents

From NPR and The Orlando Sentinel

Oscar Wilde had a drinking problem

The study is relatively straightforward: they got college kids moderately drunk (0.075 BAC) and gave them Remote Association Tests, which are basically word puzzles with creative answers that you can’t really logic your way through. They obviously also did the same thing with sober students, and the drunk ones “solved more RAT items, in less time, and were more likely to perceive their solutions as the result of a sudden insight.” Their explanation is that alcohol impairs the frontal lobe of the brain, which is where our self-control is; the problem with self-control is that it stifles creativity: it tends to make you think ‘by the rules’ instead of considering solutions outside the box. Interestingly, being tired has a similar effect to being drunk.

But staying up all night is not what Amy Winehouse died of; no, she died because her blood alcohol concentration was 0.416%. And apparently she’s just one of many, many British binge drinkers: 80% of drinking in France, Italy and Spain takes place at dinner, but 80% of drinking in Britain is done elsewhere (i.e., bars). The amount of drinking generates all kinds of problems, not the least of which is billions of dollars of healthcare costs. The NPR article in question is about efforts by the British government to cut down on drinking by increasing the sin tax on alcohol — efforts which are being met with a loud “nooooo” by the shall we say “creative” population of Britain.

From Science Direct and NPR, via Wired

But, these rating should be taken with a grain of salt because they’re averages of all the cars a brand makes: so for Chevrolet, they include the Impala, Corvette, Malibu, Suburban, etc. If you’re using the study (PDF) to buy a car, the brand rating gives you just a general idea of how the brand is, not how good a particular model is.

Fortunately, they also provided the most dependable cars in each class:

• Sub-compact: Toyota Yaris, Scion xD, and Honda Fit
• Compact: Toyota Prius, Toyota Corolla, Hyundai Elantra and Scion tC
• Midsize: Ford Fusion, Mitsubishi Gallant, and Toyota Camry
• Large: Buick Lucerne, Toyota Avalon, and Ford Taurus
• Entry Premium: Lexus ES350 and Lincoln MKZ (tied), and Acura TL
• Premium: Hyundai Genesis, Mercedes E-class, and Volvo S80
• Compact SUV: Chevy Equinox, Honda CR-V, Toyota RAV4, and Scion xB
• Midsize SUV: Ford Explorer and Nissan Murano (tie), and Toyota Highlander
• Premium SUV: Lexus RX350 and Lincoln MKX
• Midsize Pickup: Nissan Frontier, Ford Ranger, Honda Ridgeline
• Large Pickup: Toyota Tundra, GMC Sierra HD, Chevy Silverado LD
• Minivan: Toyota Sienna, Honda Odyssey

Even though Chevy and Honda are average brands, they make some of the best SUVs, trucks, tiny cars and minivans. Overall though, the Toyota family and Ford seem to have their act together most.

The study measures problems experienced during the past 12 months by original owners of three-year-old (2009 model-year) vehicles. Overall dependability is determined by the level of problems experienced per 100 vehicles (PP100), with a lower score reflecting higher quality.

2011 Hyundai Genesis

From JD Power, via NPR