The goal of this essay is to try to decipher how habits are formed in the brain, why they become fixed, and why we can't break bad habits even if we consciously know they are harmful. This is achieved by studying habit formation in rats and seeing what changes when we activate or deactivate certain areas of the brain. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Before we can delve into habit formation in the brain, it is important to first know what a habit is, an action that has become routine and no longer needs to be done deliberately. Habits are a double-edged sword. Their advantage is that they allow us to automate the most menial tasks and free up brain power for more important things. On the other hand, when habits become ingrained, our brain no longer monitors what we are doing and it becomes difficult to realize if a habit is becoming a harmful addiction. Furthermore, even if we realize we have developed a bad habit, it is extremely difficult to break it. According to Smith and Grabiel (2014), the tenacity of habits can actually give us insight into how they are formed. Apparently the reason it's so hard to kick a bad habit, even if we know it's bad, is due to something called reinforcement contingencies. Reinforcement contingencies refer to how the brain decides whether or not to maintain a certain habit. For example, if doing action A gets you a reward and doing action B gets you a punishment, then your brain will look at both outcomes and use them to influence your future decisions. Another method used by the brain to determine future behavior is called 'reward prediction error signals'. This is when the brain compares the actual outcome of an action to the predicted outcome of an action to see how accurate the prediction was. Based on this comparison, the brain assigns a positive or negative value to the action, making us more or less likely to repeat it in the future. To look more closely at how exactly the brain forms habits, Smith and Graybiel (2014) turned to laboratory mice. In a variation of a 1980 experiment, MIT researchers had rats run along a T-shaped maze and turn left or right at the top depending on an audio cue; at both ends of the maze there would be a reward in the form of food. Normal food was then replaced with unpleasant food. If the rats, after tasting the now-devalued reward, still ran towards it, the researchers could come to the conclusion that the rat had formed a habit. Now that the habit was gone, the researchers could study the rat's brain to see what had changed. In the first trials, before the habit was formed, the motor control part of the rat's striatum was active the entire time the rat ran down. the labyrinth. After the rat had formed a habit, the researchers saw that its neurons were mostly active during the begging phase and at the end of the run. What had happened was that the rat's striatal cells had transformed the act of running through the maze into a single canned action. Instead of continually having to make deliberate decisions to run through the maze, he could now do so “without thinking.” As researchers delved further into how the brain works, they found three main areas of the brain that had control over habits. The first was the striatum, which could contain habits once formed. The.