Habits, where we came from and where we're going.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my habitual behaviors. Perhaps it’s sitting on the cusp of the wrong side of 30, maybe it’s the continuing glut of neuroscience literature to read, it could even just be a side effect of considering exactly what I want the rest of my life to look like; in any event the idea of the function and features of our habits has been in the forefront of my mind. Both good and bad, I am who I am because of and despite my habits. Some I would certainly like to change (I am excellent at sinking many of the opportunities I create, cannot seem to help it) and some I would certainly like to reinforce (I love feeding my habit of being active) but in either case it’s definitely worth a look as to what our patterned behavior actually is.

The habits we dislike may be considered our flaws, but they do not stem from some inherent weakness. Evolution necessarily shaped our minds to function on autopilot for as many operations as possible, programmed for basic survival and the opportunity to flourish. It makes perfect evolutionary sense for our ancestors to voraciously feast on anything available – where and when would the next meal be? The same goes with all of our animal habits of consumption be they drugs, sex, relationships, listening to pop music, collecting shoes, whatever: if you’re unsure when the next drought or saber toothed thing might come for you of course you’ll want to get while the getting is good.

The scarcity argument aside, remember just how automatic our ancestors were. Unless you’re in the creationist camp you probably believe that we evolved our mental abilities over thousands of years. While there are different theories of the evolution of our consciousness, it seems most reasonable that we ever so slowly gained some sort of independence from our automatic functioning and responses. As mentioned in yesterday’s post we didn’t just wake up with our full complement of cognitive powers – more likely we developed conscious access to ourselves on a strictly need-it-to-survive basis.

Further, just because we developed the potential to overcome our basic responses we still have to understand how fragile our store of willpower actually is. The idea may be a bit confusing but consider what happens the minute we’re compromised in any way (think hungry, angry, lonely, tired). Our lizard brains take right back over – how many diets have fallen to the stress of the holidays? How many bad relationships have been re-consummated when we’re not at 100%? Why do you think a bad day drives many people to the bar? The wash of chemicals we get from these behaviors on some level reinforces our most primal instincts for comfort and satiety.
The only difference now is that it isn’t the loss of half our tribe or threat of mammoth stampede that drives us, but our modern society. Between the business world wanting us uncomfortable (because consumers don’t consume when they are happy) and modern media telling us we aren’t beautiful or rich enough (because we aren’t like who we see, hear about etc.), we’re always in a somewhat compromised state.

There’s also the trouble of sophistication – at basic we do fit the hedonist principle of seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. While we have as a race developed some additional powers of discernment we still do live by the maxim of getting the most of what we like and avoid as much of what we don’t as possible. It’s easy to want to disagree, it can be argued that even altruism can be considered part of this principle – we help other people at the expense of ourselves because it brings us more pleasure than the alternative of not providing altruistic service. We simply haven’t evolved enough to be able to push our higher values into our animal wiring.

It doesn’t seem so confusing then that we struggle with changing our habitual behavior; even in our best case scenario the fight is not only with our internal wiring but the external forces of society. The next time you’re ready to get down on yourself or someone else for what they are or are not able to change (or just how they are), it’s important to remember what we as humans in modern society are still ill equipped to navigate our situation. We’re wired to overdo it (scarcity principle) on a very basic system of needs (pleasure v. pain) with a consciousness that requires optimal conditions to transcend such predispositions (which is made even more difficult by continual comparison to some fantastical state of existence which no one being can hope to achieve). Where our peculiar habits come from is a topic for another day, but remember when you’re struggling to change yourself you’re fighting against not only your own lizard self but a world that often wishes to play on that that primal response for financial or personal gain. We are way more imperfect than we often like to think, so cut yourself or your loved one a break, we are truly doing the best we can with the little that we’re given.

It's not that we're dumb, just badly evolved

At first blush our brains are incredibly lazy. Even if the old adage that we only use 10% of it were true it would only seem to be because the other 90% has no desire to get off the couch. When I look at all the ways our minds deceive us, the shortcuts in logic, our problems with misperception how can I not wonder why we forget our keys in the door, our glasses on our head, miss the gorilla dancing through the frame. Why would this be so? Why haven’t we evolved more acute powers of observation? Why can’t we all behave as though we’re on our NZT-48 (Limitless, a better concept than movie but now streaming on Netflix anyway) all the time? How come we cannot comprehend more information, why do we make such obvious mistakes? This is not a new question and answering it would require far longer than the scope of this article, but it’s important to remember that we are way closer to our Cro-Magnon ancestors than we like to admit. It is not our minds that are lazy so much as evolution is efficient in changing as little as possible while ensuring our survival.

Consider how the evolution of our consciousness must have proceeded – it wasn’t as though we magically woke up endowed with the powers we have today. No, more likely we picked up exactly and only what we needed to survive, expanding our inner space as our increasing comfort and safety allowed. It makes some pretty basic sense that being endowed with the concept for division doesn’t help when the mammoth is bearing down on you and your flint and hide spear. More likely we acquired our concept of numbers from pack hunting, matching the number of animals to be hunted or planning coverage tactics and developing more abstract operations only as we had the leisure to ponder in safety. I would love to know exactly the steps between learning to count and developing currency systems, the evolution of mind had to occur. I hope one day we can at least construct such a timeline but in the meanwhile it’s at least important to point out that for a long stretch of our evolution having additional cognitive powers doesn’t provide nearly the advantage that being able to swing a club more ably than everyone else would.

Remember though that while our conscious cognition may be often severely lacking it is only because of the limitations of our conscious mind in relation to amount of sense data that is available to be perceived. We take in about two million bits of information but can only consciously process 134 bits per second. That’s a serious issue of scope and quite the burden for any mind to consider. It’s also the most likely the reason why our conscious mind is so terrible with willpower and attention; we’re so busy dealing with the other two million (.0067%) bits how can we possibly expect to right even most of the time? I’m amazed that we’ve progressed as a society as far as we have and removes some of the surprise I get when I read Literally Unbelievable; still entertaining, just less surprising.

And that’s just the information coming through our senses, saying nothing of the internal processes that we take for granted. Consider how difficult it is to control your breath, a feature that is at once both automatic and within our conscious control. As any beginning meditator or yogin (or just someone upset) can tell you simply breathing with some control is one of the most difficult things to do on command. But that isn’t all your mind is always responsible for; it also digests your food, beats your heart, filters your impurities and regulates your body temperature among the countless other things you do without realizing it. It’s not a far leap then to realize that more likely our cognitive abilities were carved out as best as our adaptation allowed – we’ve always been working at capacity, it just so happens that we’ve managed to get efficient enough to allow some behavior that we think we control above and beyond the old fight or flight.

Basically nature made us extremely flawed, but good enough as a group to make everything that we see before us. What we perceive as an actively thinking mind is for most if not all of us as primal as we can possibly possess while still living and growing hair. As mentioned in the brilliant movie Waking Life the difference between Aristotle and common man is grater than the difference between common man the ape. It may sound inflammatory but really makes some painful intuitive sense: since we’re operating near capacity at each waking moment, it stands to reason that such deviations in prowess from the average are the exception rather than the rule.

Our failures in cognition are perhaps even less surprising when you consider how poorly we reason under stress (see the phenomenon of Controlled Flight into Terrain) or in emotional circumstances. Suffice it for today to remember just how primal we actually are and in actuality just how few resources we have allocated in our minds for reason and logic. When you figure in issues such as habitual behaviors (created to free up cognitive space) and brain damage from environment, injury or consumption it makes so much more sense to praise effort rather than outcome. We succeed despite our wiring, not because of it, which is something to remember the next time your frustration at ineptitude surfaces; we’re all in the same kind of badly built glass house.