What does Robert Frost’s poem have to do with Hebb’s rule and classical conditioning? Funny you should ask. Let me explain…
Habits, good and bad, can be thought of as classically conditioned responses to stimuli. What does that mean? It means that when you smell food, your brain is triggered to find and eat the food. It also means that over time these responses become automatic. The space between your encounter with the smell of the food and your behavior of putting the food in your mouth becomes shorter. Not you? Are you sure? Have you ever found yourself opening the bag of chips and wonder how that happened? Maybe your habit is something different. The point is the same. Something inside or outside triggers us and we engage in a routine behavior without much thought. This is the essence of classical conditioning.
When I think of classical conditioning, I can’t help but think about Hebb’s rule: neurons that fire together, wire together. It’s true. The more two things are paired, the stronger the association becomes. It’s also true that when we intentionally stop pairing them the association weakens.
If you read my bio, you know that I love to go hiking. You may not know that I prefer to hike the paths that fewer people have taken. I want to see and experience things that most people haven’t seen. That desire drives me to hike steep mountains over treacherous terrain. I’m not an athlete. I’m not really even in the best shape. I just have a desire to see as much of God’s handiwork as I can see during my lifetime.
You may be wondering how this relates to classical conditioning. Well, here’s my attempt to make it plain. When you have a choice between two options: drink alcohol or abstain; use drugs or abstain; eat unhealthy food or choose a healthy option; etc., the most common previous choice is the one you are most likely to choose. That is the path you see on the left side of the picture above. It is the wider path, having been traveled many times before. It didn’t start out that way though. All hiking trails started out as narrow paths through unknown territory. In fact, long ago, that’s how roads were created. Over time, the path became wider as it was traveled more often. The same thing happens with neural connections (habit patterns) in the brain. The more often we can choose the path less traveled, the easier it will be to travel down that path in the future.
If we want to find and break unhealthy habits, we must look for and travel the road less taken. We must also take the time to slowly build new habits. After all these years of hearing and reading Frost’s poem, did you ever imagine it could be used to talk about habits of behavior? I suppose someone did, but this is a new idea for me.
