Habits

From Discover magazine there’s an interesting story about turning off habits. Earlier research suggested that infralimbic cortex was involved with habits. A team at MIT decided that slicing and dicing the "ILC" was too crude, so:

They turned to optogenetics. This revolutionary technique takes light-sensitive proteins from around the tree of life, and uses viruses to introduce them into an animal’s neurons. By choosing the right protein, and targeting the right part of the brain, scientists can now excite or silence a chosen group of neurons with astounding precision, using little more than flashes of coloured light.

Working with supervisor Ann Graybiel and optogenetics founder Karl Deisseroth, Smith filled his rats' ILCs with halorhodopsin – a protein that comes from salt-loving microbes, and silences neurons when hit by yellow light.

They then trained them to turn one way in a simple maze. A flash of light could turn off neurons in the ILC, so:

Then, Smith inactivated the rat's' IL, while they were running through the maze. The effect was dramatic: almost immediately, they behaved as if they had never acquired their habit in the first place.

Whoa! Then they trained them for a new habit, and were surprised to discover that the rats not only lost the new habit, they recovered the old one.

So the ILC is responsible for maintaining habits. (Which is scary: some habits are kind of important. Want to relearn how to drive?) Also, apparently habits aren’t forgotten, but remain around like unused subroutines in an old program, until the ILC calls it from a list of possible "actions".

I know we're supposed to cultivate mindfulness, and doing things automatically is deprecated, but sometimes I'd like to contemplate other things while automatically locking up at night. Their methods sounds kind of shotgun.

Misspellings are in the original