Thursday, October 28, 2010
Brain Study Sheds Light On Habit Formation
From McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Neuroscientists led by Institute Professor Ann Graybiel found that untrained monkeys performing a simple visual scanning task gradually developed efficient patterns that allowed them to minimize the time it took to receive their reward.
“We wanted to create an environment that would be similar to the world we walk around in every day — an environment where there are lots of choices the animal can make,” says Theresa Desrochers, an MIT graduate student and lead author of a paper describing the work in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of Oct. 25.
The findings not only help reveal how the brain forms habits, but also could shed light on neurological disorders where amplified habit-formation results in highly repetitive behavior, such as Tourette’s syndrome, obsessive-compulsive disorder and schizophrenia, says Graybiel.
Read the full article here.
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