Project description
How to break bad habits
Drug addiction, out-of-control spending, binge-eating, obsessive-compulsive rituals – such compulsive behaviours are part of our brain’s habit system. Of course, habits are important in our lives. But little is known about whether we can engineer more robust and rigid habits by design and develop novel methods to break the most rigid of habits. The EU-funded HABIT project will leverage known differences in the temporal dynamics of each habit system in which stimulus-response automaticity is fast and goal-directed behaviour is slow. It will couple the millisecond precision of electrophysiology with the breadth of large-scale phenotyping via smartphones to develop a new mechanistic model of the independent functioning of these systems and their interaction.
Objective
Every minute of every day, our brains habit system is hard at work automating well-practiced actions so our brains can focus on new and more complex challenges. This does not always work to our benefit, however. My research has implicated hyper-expression of habits in a range of compulsive behaviours, from drug addiction to out-of-control spending, binge-eating and obsessive-compulsive rituals. Despite the importance of habits in our lives, there are major gaps in our understanding of how they are acquired in humans and a virtual absence of research into how they can be broken. This is because the mainstay experimental paradigms in the field measure habit expression in a way that cannot distinguish impairments in goal-directed control from the strength of automatic stimulus-response associations. This has led to confounded interpretations that have seriously impeded research aiming to investigate these basic mechanisms. HABIT aims to change this by leveraging known differences in the temporal dynamics of each sysem, where stimulus-response automaticity is fast and goal-directed behaviour, slow. Our novel approach couples the millisecond precision of electrophysiology with the breadth of large-scale phenotyping via smartphone to develop a new mechanistic model of the independent functioning of these systems and their interaction. This novel combination will be used to develop a detailed neural account of both systems and their split-second trade-off, but also to test the real-world functional consequences of disruptions to either system. A series of causal manipulations anchor this grant and are designed to challenge key assumptions of our working model. Can we engineer more robust and rigid habits by-design and develop novel methods to break the most rigid of habits? With clear potential for impact, the fundamental insights from this project will reveal how we can harness the power of habits in our lives and better understand key aspects of mental illness.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- engineering and technology electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering information engineering telecommunications mobile phones
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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H2020-EU.1.1. - EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)
MAIN PROGRAMME
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
ERC-STG - Starting Grant
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Call for proposal
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2020-STG
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
D02 CX56 Dublin
Ireland
The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.