An M.I.T. neuroscientist named Ann Graybiel told...

An M.I.T. neuroscientist named Ann Graybiel told me that she and her colleagues began exploring habits more than a decade ago by putting their wired rats into a T-shaped maze with chocolate at one end. The maze was structured so that each animal was positioned behind a barrier that opened after a loud click. The first time a rat was placed in the maze, it would usually wander slowly up and down the center aisle after the barrier slid away, snifﬁng in corners and scratching at walls. It appeared to smell the chocolate but couldn’t ﬁgure out how to ﬁnd it. There was no discernible pattern in the rat’s meanderings and no indication it was working hard to find the treat.

The probes in the rats’ heads, however, told a different story. While each animal wandered through the maze, its brain was working furiously. Every time a rat sniffed the air or scratched a wall, the neurosensors inside the animal’s head exploded with activity. As the scientists repeated the experiment, again and again, the rats eventually stopped snifﬁng corners and making wrong turns and began to zip through the maze with more and more speed. And within their brains, something unexpected occurred: as each rat learned how to complete the maze more quickly, its mental activity decreased. As the path became more and more automatic — as it became a habit — the rats started thinking less and less.

- Charles Duhigg, via How Companies Learn Your Secrets

[…] Tell me this doesn’t explain everything about everything. via alexbaca

Bingo. via the browncoat

I need to find a way to work this M.I.T. story into FToM :P I think it’s easy to assume that people get addicted to the freedom of travel and the romantic idea of new places; but, the truth is, at least on a cross country bicycle trip through the United States, things are flat and quiet… the small towns you see over and over and over again don’t look all that different than the small town you grew up in.

But, like this quote says, it’s all new to you - and it makes no difference if the fields of tall-grass look *exactly* the same as the fields of tall-grass behind your house, they are a new place, and although you can’t feel the furiously active neurosensors in your mind in the way you can feel the wind on your face, something is different inside you… you feel, not “alive”, because that can mean too many things to too many people, but you feel awake.

And that might be the hardest part of coming home… the winding down.

The New York Times