Before we get into that let’s understand a bit about the human brain… Like I had written some time ago in my article on Artificial Intelligence the human brain is believed to have evolved once humans learned how to walk upright on their two legs …Walking upright helped humans to do several tasks in a much easier manner and this led to better development of the human brain.. It is also known that whenever we do something new for the first time a new pattern is created in the brain… When we keep repeating the same tasks the pattern within the brain gets reinforced till it becomes what we call a habit.
There are lot of things that we do on a daily basis which is controlled by our brain without any real conscious interference from our side. We can call this part of the brain as System 1. Most of the functions of our body including breathing, digestion etc are take care by this part of the brain. There are several day to day decisions that we take also that are controlled by System 1. For example, if we are shown a picture of the person and asked to quickly give your opinion you will notice the complexion, hair colour, face expression and quickly give your opinion. This action is driven by very fast thinking and is controlled by what we call as System 1 of the brain.. System 1 operates automatically and quickly with little or no effect and no sense of voluntary control.
Now consider when we are asked to multiply two numbers which are not part of the multiplication table which we have learned by heart at school. Consider for example we are asked to multiply 18*23 ..This multiplication will take some time as we proceed through a series of steps where you also have to hold on to some things into your memory to complete the multiplication. This type of work is controlled by the part of the brain that we call as System 2. System 2 is allocated to activities that demand focused attention including complex computations. The operations of System 2 is often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice and concentration.
Now consider how it was when we started to learn driving… We were so conscious of every move that we make we decided every turn and every move after a lot of thought. Today when we drive lot of things mostly happens on its own ..So while we started learning driving every action was influenced by System 2 but today a lot of things are controlled by System 1 while we shift into System 2 whenever there is a sense of something new or which requires attention of System 2..
As habits get formed most of the action like in driving shifts from System 2 to System 1..For example for ease of remembering I have kept a specific place for keeping keys when I get into my house and another specific place to keep the keys in my bag after I lock the house. Over a period of time subconsciously I keep following this routine and the key always gets placed at the location identified for it.
System 1 is designed to be quick and hence jumps to conclusions with very little evidence. It does not retain the size of the jumps or the time taken to arrive at the decision…The quality of the evidence is also not really important for System 1 as lots of our strongest beliefs make a great story but lack very clear and justifying evidence..System1 also doesn’t retain the data on the other options that were considered before taking the decision and System 1 is always active and cannot be turned off..
It has also been noticed that there is a limitation to the amount of data or information that System 2 can process ..So we have often come across cases where when people are engrossed in a task which occupies the full bandwidth of System 2 they do not notice things that happen in the background which would otherwise have immediately been treated as stimuli and fed back to System 2 for processing. This blindness that comes about while focusing intensely on a task was brought out by Christoper Chabris and Daniel Simons in their book The Invisible Gorilla. .To explain this they constructed a short film of two teams passing basketballs, one team wearing white t shirts and the other team wearing black t shirts ..The viewers of the film were instructed to count the number of passes made by the white team ignoring the team in black t shirts.. Halfway through the video a women wearing a gorilla suit appears and crosses the court, thumps her chest and moves on..The gorilla is in view for 9 seconds.. More than 50% of the thousands of people who have seen this video fail to notice the gorilla at all.. They are so focused on counting the passes of one particular team that they became totally blind to the surroundings. What’s even more interesting is that the viewers who hadn’t seen the gorilla were very sure that a gorilla never appeared at all which also means that we can be blind to our blindness also..
Why does the brain try to build habits?
Habits are simply reliable solutions to recurring problems that we encounter in our environment… Whenever there is a problem the brain starts the process of habit formation with trial, failure, learning from the failure to try the solution differently. This period of trial and error which involves high amounts of brain activity leads to a solution which meets the requirements… With time the useless process that were involved gets removed and the useful actions gets reinforced. As habits gets created the level of activity in the brain reduces. .The conscious mind or the System 2 part of the brain can only pay attention to one activity as we saw in the gorilla video and the brain is continuously trying to find ways to preserve usage of System 2 so that its attention can be focused on the most crucial of tasks..
So, is building a good habit about following a goal or building the right systems to achieve the goal?
Being a huge cricket fan I am always fascinated when Dhoni (perhaps India’s most successful captain) talks about building the right process which will eventually lead to the win that you are looking forward to ..So the best example which came to mind is from a sporting team and that of the widely publicised example of how Dave Brailsford built up the British cycling team to the world winners that they are today.. Till the time that Brailsford was appointed as Team Director in 2003 the British team hadn’t won a single Olympic gold in about 100 years… Some of the system changes that Brailsford and his coaches incorporated were
- Redesigning the bike seats for more comfort
- Rubbing alcohol on the tires for better grip
Changing the riders suits to indoor driving suits which were more aerodynamic - Making riders wear electrically heated over shorts to maintain ideal muscle temperature
- Changing their massage gels to identify the one with the fastest muscle recovery
- Teaching riders the right way to wash hands to prevent them from catching cold. This was pre- COVID!
Identifying the pillow and mattress to provide the best night’s sleep - Making the team truck spotless and painted in white to detect the smallest of dirt
What this led to is the team winning 14 medals in the 2008 Olympics with 8 gold and in the 2012 Olympics they repeated the feat winning 12 medals including 8 goals…
So how would it be if we could make a clear process like the British cycling team did to convert all our resolutions into habits which would lead us to the results that we had in mind?
Resolutions and habits require careful thinking so I will stop here for now and tell you the process in my next article …
Watch this space for more…
