Hello, Habits

by Fumio Sasaki

  But our awareness is called up when there’s an issue before us that we should worry about. For example, no one considers the question of whether to receive a hundred dollars or a thousand dollars an “issue” to worry about; we can make an instant decision without using our cognitive ability. It’s when there are similar values in front of us, and we need to think about which is worth more, that we start to worry. Do we receive one apple today, or do we receive two apples tomorrow?

  “Actions that we take with barely a thought,” without calling up our awareness: I think that’s what habits are. What then is this “awareness” that’s called up when we worry about a lot of things?

  How can people start to act well—stop themselves from eating the marshmallow—without using their awareness? How can they turn things they consciously want to do into habits? Let’s take a close look at this in Chapter 2.

  Summary of Chapter 1

  •Hyperbolic discounting is the human tendency to exaggerate rewards in front of us and to minimize our estimation of rewards (and punishment) in the future, making it tough to acquire good habits.

  •From school performance to character, children who waited twenty minutes in order to receive an extra marshmallow in the marshmallow test demonstrated high capacities in various things once they grew up—but that doesn’t necessarily mean they had a fixed, “strong willpower” from an early age.

  •Willpower is not something that decreases when you simply do something.

  •Willpower is affected by emotions and lost because of uncertainty and doubt. Even if you do something that requires willpower, you won’t lose it, as long as you have a sense of self-esteem.

  •The human brain has a cool system that’s logical and a hot system that’s emotional, and these systems counteract one another.

  •The hot system can be controlled when we look at the things in front of us in a new way, for example, when we use the cognitive capacity in our cool system to think of marshmallows as clouds.

  •Since we cannot eliminate our emotions, our willpower will always continue to be unreliable. And the cool system can always be manipulated to make deliberate lies and convenient excuses.

  •People with “strong” willpower were not even aware that they were being tempted in the first place.

  •The question of which reward is greater becomes an issue that we worry about if we have to call up our awareness.

  •Habits are actions that we take with barely a thought. To make something a habit, it’s necessary to reduce the emergence of our awareness.

  CHAPTER 2

  WHAT ARE HABITS?

  There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation. Full half the time of such a man goes to the deciding, or regretting, of matters which ought to be so ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his consciousness at all.

  —William James

  I wrote at the end of Chapter 1 that habits are actions that we take with barely a thought.

  My belief is that when something is a habit, you’re as close to acting without conscious thought as possible. In such a state, no concerns or decisions exist as to whether or not to act, and there are no choices about methods to take. This is because concerns, decisions, and choices are all issues that we handle in our conscious mind.

  According to a study done at Duke University, 45 percent of our actions are habits rather than decisions made on the spot. A question comes to mind when we say that we should be thinking consciously to determine most of our actions, like whether to have curry or ramen noodles for lunch, or which movie to see on our day off. If habits are “actions we take with barely a thought,” then isn’t 45 percent a large percentage?

  But while there may be some who can’t make up their minds about which restaurant to go to for lunch, do people seriously contemplate whether or not they’ll “start with a beer” when they go to a bar?

  Habits from the time we get up in the morning

  Let’s think about our actions after we wake up in the morning. We get up from bed, go to the bathroom, and take a shower. We eat breakfast, brush our teeth, get dressed, tie our shoelaces, and leave the house.

  Everyone has a unique set of procedures, and isn’t our morning flow like a ritual from the moment that we get up?

  We don’t usually think about how much toothpaste to use when we brush our teeth or which tooth to start with, and we don’t think about how we’re going to tie our shoelaces that day. Since we can do these things without thinking, there should be few people who consider their morning ritual difficult or an effort. We can say that these things are habits for most adults.

  But for small children, this series of actions in the morning takes a lot of effort. They can’t go to the bathroom by themselves, there are obstacles to brushing their teeth, buttoning their clothes, and tying their shoelaces, and it takes tremendous patience to overcome them. They might exhaust their willpower even before leaving their homes, and sulk in bed. But they’ll be able to do these things automatically after continued repetitions. These are mostly subconscious movements for adults, and we can’t understand why it’s difficult for children to do them.

  Can you explain every tap you make on your smartphone?

  Of course, there are things we have to learn after we grow up. Last year, I started driving a car again for the first time in eighteen years, after obtaining my license. At first, I was going through each procedure in my head—fasten the seat belt, step on the brakes, turn the key, release the hand brake, shift the gear from “park” to “drive.” I’m now driving a more complicated manual-transmission car, but my hands and feet move without the need to think about anything, and it’s tough to explain each procedure in this way.

  Before I became used to driving, there was a need to focus my awareness, and I felt like I was looking at an incredible god when I saw anyone driving while they listened to music. But I can now drive without thinking about it while directing my attention chiefly to my English audio study material.

  It’s probably the same with people who ride a bicycle. Even if they don’t drive a car, perhaps it’s difficult for them to explain the procedure of how to pedal a bike, or offer tips on maintaining your balance. I wonder if people who are always tapping on their smartphones are able to explain, without using their hands, how they’re entering each vowel or consonant.

  People who cook or drive while sleepwalking

  As a child I was terrified of cracking eggs—I was always nervous, like I was handling something incredibly precious. I think I had my awareness working to a considerable degree the first time that I cooked eggs sunny-side up. How much oil to use, how strong the heat should be. Now I no longer have to do a recipe search for eggs sunny-side up, or for hard-boiled eggs; my hands move automatically.

  My mother knows how to cook an array of dishes, and even if we’re in the middle of dinner, if the neighbors bring something over, she can cook it right away. She doesn’t need to check recipes on cooking sites, and she doesn’t need to measure the seasonings. She says she can come up with ideas about what to cook when she looks at ingredients. She also says she’s never thought it “troublesome” to cook. Those of us who don’t often cook think it’s “troublesome” because we’re pondering the procedures, which is proof that our awareness is at work. My mother can cook without giving it a second thought; that’s probably why she doesn’t think it’s troublesome.

  Sleepwalking patients sometimes cook or drive during deep non-REM sleep, and they don’t remember these actions later on. While the part of the brain that monitors these movements is asleep, the part that directs complicated actions is working. In other words, people can act in complicated ways, even if they aren’t “aware.”

  I don’t think ants are supposed to have a cognitive awareness
, either, but they dig holes, carry sand, and always work hard. Ants don’t need business books. They can work without relying on things like motivation or enthusiasm.

  Awareness is like a newspaper

  It’s possible to take complicated actions without cognitive awareness. On the other hand, this awareness is what we usually think of as making us “ourselves.” It lets us perceive the beautiful scenery in front of us, and it causes us to care about the things that people say to us.

  What in the world is this cognitive awareness that people have?

  In his book, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, neuroscientist David Eagleman says the conscious mind is like a newspaper.

  This is what happens every day in a given country: Factories are in operation and companies deliver their products. The police track criminals, doctors conduct operations, and lovers go on dates. Electricity flows through power lines, and waste is passed through sewers. But people have neither the ability nor the desire to know about all events that are going on in their country. That’s why there’s a need to summarize only the important things, and that’s why we have newspapers.

  In a newspaper headline, we don’t expect to find out the amount of grass that such-and-such a number of cows in the country ate yesterday, or how many thousands of cows were shipped; we only want to be warned if there’s a sudden rise in the incidence of mad cow disease. We don’t want to know how many tons of garbage were disposed of yesterday; we only want to know if a new waste processing plant will be set up in our neighborhood.

  In the same way, it isn’t as if our conscious mind wants to process all the details of what’s happening in the sixty trillion cells in our bodies, or the interactions of electric signals in the thousands of neurons within us. While the brain processes 11 million bits of information every second, it’s estimated that only 50 bits of information are processed in our conscious mind. Like a newspaper reporter, the neural circuit in our brain gathers massive amounts of data behind the scenes in our subconscious mind. And as with a newspaper, only the summaries are delivered to our conscious mind.

  Awareness is like a newspaper.

  Which shoe did you put on first this morning, the right or the left?

  Your awareness is not called up when you’re repeating the same actions as always, without any problems—just as no articles are produced about an ordinary subject if there are no incidents. The reason why it’s tough to correct habits like crossing your legs or slouching is because they occur without your awareness.

  Few people clearly remember which shoe they put on first this morning, their right or their left. It’s because the question of which shoe to put on first isn’t determined by your conscious mind; it’s generally already decided.

  Neuroscientist Yuji Ikegaya offers an interesting example. “We can always see our nose, but we aren’t conscious of it.” True, our nose is always in our field of vision, and we can see it if we desire. But it isn’t the type of news that has to be printed in a newspaper.

  Times when our conscious mind is called up

  Let’s imagine a situation where our conscious mind is called up. Think about when you walk. We have more than two hundred bones in our bodies, more than a hundred joints, and four hundred skeletal muscles, and each of these parts works in close coordination with the others. The reason why it’s tough to make a robot walk is because you need to program and teach it everything, from how to move and angle each individual part, to how to use feedback from the soles of the feet to determine and adjust to the surface of the floor.

  We don’t need to have a conscious thought about walking; we can stroll at our leisure.

  But even then, our awareness will be called up if we step on something tender.

  Squish. “What was that? Dang!”

  The newspaper when you have a stomachache

  I’m sure that everyone has experienced getting a stomachache at school. Even if it happens during a class in which you’re usually happy to kill time spacing out, dozing off, or doodling, the situation will suddenly change. A newspaper headline will be delivered to your conscious mind:

  “Abnormality in the stomach. Possibility of a stomachache.”

  “Determined as a stomachache. Is it because I ate too much at lunch?”

  “Thirty minutes remaining in class. What will happen to the stomachache issue?”

  “Respite in stomachache, leading to moments of peace.”

  A lot of newspapers get delivered—our conscious mind is called up frequently—which means we can’t concentrate, and the usual duration of time seems terribly long. Just as newspaper headlines are only made when incidents occur, our awareness is only called up when something different happens.

  Do people have free will?

  While they may be aware of their actions, they are ignorant of the causes by which they are determined.

  —Baruch Spinoza

  Surely awareness is what leads our mind. It considers things and determines our actions. But most day-to-day actions are taken not according to directions given by our leaders, but instead by the townspeople, on their own initiative.

  You’re doing something and feel tired. You stretch without being aware of it; you don’t think, “Okay, I’ll raise the palms of the hands I’ve clasped together and stretch.” It isn’t the leader who decided that you would stretch.

  A famous experiment conducted during the 1980s by physiologist Benjamin Libet shows how unreliable this leader, awareness, can be. The people who participated moved their fingers (or their wrists) whenever they wanted, and records were taken of their brain activity, to determine:

  1.The moment that each subject made the decision to move the fingers

  2.The moment that a command signal for motion occurred in the brain

  3.The moment that the fingers actually moved

  The results? Surprisingly, the sequence of events turned out to be 2 > 1 > 3. The command signal for motion occurred an average of 0.35 seconds before the subjects thought they’d made their decision. The brain started to prepare to move the fingers before the subjects decided to do so.

  This experiment gathered a lot of attention; it had the potential to refute the idea of free will. But actions can never be incurred from nothing, and there must be some type of brain activity that occurs before the action.

  Who’s the DJ that chooses which tunes to hum?

  What about humming? Humming is different from making a selection on a jukebox or at a karaoke bar. With a jukebox, you make a conscious choice about what song you’d like to listen to or sing along to. But I doubt that anyone thinks, “Which song shall I sing?” before they hum a tune that comes to mind naturally.

  Sometimes the songs I hum are simply those that happened to be playing at the supermarket that I just went to; I’m not in the least bit interested in singing them. These are songs that the DJ in a place beyond my awareness has gone ahead and chosen.

  Consider our intestines. There are more than a hundred million nerve cells in a person’s intestines, which are connected to the brain through the vagus nerve. But even if the vagus nerve were to be cut off, the intestines would still make independent decisions. Thus, the gut is sometimes called “the second brain.” But can you imagine your stomach being your second in command?

  Our actions are determined by something like a parliamentary system

  It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried.

  —Winston Churchill

  Unconscious actions are determined on a case-by-case basis, but not by an absolute monarchy. We might think of it as a parliamentary system.

  Let’s take getting up in the morning as an example. The alarm clock rings at the time you decided on beforehand, when you said you would “get up at such-and-such time, starting tomorrow.” But when the alarm actually goes off, it’s not the end of the matter; instead, it’s a signal that parliament is about to convene.

  Politicians assemble fr
om various parts of your body, and the session gets under way. Your lower back has awakened, and you have a little pain there. Because of that, the politician elected from the lower back region grumpily says, “We should still be asleep.” You also ate too much at an event last might. The politician that from the gut region says, “Let us slowly digest.”

  It’s time to vote, and the majority vote is to “get some more sleep.” You hit the snooze button—a decision has been made to sleep for five more minutes. More votes take place every five minutes, until the parts of you that want to eat a nice breakfast or want to get to work on time gradually become more persuasive. And finally, despite all the fuss, you get out of bed.

  When an unconscious action has become a habit

  Once getting up early has become a habit, the motion to “get up right away” is passed in a short period with majority vote, despite a little opposition.

  It’s important to understand that parliament will still be held, even if you did everything right to prepare to make a good decision, and opposing opinions won’t stop being presented completely. I make sure to get plenty of sleep, but of course, there are times when I can get up feeling clear and refreshed and times when I don’t feel like that at all.

  When I don’t want to get up, I always think the same thing: “Maybe I’ve accumulated fatigue.” I have this thought constantly, and I sometimes wonder if I can trust the idea that it’s time to start my day, even if that thought is also coming from me.