Behavior Archives - Farther to Go!

It’s All about the Action

April 12, 2024 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

“I think therefore I am.” So declared Rene Descartes sometime in 1640.

Cogito ergo sum! was the culmination of his attempt to identify something he could be certain of, some bedrock truth of which there was no doubt.

Even he knew, way back then, that sensory perception can be incredibly misleading and was not to be trusted. His thinking led him to wonder if we are all hallucinating our experiences. Or part of the Matrix. These are not new thoughts.

In coming to his conclusion, Descartes assumed a separation between the physical and the mental that many members of the species continue to grapple with, at the same time he elevated the mental beyond all proportion.

Right off the bat, however, the first two words, as translated—“I think”—are totally misleading. They imply agency and intent. It would be more accurate to say “I have thoughts” or better, “thoughts have me.” Most of the thoughts running through our mind at any given time are involuntary and unintended. The best analogy is to the air we breathe.

Having air circulate via the nostrils, throat, lungs, etc. is highly desirable, but (fortunately) it isn’t under our voluntary control. It’s debatable how desirable it is to have thoughts continually circulating in the mind, but circulating thoughts, like circulating air, is not something to take credit for or, in the case of Descartes, crow about.

This is all to say that at least since Descartes, thinking has been assumed to be the crowning glory, so to speak, of the species. Granted, there are some tasks only thinking (i.e., System 2 logical/linear, voluntary/intentional thinking) can and should handle. But that kind of thinking is extremely hard, so we do very little of it. And even when we do it, if we don’t follow it up with action, there isn’t much point to it.

A number of false assumptions follow from the false belief that it’s what we think that matters most. The most significant of these assumptions is:

Understanding something will automatically have an effect on behavior, as will having a desire or an intention to do something.

Two more false assumptions:

We don’t need to pay much conscious attention to what we do.
Only some of the actions we take are worth paying attention to, in any case.

The unconscious part of the brain, however, pays attention to everything we do, including the things we’d really prefer no one—including us—noticed at all. It pays considerably less attention to what we think or even what we think about doing.

What Is the Brain for?

The purpose of the brain is to figure out what to do (what action to take) and then to make those actions happen.

It’s blindingly obvious why we have a brain. We have a brain for one reason and one reason only, and that’s to produce adaptable and complex movements. There is no other reason to have a brain. Think about it. Movement is the only way you have of affecting the world around you. —Daniel Wolpert, neuroscientist

It’s also via the actions we take that the brain figures out how to interpret the information it receives, including who we are and what things mean. It’s via repetitive actions that the brain determines what behaviors to turn into habits and hand off to the basal ganglia to administer. It’s via persistent actions that the brain changes: trajectory, perception, identity, awareness, and areas of attention.

Yes, it’s annoying that the brain pays attention to all our actions—including those we aren’t paying attention to. It’s as if the brain maintains or modifies our mental model of the world according to its own parameters rather than to our wishes. [That was sarcasm. Of course that’s what it’s doing.] But since our wishes, like our thoughts, are fleeting and contradictory and ephemeral, it’s a good thing the brain doesn’t take them seriously because that would result in chaos.

As we know, our moment-to-moment choices—or actions—are not consciously determined. Rather, it’s our unconscious that determines out actions based on its interpretations of the internal and external sensory data it views through our mental model of the world.

Since action is the only way we can affect the world (of which we are a part), then the only way to create change is to get our brain to take different actions than the actions it is currently taking. And that requires modifying the brain’s interpretations of the sensory data it processes.

How does the brain modify its interpretations? By the actions we take. If this sounds like a vicious cycle, it really isn’t. This is where thinking comes into the process. Thinking can provide a bridge between the undesired actions (and outcome) and the desired actions (and outcome). It can do that by identifying the outcome we want, the actions that are likely to produce that outcome, and the contrivance or contrivance we can use to train the brain to take the actions we want it to take.

This is what contrivances are for: to train the brain (our movement organ) to automatically take the actions we want it to take rather than the actions it’s automatically taking now. This is how to use the brain to create a satisfying and meaningful life. The process isn’t complicated or complex. It’s our thoughts about the process that get in the way.

Note: This post is an update of an article in lucidwaking from February 2022. Look for the companion piece next week!

Why Did You Do That?

December 31, 2018 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

I’ve been railing against the futility of trying to figure out why we behave as we do for several decades. Now I’ve come across the clearest explanation yet of why why (or why backward, as I refer to it) is a gigantic can-of-worms question that’s just not useful to ask in regard to behavior change.

This is a long quote from Robert Sapolsky’s book Behave, which, at 717 pages, is also a long book. But so far I find that it’s definitely worth reading.

A behavior just occurred. Why did it happen? Your first category of explanation is going to be a neurobiological one. What went on in that person’s brain a second before the behavior happened? Now pull out to a slightly larger field of vision, your next category of explanation, a little earlier in time. What sight, sound, or smell in the previous seconds to minutes triggered the nervous system to produce that behavior? On to the next explanatory category. What hormones acted hours to days earlier to change how responsive that individual was to the sensory stimuli that trigger the nervous system to produce the behavior? And by now you’ve increased your field of vision to be thinking about neurobiology and the sensory world of our environment and short-term endocrinology in trying to explain what happened.

And you just keep expanding. What features of the environment in the prior weeks to years changed the structure and function of that person’s brain and thus changed how it responded to those hormones and environmental stimuli? Then you go further back to the childhood of the individual, their fetal environment, then their genetic makeup. And then you increase the view to encompass factors larger than that one individual—how has culture shaped the behavior of people living in that individual’s group?—what ecological factors helped shape that culture—expanding and expanding until considering events umpteen millennia ago and the evolution of that behavior.

…

Any given type of explanation is the end product of the influences that preceded it. … If you say, “the behavior occurred because of the release of neurochemical Y in the brain,” you are also saying, “The behavior occurred because the heavy secretion of hormone X this morning increased the levels of neurochemical Y.” You’re also saying, “The behavior occurred because the environment in which that person was raised made her brain more likely to release neurochemical Y in response to certain types of stimuli.” And you’re also saying, “…because of the gene that codes for the particular version of neurochemical Y.” And if you’ve so much as whispered the word “gene,” you’re also saying, “…and because of the millennia of factors that shaped the evolution of that particular gene.” And so on.

It is impossible to conclude that a behavior is caused by a gene, a hormone, a childhood trauma, because the second you invoke one type of explanation, you are de facto invoking them all.

Don’t Ask Me Why I declared in a post on this topic published more than five and a half years ago, in which I commented that it isn’t just that our answers are incomplete and often erroneous…

…once we get an answer that seems satisfying, we close the door on that particular line of inquiry. Once we get a good-enough answer, the cause-and-effect link is cemented into place. Occasionally someone might say, “Well, that’s as good an explanation as any,” but that probably applies to the vast majority of our explanations: one is probably just as good (or bad) as another. Yet we believe in whatever answers we’ve arrived at, and we proceed as if they are the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

It isn’t that I believe there are no answers or explanations to be determined. But as Sapolsky puts it, explanation for any behavior involves a “whole multifactorial arc.” Any given type of explanation is the end product of the influences that preceded it. It’s unlikely you or I are going to have access to all those influences.

So I aim to focus my attention on what questions—and on asking why forward instead of backward.

S Is for Self-Talk

March 8, 2017 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Buddha is supposed to have described the mind as resembling a drunken monkey that’s been stung by a bee. The monkey mind is a restless mind. It chatters incessantly, jumps from thought to thought the way a monkey jumps from tree limb to tree limb, is easily distracted, undisciplined, unquiet, and often confused.

If you’re like the rest of us, you probably have many conflicting wants, needs, and goals but little available mental space in which to sort them out. Most of your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are not even consciously generated. They’re the result of what neuroscientist David Eagleman calls zombie systems.

Your unconscious (System 1) passes along suggestions to consciousness (System 2) that you experience as impressions, intuitions, intentions, and feelings. If System 2 endorses them—which is most of the time—those impressions and feelings turn into beliefs. If System 2 doesn’t veto or modify the impulses generated by System 1, they turn into actions.

Monkey mind is a result of your brain’s wiring. You can’t eliminate the monkeys, but neither do you have to let them run amok. The best way to get them under some degree of control is to start tuning in to your self-talk.

You’re engaging in some variation of self-talk whenever you:

Explain yourself to yourself
Explain external events and other people to yourself
Assign blame
Rationalize
Justify
Judge
React to events and other people
Rehash events
Mentally argue with yourself or others
Come to conclusions
Try to make decisions
Recall past events
Berate yourself
Make comparisons
Make predictions about the future
Encourage yourself
Give yourself directions
Remind yourself or keep a mental to-do list
Rehearse for the future

Much self-talk is not very productive or what you would call positive. But self-talk can have a very powerful effect on you.

Anyone listening in on your internal monologue, particularly in times of nerves, anxiety, or fear, might hear a verbal rabbit hole of unreasonable negativity and self-berating. —Janet Choi

Self-Talk Helps Maintain the Status Quo

The incessant jabbering in your brain is one way System 1 keeps you from veering off course. If you’re satisfied with the course you’re on, thank System 1 for helping you stay on it. If you’re trying to change some aspect of your behavior, however, listening unquestioningly to your self-talk is problematic. It’s part of the ongoing narrative your inner interpreter spins to make sense of your life. It may not seem like a big a deal, but it is. It’s as if you’re being blasted incessantly with so much propaganda from a dictatorial regime that you eventually come to believe it.

Believing your own self-talk can lead to a whole host of additional problems.

Negative Self-Talk Keeps You Down

When your monkeys are in charge, it’s harder to:

Remember
Concentrate
“Do the right thing”
Relax
Learn
Maintain your equanimity
Respond to life’s challenges
Experience joy
Follow through on your intentions
Be present

It’s also easier to:

Make mistakes
Stress out
Get depressed
Make snap judgments
Blow things out of proportion
Lose sight of the bigger picture
Get into arguments
Miss what’s right in front of you
Get hijacked by external (often fleeting) events
Continue unproductive habits

Frequent Negative Self-Talk Can Lead to Rumination

According to Susan Nolen-Hoeksema of Yale University, the definition of rumination is: a tendency to passively think about the meaning, origins, and consequences of your negative emotions.

Rumination isn’t the same as worry. Worry tends to be focused on the future (an anticipated threat), while rumination tends to be focused on the past or present (some form of loss). Almost everyone ruminates from time to time, but rumination has the potential to become a mental habit you can fall into automatically without thinking about it. And habits are notoriously difficult to break.

Rumination feels like problem-solving but it actually prevents you from solving problems because it keeps you focused on negative events and emotions.

Frequent rumination leaves individuals highly vulnerable to several problematic outcomes, particularly future episodes of depression. —Michael Anestis

You can ruminate about external situations and events and about relationships or you can ruminate over your own perceived mistakes and shortcomings (self-rumination).

Addressing Negative Self-Talk

If your self-talk has a tendency to accentuate the negative, you can help yourself avoid getting sucked into the vortex by practicing self-distancing. All that means is getting a little space between you and your self-talk so you are not stuck inside your own head.

Two ways to do that are:

Avoid Talking to Yourself in the First Person
If you use the first person when you talk to yourself, switch to the second- or third-person or address yourself by name. This allows you to gain some perspective regarding the situation. Getting into the habit of using second-person, for example, or addressing yourself directly diminishes the voice of your inner critic.
.
Have a Dialogue with the Wiser You
Assemble paper, pen, and a timer. Begin by asking your Wiser Self a question about the situation (or feelings) at hand. Allow a written dialogue to evolve between you and your Wiser Self. Ask for suggestions and encouragement. Then use your self-talk to give yourself instructions and support.

Some of the bonuses of practicing self-distancing are:

A decrease in rumination
An increase in problem-solving ability
Disruption of the status quo
More self-awareness
Greater confidence

Self-Observation

Tuning in to your self-talk is a good way to find out what’s going on in there (inside your head). The problem is that once you start paying attention to your self-talk, you’ll likely feel an overpowering urge to change it. It’s difficult for us to observe anything without having a judgment about it, so observing your self-talk will take practice.

You can develop the habit of paying attention to your self-talk if you get a pocket-sized notebook to carry with you. When you notice your self-talk, jot down the date, time, and a brief summary of (or comment on) your self-talk. The more often you write in it, the more aware you will become of the way you talk to yourself, what you talk to yourself about, and what effect it has on you.

Remember that Self-Talk Radio is always on the air—so you can tune in any time.

Part of the series A-Z: An Alphabet of Change.

H Is for Habits

December 21, 2016 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Habits are recurring, generally unconscious patterns of behavior you acquire through frequent repetition or that are learned over time. Since they operate outside conscious awareness (and control), you may suddenly discover, as I have, some habits you didn’t know you had.

Your brain creates habits, with or without your conscious participation, in order to operate more efficiently. It chunks repetitive behaviors and turns the chunks over to the basal ganglia so you don’t have to waste your precious and limited System 2 attention on them. So the habit habit is actually a labor-saving device for your brain, which means your brain is primed for habits.

Since we tend to identify with our conscious brain rather than our unconscious, we’re under the illusion that most of what we do is the result of conscious choice (behaviors are preceded by conscious intentions). So you may not be aware of how pervasive habits are in your life.

When a habit emerges, the brain stops fully participating in decision making. It stops working so hard, or diverts focus to other tasks. —Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit

Habits vs. Goals

Habits differ from goals in two significant ways:

Goals are temporary; whether it’s three weeks or three years, there’s always an end point. Habits, on the other hand, are ongoing.
Goals require conscious attention from beginning to completion. Habits, once in place, use System 1 attention. That’s why you may be unaware of some of your habits.

Creating a habit you want (or changing an existing habit) does require conscious attention initially, but only until System 1 takes it over, at which point it is initiated automatically as a result of something in the environment—a cue or a trigger.

Continual repetition of behaviors and thoughts results in highly reinforced neural connections, which are experienced as habits. …By adulthood, most emotional responses and behavioral impulses are conditioned: we think, feel, and behave more or less the same in the same states and social contexts over and over. Habits and the conditioned responses that compose them are processed in the brain in milliseconds, thousands of times faster than conscious decisions. —Steven Stosny, Ph.D.

According to Charles Duhigg, there are three parts to what he refers to as the habit loop: the cue, the routine, and the reward. The cue is what triggers the routine—the beginning of the habit loop—and the reward lets your brain know the loop is complete.

Habits: Good or Bad?

The word “habit” often conjures up the word “bad.” If you think of habits as bad—or as just something inconsequential that you do—you’ll have a harder time creating the habits you want to have.

Whether your habits are “good” or “bad,” they’re all the same to your brain. It doesn’t care what you think of your habits. All it cares about it is being efficient. Do anything often enough and it will become a habit. And habits, by their nature, are hard to change. Trying to exert willpower, using positive thinking, engaging in deep soul searching, or looking for the underlying cause of a habit are all fruitless endeavors. Unfortunately, you can’t have a heart-to-heart with your basal ganglia.

The main reason that conscious control of habits is limited is that it requires the most easily exhaustible and metabolically expensive of mental resources: focused attention. …When resources are limited, people are unable to deliberately choose or inhibit responses, and they become locked into repeating habits. …The autopilot, being virtually inexhaustible, wins the struggle more often. —Steven Stosny

The Value of Habits

It’s easy to see the positive, productive role of habits in the development of a skill or craft—that of a musician, an artist, a writer, a quilter, or a cook, for example. We generally expect that the more a musician practices her instrument, the more dishes a cook prepares, the better they will become at doing those things. A musician is unlikely to attain excellence if she only practices when she’s in the mood for it. Skillful musicians develop the habit of practicing regularly whether they’re in the mood for it or not. And they don’t have to be in the mood for it precisely because they’ve developed the habit. They don’t have to waste conscious attention or drain self-control resources by thinking about or deciding each time whether or not to practice.

Because habits don’t drain self-control resources to the same extent as non-habits, once a behavior becomes a habit, it frees up your conscious attention and makes achieving goals considerably easier. Habits and routines are actually essential to people who need to be creative on a regular basis.

Changing the status quo isn’t easy. The unconscious part of your brain, which might be said to be allergic to change, is way ahead of the conscious part, especially in familiar situations. It’s built to predict what’s likely to happen next, construct multiple response scenarios, and initiate the response it considers the most effective—not the response you consider most effective.

That’s why habits seem to have so much power. They are very familiar to your unconscious, which bases its predictions and responses on previous experience. You may want to go for a walk after dinner, but if you’ve been plopping down on the sofa every evening, your brain is going to “choose” the sofa over the walk. You may want to cut back on the donuts, but if you’re in the habit of grabbing one with your coffee at the office, that’s what your brain is programmed to “choose” to do.

You can make use of the power of habit by learning how to change the ones you don’t want and by creating habits you do want. In order to change an existing habit, you need to identify the cue and the reward and substitute a different behavior (routine) that gives you the same reward. To start a new habit, first decide what the behavior will be, and then choose a reward and a cue. It’s easier to start a new habit if you make the cue something you already do on a regular basis. Charles Duhigg explains the process in his Guide to Changing Habits.

One major caveat: There is no magic number of days that it takes to change or create a habit. But there is a highly effective type of magic you can apply; it’s called perseverance.

Part of the series A-Z: An Alphabet of Change.

Reward Stickers
and the End of Civilization

September 7, 2016 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

If you listen to the dire warnings of the anti-reward-stickers faction, you’ll discover that giving kids reward stickers—or any kind of reward for that matter—is likely to turn them into anti-social schmucks who send their parents off to assisted living as soon as they can get away with it. Someone really said that. That’s because the kids will inevitably become “reward addicts,” which means they’ll need more and more of the reward to be satisfied. And eventually, they won’t be able to function without it.

No one is arguing that rewards don’t work. In fact, experts in the field frequently comment that they work “too well.” But the fact that they work isn’t good enough. One individual with a Ph.D. actually wrote this: “If I went to the doctor with a sore knee, one solution that would end the pain would be to amputate my leg. There is no doubt the solution would work. But it is still the wrong answer.” (Well, there is some doubt the solution would work, given that phantom limb pain is real and a real possibility.)

I’ve written and talked about rewards a lot, so I’m not going to go into the why of them again, except to say that the brain runs on rewards and we can’t change that. Rewards activate memory and learning circuits in the brain. You can figure out the implications. What I want to do is address some of the misguided thinking about rewards (including reward stickers) and behavior change.

Desired Outcome

What both the fellow with the hypothetical sore knee and the rest of the anti-reward folks seem to be missing is a clear definition of their desired outcome. In addition to being painful, a sore knee usually has some negative impact on mobility, so the desired outcome for treatment would include a return to normal function, thus eliminating amputation as a possible solution—and this particular example as a viable refutation of rewards.

So determine what your desired outcome is, and then decide whether or not rewards will help you get it.

Maybe you’re a busy person who wants to pursue your interest in Italian Renaissance art. You might decide that taking a class or spending a certain amount of time each week exploring the subject will help you achieve that outcome. In that case, you could set up a system to reward yourself each time you complete an assignment or spend your weekly allotment of time on your pursuit. Rewards can help you follow through and keep you on track. They can’t help you improve your talent or taste in art or sustain your interest in the subject.

Or maybe you’re a parent who wants to get your kid to develop a bedtime routine that doesn’t involve screaming, crying, or begging. You could set up a system to reward him or her for completing specific tasks. Rewards can definitely help with that, especially if you start small (with one task) and add new tasks one at a time and your kid is into the reward. But rewards can’t get him or her to love getting ready for bed, and it’s unrealistic to expect them to.

Intrinsic Motivation

All of the experts opining on the subject seem to believe that (1) kids should be intrinsically motivated to do the right thing—meaning whatever it is the adults want them to do—and (2) being intrinsically motivated will affect their behavior (i.e., will cause them to, in fact, do the right thing).

There should be a collective hysterical burst of laughter right about now. I’m an adult. You’re an adult. We can’t even get ourselves to do things we’ve decided we want to do when we’re crystal clear about the benefits of doing them and the consequences of not doing them. Why would we expect kids to behave better than we do?

Intrinsic motivation is a tricky concept, anyway, because it’s tied up with should. I should want to do this because it’s the right (healthy/ appropriate/ considerate/ responsible, etc.) thing to do. And you should want to do it, too. Some people are more bound by what they should do than others. They follow the rules. Whether they’re adults or kids, they generally cause less trouble. From the outside, they appear to be intrinsically motivated, but they’re not. The point is that I can’t tell what your motivation is for doing something and you can’t tell what my motivation is.

And being intrinsically motivated is no guarantee that anyone, adult or child, will follow through. Motivation and action are not one and the same, much to the disappointment of people who’ve paid hundreds or thousands of dollars to get motivated. Adding extrinsic motivation to the mix doesn’t conflict with the intrinsic motivation. It provides an extra boost and can help you deal with System 1’s siren calls of distraction and immediate gratification.

A couple of weeks ago, I described my current reward sticker routine for completing the same four tasks once in the morning and a second time before going to bed. They’re all things I want to do (am intrinsically motivated to do) and that I was doing more often than not. But since I wasn’t doing every single thing twice every single day, I decided to try the gold stars. That was my desired outcome, by the way: to do the four things twice a day. Period. And I would know I did them by the number of stars on my calendar. The extrinsic reward stickers have been just the boost I needed to get to—and so far to stay at—100% completion.

Maybe you’re intrinsically motivated to do a particular thing. If you are doing it, congratulations! But if you aren’t following through to your satisfaction, add an extrinsic reward to the process.

Maybe your kid wants to learn to play an instrument (is intrinsically motivated), but doesn’t always feel like practicing. Add an extrinsic reward for following through on the practice schedule and see if that increases his or her practice time.

For both adults and kids, reward stickers are easy. You get a visual record of a series of successes that encourages you to keep the chain intact. But you can use anything that works.

Behavior change is not easy, for kids or adults. But it’s important to recognize that the concepts we have about how we should go about changing behavior need to be balanced against how our brain actually operates. Our brain wants a treat. So we can decide what kind of treat to give it or we can let it choose its own treats. See Eating the Entire Bag of Potato Chips.