Routines, rituals, recurring movements … Our daily life is dotted with sequences of actions experienced by repetition. More than comfort, this system where the will is placed on pause is essential for the activity of our brain.
Liberating mechanics
Monday morning, breakfast swallowed, cleansed dishes, child deposited in school. In the blink of an eye, we meet in the office. The daily journey seems to have been elected. How did we get there? The answer is in the hollow of our synapses, these paths that connect our neurons. As with all mammals, our brain is built on rehearsal: we learn while trying, failing. Then learning becomes a habit. However, it is difficult to decipher the user manual for an action that has become usual: how do we read, do we have a bicycle, do we have our laces? Gestures go beyond thought, our habits lead dance. It is by studying neurodegenerative diseases, but also the great apes, that the neurologist and neurobiologist Pierre Burbaud became interested in the manufacture of habits and their essential role for the activity of our gray matter. In The brain of habits (Ed. Odile Jacob), he takes us on an exciting cortical journey.
When he planned in the first year of medicine, the young Pierre Burbaud had a method to absorb knowledge. To walk. The fact of practicing this harmless, so usual action, learned in early childhood, released mental space to fix its memory. “The subcortical operating mode becomes aware with the cortex. To act properly, the brain must sometimes emerge from the principle of will. ” Unlike the adage, the young man who has become a teacher considers that we use 100 % of our brain daily and that what allows this great stimulation is the activation of automatic piloting: habit. “She frees us to work on a daily basis. The difference with the PLC is that it is corrected. You make your usual trip by car, your brain is in automatic piloting, something unexpected is happening, and you change your trajectory. “
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Recognized paths
You have to imagine the human brain as a forest. A mass of 100 billion neurons, interconnected by 10. 000 microscopic extensions, synapses. Imagine that you are in an undergrowth and that several paths are available to you. One is delimited, it has been borrowed a lot, the other is brushy. Without thinking, you take the first: that’s a habit. “The repetition of the passage in a neural circuit, long -term potentiation, will strengthen the connection. It is the basis of procedural memory, that of know-how, habits, whether motor or cognitive, “explains the neurologist. This is why we never forget to cycle, mental calculation, to be polite: “They are inscribed in the deep structures of memory.”
Dopamine and derivation
To make these connections come true, dopamine has a regulator role. And when it does not affect properly, as in people affected by Parkinson or severely depressed, the automatic pilot is deregulated: “The person is“ frozen ”on the spot and must make a conscious effort to carry out each action.” With the help of dopamine, which acts on the circuits of motivation, pleasure and reward, good habits as Sunday jogging have the same physical reality as bad, like morning cigarettes. “What is hard with smoking cessation is not to lose nicotine, but to lose the habit of smoking which, too, has an anxiolytic action and against which there is no patch.” According to the neurologist, if drugs can support the patient in the fight against addiction or to OCD, it is action that really changes neural circuits. You have to find a derivative, another gestural habit. “To have a good setback in tennis, you must have tried, missed, felt the right gesture in your muscles … This is why you have to encourage young children in their learning, show them where they have sinned, so that they learn to select good deeds,” says Pierre Burbaud.