We all have habits we’d like to break, but for many of us it can be nearly impossible to do so. There is a good reason for this: the brain is a habit-building machine. In this talk based on his new book, Hard to Break, Stanford neuroscientist Russell Poldrack explains the science of how habits are built in the brain, why they are so hard to break, and how evidence-based strategies may help us change unwanted behaviors. Learn how cues trigger habits; why we should make rules, not decisions; how the stimuli of the modern world hijack the brain’s habit machinery and lead to drug abuse and other addictions; and how neuroscience may one day enable us to hack our habits. Moving beyond the hype to offer a deeper understanding of the biology of habits in the brain, Russell Poldrack reveals how we might be able to make the changes we desire—and why we should have greater empathy with ourselves and others when we struggle to do so.
Russell Poldrack is the Albert Ray Lang Professor of Psychology at Stanford University. He is the author most recently of Hard to Break: Why Our Brains Make Habits Stick as well as The New Mind Readers: What Neuroimaging Can and Cannot Reveal about Our Thoughts. He lives in San Francisco and can be found on Twitter @russpoldrack.