Making and Breaking Habits

ongoing

Every minute of every day, our brain’s habit system is hard at work automating well-practiced actions so our brains can focus on new and more complex challenges. This does not always work to our benefit, however. My research has implicated hyper-expression of habits in a range of compulsive behaviours, from drug addiction to out-of-control spending, binge-eating and obsessive-compulsive rituals. Despite the importance of habits in our lives, there are major gaps in our understanding of how they are acquired in humans and a virtual absence of research into how they can be broken. This is because the mainstay experimental paradigms in the field measure habit expression in a way that cannot distinguish impairments in goal-directed control from the strength of automatic stimulus-response associations. This has led to confounded interpretations that have seriously impeded research aiming to investigate these basic mechanisms. HABIT aims to change this by leveraging known differences in the temporal dynamics of each sysem, where stimulus-response automaticity is fast and goal-directed behaviour, slow. Our novel approach couples the millisecond precision of electrophysiology with the breadth of large-scale phenotyping via smartphone to develop a new mechanistic model of the independent functioning of these systems and their interaction. This novel combination will be used to develop a detailed neural account of both systems and their split-second trade-off, but also to test the real-world functional consequences of disruptions to either system. A series of causal manipulations anchor this grant and are designed to challenge key assumptions of our working model. Can we engineer more robust and rigid habits by-design and develop novel methods to break the most rigid of habits? With clear potential for impact, the fundamental insights from this project will reveal how we can harness the power of habits in our lives and better understand key aspects of mental illness.