[The Psychology of Habituation: Why We Get Used to Everything and How to See Again]-[Making the World Sparkle Again]

Hidden Brain · B2 · 2024-06-24

📋 Summary

The Psychology of Habituation: Understanding the Hedonic Treadmill and Beyond

In our daily lives, we often find that the excitement of new experiences—whether it's a new home, a job, or a romantic relationship—inevitably fades. This phenomenon, known as habituation, is a fundamental property of the human brain. As cognitive neuroscientist Tali Sharot explains in her book Look Again, our brains are evolutionarily designed to filter out the old and expected to focus on the novel and potentially threatening. While this mechanism serves an adaptive purpose, it has profound implications for our happiness, our moral compass, and our societal progress.

The Mechanism of Habituation

Habituation is the brain's way of conserving limited resources. By responding less to stimuli that are constant or frequent, the brain frees up capacity to detect new threats or opportunities—like the "smell of smoke" or a "rustle in the bushes." Sharot notes that this occurs across all levels of perception, from the sensory (eventually not smelling the roses in a room) to the emotional (no longer feeling the thrill of a new job).

This is closely linked to the "hedonic treadmill," the theory that humans return to a baseline level of happiness regardless of positive or negative life events. However, Sharot emphasizes that habituation is broader than just happiness; it is a fundamental neural adaptation that affects how we perceive the world around us.

The Power of "Dishabituation"

To recapture the joy of ordinary life, Sharot proposes the concept of dishabituation: the act of intentionally interrupting our routines to force the brain to notice and respond again.

The Power of "Firsts": Research at resorts shows that happiness peaks around 43 hours into a vacation because everything is a "first." To maximize joy, Sharot suggests taking shorter, frequent breaks rather than one long, extended period, as this creates more "firsts" and prevents the dulling effect of constant exposure.
Breaking Up Experiences: Counterintuitively, studies show that people enjoy experiences like music or massages more when they are interrupted. As economist Tibor Scitovsky noted, "pleasure results from incomplete and intermittent satisfaction of desires."
Environmental Change: Simply moving to a different room or taking a walk can reset our perspective and enhance creativity, even if the effect lasts only for a short window of time.

The Dark Side of Habituation: Risk, Dishonesty, and Society

While habituation numbs us to pleasure, it can be dangerous when it numbs us to negative stimuli.

Risk and Disasters: In hazardous work environments, workers often become desensitized to danger over time. Sharot’s virtual reality research shows that people who habituate faster to fear are more likely to engage in risky behaviors in real life. This explains why many industrial disasters occur at the end of projects—people have simply habituated to the risks.
The Slippery Slope of Dishonesty: Through experiments, Sharot found that people habituate to their own lying. Initial acts of dishonesty trigger a strong emotional response in the amygdala, but this response diminishes with each subsequent lie, allowing individuals to progress from small deceptions to major corruption.
Societal Normalization: This process applies to societies as well. Authoritarianism, misinformation, and climate change often escalate gradually. Because the changes are incremental, the public’s emotional outrage remains weak. As seen with the history of Nazi Germany, when oppression grows slowly, it elicits far less resistance than if it were sudden.

Conclusion: Relying on Instruments over Intuition

Because our perceptions are prone to habituation, they are often unreliable for navigating complex societal issues like climate change. Sharot argues that we must stop relying solely on our feelings and start relying on instruments and data. Much like a pilot suffering from vertigo who must trust their cockpit instruments over their own physical sensation of "flying up," we must trust external data to alert us to dangers that our habituated minds have learned to ignore. By understanding the mechanisms of our own brains, we can learn when to savor the good and when to disrupt our complacency to address the bad.

🎯Key Sentences

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📝Key Phrases

take for granted

grapple with

fade away

blow one's mind

get settled

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📖 Transcript

This is HiddenBrain, I'm ShankarVedanta.

In March2020, a few weeks after COVID-19 lockdowns began in theUS, we asked listeners to send us voice memos about their experiences of thepandemic.

We recently went back and listened to thosemessages, each one a tiny time capsule of life in a world on alockdown.

Listeners told us about the stress of trying to find toilet paper andmasks.

They talked about the challenge of trying to work overZoom.

And more thananything, they grappled with thesudden, shocking ways in which their lives had become smaller and moreisolated.

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