5 tricks your brain uses to keep you in the grip of a bad habit

[Lord777]

A bad habit can ruin your life. You perfectly understand this and really want to get rid of it, but ... nothing comes of it. Want to know why?
And because your brain knows many clever ways to keep you at the mercy of your habits.

1. Your brain thinks you are "the future" of a completely different person
You know that tomorrow, at exactly 8:00 am, you will have to take an important exam. And, nevertheless, it is already one in the morning, and you are still in aimless wanderings through the back streets of the Internet. Mind you, of course, understand that it is high time to go to bed and that tomorrow your night vigil will come out sideways, but on a subconscious level, "tomorrow's version" of yourself seems to you a completely different person. The one tomorrow will deal with the consequences; and today's will watch some more action movie.

One scientific study found that when we think about ourselves and about other people, completely different parts of our gray matter are activated. This is quite understandable - the brain assigns different shares to its beloved and to everyone else, because, first of all, it thinks about its own needs. The strange thing is that for some people, when thinking about themselves in the future, those areas that were reserved for "outsiders" were activated.

So how do you now motivate yourself to give up the bun and go to the gym? You can convince yourself as much as you like that soon not a single pair of pants will be buttoned on you, but since your brain refuses to associate itself with tomorrow's fat man, it will manipulate your subconscious mind to once again enjoy fragrant pastries.

2. It takes about ten weeks to form a stable "good" habit.
Let's say you have one or two bad habits that you definitely need to get rid of. You decide to start by acquiring a few good ones, because, as you know, the surest way to overcome an addiction is to supplant it with another addiction. You buy a membership to a local gym, and plan to train three times a week and finally defeat the passion for cakes. Or beer. Or something else.

How long do you think you will have to force yourself until training becomes an integral part of your life? And how soon will exercise start to be enjoyable?

According to one study, it takes about 66 days to form a habit. During this time, conscious effort and compulsion become automatic. So if you decide to make friends with the treadmill, keep in mind that only after two months it will turn from torture into a routine.

During these two months, all sorts of obstacles and slingshots will constantly stand in your way. Then you catch a cold, then you have to stay late at work ... And that's all. The end of a good habit and a return to the old "harmful" joys - because the latter have long been formed and built into your life.

This does not happen because your brain wishes you harm - it just loves performance, and bad habits are always effective. And the result he achieves is this: turn your life into a set of repetitive actions that can be done on autopilot, develop, based on the experience, a set of rules that would allow you to live life, spending a minimum of energy. Everything.

Therefore, if you want to disrupt the usual course of your life, you will have to be very difficult. About two months.

3. Willpower is a limited resource
If you nevertheless firmly decided, for example, to run every morning, and are tuned in to a long struggle with yourself, we consider it our duty to warn you: the greatest danger on your path to perfection is not all sorts of circumstances beyond your control, but ... lack of motivation. That is, if, say, you run every morning and can already boast of certain successes, then at some point you may decide that you deserve a break.

It turns out that the more often and longer people resist their desires, the less willpower they have left to resist the subsequent desire. In psychology, this phenomenon is called "depletion of willpower."

During the experiment, the scientists asked one group of students to memorize a two-digit number and another seven-digit number. Then the participants from both groups were offered a choice between cake and fruit salad. Amazingly, students who memorized the seven-digit number chose cakes twice as often. That is, in order to significantly reduce willpower and throw away the white flag, it is enough to remember some five extra numbers.

Then the scientists conducted another experiment, in which they approached the same problem from the other side: the volunteers were shown two dishes - one with freshly made cookies, and the other with radishes. Half of the participants were pre-instructed to take a cookie, the other half to take a radish. After that, everyone was asked to solve a complex geometric puzzle. Those who took the radish abandoned the task after eight minutes, and those who got the cookies fought on the puzzle for a full 19 minutes.

Despite the fact that the task did not require any physical effort, the refusal of the delicious cookies took away from the participants some of the energy that could be spent on the task.

4. The brain uses your successes as an excuse to indulge itself.
For one recent study, scientists assembled a group of dieters who had already made notable gains. The volunteers were divided into two groups. Some were praised for their successes on the way to achieving their ideal, others were not told anything special.

Both groups were then offered the choice between an apple and a chocolate bar as a thank you gift for participating in the study. 85 percent of those who were praised chose chocolate, while in the second group, only 58 percent of the participants preferred chocolate.

Those to whom they sang praises decided that they had every right to reward themselves once for their successes, while others humbly chewed apples.

In other words, recognizing success is the first step to failure.

If the "celebration" was limited to just one chocolate bar, this would not be a big problem. But ... ask any person who has climbed out of any addiction, and he will confirm that "once" almost always turns into a whole stream of small defeats, and before you have time to look back, not a trace remains of your successes ...

As we already said, the brain prefers the old, familiar, and therefore less energy-consuming way of existence, even if you risk not living up to forty with it.

But sometimes ...

5. You put up with a bad habit to save yourself from a big failure.
There is a special type of people who are always whining. Some insurmountable obstacle always stands in their way to success - neither one, so another. Having talked with such a person for a long enough time, you understand that he does not strive to achieve anything, he just constantly invents new and new obstacles for himself - and, apparently, on purpose.

Psychologists call this phenomenon "masochistic personality disorder." Scientists explain this behavior as follows: a person subconsciously "agrees" to failure, which he can relatively easily survive, because he is afraid of another, some very painful one. That is, it makes a kind of deal.

For example, a lonely guy would rather give up on girls altogether and endure ridicule than allow some beauty to dismiss him as a nerd / mattress / pimply bore.

And then it is very easy to understand how another bad habit grows out of this. Let's say your office work is complicated by the fact that you hate wearing ties or getting up in the morning. In this case, you have a very strong motivation to cherish and cherish these weaknesses in yourself, because they protect you from the shame of being incompetent and failing in your professional activity. Therefore, you continue to stagger around, but with the illusion of your own professional genius, which always prevents you from showing something. A bad habit guards your self-esteem.

 

[Teacher]

Brain. Everything you need.
Salyut, carders, there are some people who just want to approach and ask if it is difficult to live without brains. Many complain about their appearance, and no one about their intelligence and brains. It's like a lot of people live with a bullet in their head. Although many people show deformity of the unformed brain, but in general this does not prevent them from living.
I will tell you briefly how the most important organ in our body, which is called the brain, can be improved.
Our brain is so fucked up that all other organs are sucked out of it, including the mouth.

HOW TO SPEED UP YOUR BRAIN?
You can get into the factory settings and tweak something there. You can increase the speed of data processing, the duration of active work without sleep, memory capabilities or creative abilities.
In the last century, the list of substances that can speed up the brain was almost only drugs. Alcohol, coffee, and sex also worked, though much worse.
Great scientists of all times and peoples accelerated their brains mainly with the help of psychotropic drugs.
Sigmund Freud, Thomas Edison used cocaine
Francis Kik, Richard Feynman-LSD
Pal Erdos-Amphetamine
Also, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates adopted LSD
Perhaps due to the fact that Einstein did not hammer with colleagues on the shop floor, he made an erroneous statement about the brain - "We use only 10 percent of the capabilities of our brain."

SPEEDING IT UP.
Piracetam-it improves cognitive abilities, strengthens memory and increases learning ability, without causing any dependence.
Piracetam is based on a face value of 100 rubles, a pack of cigarettes is more expensive, but they affect the brain in different ways. The choice is yours.
Nootropics work according to a cumulative scheme. That is, to take a pill and immediately become a genius will not work, this is not NZT-48.
Modafinil is the fastest and most fucked up, the effect is instant. You don't sleep for days and work productively.
Buy will not be immediately, 30-40 tablets of 200 mg. $ 0.1.
Phenotropil - it was once created as piracetam, but only for astronauts. 30 tablets of 100 mg. $ 0.1.
Mildronate is a safe and effective chemical accelerator. The same meldonium that will make us compete under a neutral flag at the Olympic Games.
How it affects an ordinary person, not a curler, not an alcoholic, not a heartthrob, but an ordinary person. At a standard dose of 500 mg. – you can work for a day. I don't feel sleepy, my head is clear and sunny. However, it is difficult to fall asleep with meldonium. I'll have to fuck with him.

REPLACING CHEMICALS
Nootropics of plant origin.
Ginkgo biloba-also boosts the brain. 40 tablets 40 ml. $ 5.
Gotu kola-based (Asian centella, bacopa and ashwagandha), sounds like a spell.
Gotu kola is a good stimulant that works quickly. 100 pcs. $ 0.1
Always keep track of the dosage, otherwise raspizdoshit notable.

HOW TO MAKE YOUR BRAIN EVEN SMARTER?
No matter how smart our brain is, we always want it to become even smarter.
The brain contains approximately 90-100 billion neurons – nerve cells.
Each neuron is a tiny computer.
Information is exchanged between neurons by means of signals-impulses.
When we learn something new, there is a connection between neurons. Neurons that have connected to each other combine to form a network.
The number of neurons in all people is about the same.The number of connections can be very different and depends on how actively you use your brain, how much new information you learn.
Simply put, in order to achieve something in life, you need connections, neural connections.
These connections are the mind.

To make our brain smarter – we need to increase the quality of its neural connections. Any NEW case gives an increase in new neural connections. New knowledge and skills create new connections between neurons.
If you want to become smarter, learn new things while they are still new to you.
You can start with small details.
Try to dress with your eyes closed.
Write a note blindly.
Try to delegate some of the routine tasks to your left hand, if you are right-handed.
Take a new route to work.
Meet new people.

Start learning English that is completely beyond your control.
You can add a guitar to your English, or cross stitch to your guitar. Before you know it, you'll learn how to lay laminate flooring and compose poetry along the way. The main thing is that this is a completely new case.
If you stop loading the brain with new knowledge, feeding it new impressions, neurons will pull in some of their endings that they have grown to exchange information, and neural networks will gradually thin out. The only people who face lifelong intellectual poverty are those who sit back and don't make any effort to make their brains smarter.

You can forget about IQ tests. IQ tests are meaningless, because they only tell you whether you can pass these tests or not. But you can use the abbreviation IQ to stifle someone, calm them down, or calm them down, using certain blanks. For example:

• Don't talk out loud you have an IQ at room temperature.
• Don't say it out loud, you're lowering the IQ of the whole street.
• For the first time I communicate with a person who has a negative IQ.
• People who say such things have a two-digit IQ.
• You can stop carrying wild game, you have an IQ at the level of the Delivery Club deliverer.

In general, this is a constructor, you can invent blanks yourself, using the brain, you just need to combine vocabulary and imagination. I will also write an article with my personal workpieces and how to generate them correctly.

SPORT
Sports-stimulates the brain. If you don't exercise, your brain dies.
Sports are a prerequisite for proper brain care. Exercise affects the brain at the cellular level.
A number of studies have confirmed that sports activities lead to physical growth of the hippocampus-the part of the brain responsible for learning and memory.
Sports improve blood circulation in the body, blood rushes to the brain, which carries nutrients and oxygen
The only way to make the brain develop is to constantly put new intellectual tasks in front of it. Without this, no sport will help.

Tasks to speed up.

• Buy affordable nootropics. Drink for a whole month, after a month there will be an ebanistic effect, then continue to drink.
• Increase neural connections. For example: load the brain with an intellectual load (books, articles, tasks).
• Write out 5-10 completely new cases for you, and start doing them. (learn to juggle, print blindly, build a spaceport).
• Exercise every day. Sign up for a fitness club, or for a specific sport, such as BOXING (just kidding). Try to exercise every day.

The brain is the most important organ in our body and the most mysterious miracle in the galaxy.

The brain is such a powerful and highly organized matter that it is still unclear exactly how the laws of space and time work inside it, and whether they even work at all.

THE DILEMMA.
If I was offered a dilemma between - "Find out how life came to be, the universe, absolutely everything, ending with some shit like God" or "Fully know the brain from A to Z, everything that humanity may never know." I would definitely choose the second option.

Admit it, it's boring to learn everything about the meaning of life, about our appearance, about the beginning and end. As if you passed the final mission in the game and found out what the essence was, what the whole idea was, and saw the very ending.

But to know completely the brain, how it works, what it is capable of, perhaps we will never know 100%.

Thanks to it, you can master any skill, learn any language, travel, earn money, absolutely everything you can do, think in the end, and you yourself know perfectly well how amazing it is.

The main thing is to properly care for the brain, pump and go on this extraordinary path. Life is a journey, someone has a journey to the store and back, someone has a trip around the world, choose what it will be for you.

Only a smart person will succeed, SMART. And the Smart One has a brilliant brain, it works correctly.

Smart - this does not mean that he reads 1000 pages every day, runs 100 kilometers, eats right and listens to classical music - while he is without beautiful ladies, without fucking cars, without wealth, and without power, but with a tracker of habits. It's not smart - it's a non-stop kind of mammoth fucker who thinks that if you just do it, everything will happen on its own. NO, it doesn't work that way. You need to act and face fear in a way that you are afraid of fear.

You need to constantly fuck, work to the last. Either you fuck off or you're at the bottom of the food chain. Only with painstaking, hard work do you climb the social ladder higher and devour the fuckers yourself.

HOW TO STRENGTHEN THE BRAIN.
If you write it in detail, you will get about half the book, and this does not attract me, these are not children. (It was a joke.)
One of the main and necessary tweaks to your brain is to improve your memory.
Games like lotto, chess, and even cards help optimize your memory. If you periodically play chess with your computer or, better yet, a friend, it will clearly pay off after a while. (This was also a joke.)

MYSTERIOUS PEOPLE. A TOPIC THAT WILL BE DISPUTED AND MAY NOT AGREE WITH.
Speculator, fraudster, trader, politician, millionaire - it can be one person. Thanks to his unique brain, he is crystal clear and a representative of the bright side of good. I mean those who do not burn, who do not think at all, and maybe the people do not know about its existence. They have super-devilish brains. There is of course a side effect, in that they are people, not robots and can make mistakes, yawn so that the whole of Russia will know what they fools. There are a lot of examples from the dead and the living to this day - you know who I mean.

Because of the wealth they've made in so many ways, they don't care about the opinions of ordinary mortals.

But there are those who are much higher than everyone else, who are the first in the hierarchy and there are no reasonable people above them. These are those who know their own worth, see their goals clearly and the goal itself goes to them, everything is drawn to them like a magnet, they decide everything correctly, postulate eloquent speeches and remain heroes until the end of death, so they are just aliens. Like they don't have a brain in their head.

The MORAL is that only SMART people can succeed, no matter how they do it.

If you put Vasya Pupkin in the government chair and give him the task of steal a million of dollars, he will not do it, he will burn, and later he will be shot for brain moronism. If you give power to any such person, then the collapse will occur and then the death of this piece of shit will occur.

RESULT.
You see, I know that all sorts of brain improvers will not help you become a better person, whether it's books, or juggling knives.
New information is the key to success for the brain, because it forces it to think, stimulate its work, and produce new ideas and solutions. But if you don't do anything other than screwing up your reading and all that shit with your brain, then this is a missed growth opportunity.

Books are education, education is development, development is evolution, evolution is growth, and growth is action, and action is success.
The main thing is to act.Don't wait for the moment, take action, get ready to win, and learn from your mistakes and don't make one mistake twice - remember only a stupid person does it.

There will always be people with different positions and opinions, for example, on this material. Someone will think and jump out of the daily routine, and someone will write that this is all complete bullshit.

I'm interested in your opinion, write down what you think, and give us feedback.
Thank you for your time, I appreciate it and treat it with respect, good to you.

ESPECIALLY FOR THOSE WHO WANT TO IMPROVE THE BRAIN.

I know there are those who have read this section specifically, hoping to SEE ways to develop the capabilities of their brain. I'll just write a list. Everything is relative.

• Practice holotropic breathwork.
• Create your own vocabulary. A rich vocabulary will make you sound smart.
• Teach a new skill to someone else. One of the best ways to expand your learning is to teach another person a skill.
• Learn tai chi. Google.
• Cut out sugar from your diet.
• Quit smoking for at least 7 days. Even as an experiment.
• Finally try mediation.
• Even just reading this material gives your brain a little workout.
• Play games like Tetris, puzzle games, or fly into brain-training websites.
• Eat brain food. Google.
• Use your non-working hand, eat, write, brush your teeth, and watch videos.
• Discover new places.
• Challenge yourself to do something you've always wanted to do, or something that will make you better, but it's not easy.
• Fuck tongue twisters. Develop your diction.
• Positive thinking. Use a powerful weapon-a smile. Be always in a good mood. Depression, lethargy, bad mood dulls the brain and its work.
• Prepare a new dish.
• Learn etiquette. Phone, speech, military, guest.
• Master statistics, probability theory, and the laws of logic.
• Alcohol kills brain cells. Drop it.
• Learn the theories and laws of different sciences.
• And most importantly, do not stand still and apply your knowledge in practice.

 

[Tomcat]

How the brain describes our world​

Our brains use surprisingly few signs to recognize everything - a chair, a dog, a pizza, or a car. Just 49 criteria is enough to classify almost everything, a recent study proves.

We live in a world full of objects that we can identify and classify into different categories. These brain abilities are remarkable given that our ever-changing environment requires us to constantly take in unique sensory information from things around us and match it with our internal representations of objects, categories, and concepts.

The brain perceives objects, forms categories, structures conceptual knowledge, and predicts the behavior of the external world based on internal experience.
How do we recognize pizza, rocket, or bird? Why, for example, do most people agree that a dog and a cow are more alike than a dog and a car?

At first glance, it seems simple, because all things have certain specific signs: a bird has wings and feathers, a rocket has an oblong shape, a fire bursts out from a nozzle, and a pizza is flat, round, with a filling. Dogs and cows are alive, warm-blooded or soft - unlike a car. Etc.

To identify an object, the brain decomposes it into separate features and compares this combination with mental categories.

Six of the 49 main characteristics of the categorization of objects by the brain. On the scale of relevant features - color, shape, size, as well as descriptions "can move" or "associated with fire."

But what kind of signs does the brain detect in the process of such internal analysis? Martin Hebart and his colleagues at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, USA, found this out in a large case study.

To do this, they showed almost 5,500 subjects various combinations of three objects and asked them to identify one "extra", that is, the one that was more different from the other two.

“We were able to find out what exactly the participants considered especially similar and typical for a certain category,” explained Gebart. After analyzing an average of 1.5 million triple combinations and the responses of the subjects, scientists were able to determine by what criteria people classify and group objects.
It is on the basis of individual differences that one can best determine which traits matter. So one person, choosing between a koala, pretzel (pretzel) and a carpet, called the koala "superfluous", because she is an animal, alive. Another subject may have called the pretzel inappropriate in this group because the carpet and koala are fluffy. This means that the relevant attributes in this case are "animal" and "furry".

Method "One extra". The model in the figure reflects the perceived cognitive process underlying identifying the most similar pair of objects, which is equivalent to identifying the remaining object as inappropriate. The sets of objects were initially random.

Research result: Our brain only needs 49 features to recognize and classify almost all objects. “It's amazing how few features we need to identify all objects in our environment,” says Gebart. And to recognize the "extra" object, "which does not fit here," there are enough from 9 to 15 signs, the tests show.

Among the 49 relevant traits are: round, colored, large, as well as subcategories, including function, belonging to a group of organisms, or value. There were also such descriptions: an object consists of one large or of many small, similar objects - like a plate of spaghetti.

Among other things, the mathematical model identified features that reflect the semantic belonging of objects, for example, "food", "animals", "furniture", "vehicles" or "tools". In addition, a number of parameters appear to reflect other conceptual properties such as "metallic" or "solid", "valuable", "disgusting", "associated with heat" or "associated with water". Finally, some features seem to reflect perceptual properties, such as the roundness of objects, their elongation, flatness, color, sheen, or patterned texture.

“Basically, we have explained the basic principle of thinking when it comes to defining objects,” Gebart said. But now there are also many new questions that can be analyzed using a similar approach. For example, it remains unclear whether the named important features of an object will be the same for all people. How are they influenced by gender, age, culture, education, and other sociodemographic factors? And what role does the individual's acquaintance with the object at which he is looking play play?

At the same time, the results clarify some neurological phenomena. So, until now, it was believed that patients who, as a result of brain damage, cannot recognize and identify certain animals, do not recognize living beings at all. But it is likely that those affected cannot recognize the fluffy trait that defines animals. These findings can help in the development of new forms of therapy.