Descripción del proyecto
Cómo poner fin a los malos hábitos
La drogodependencia, los gastos descontrolados, la sobreingesta compulsiva y los rituales obsesivo-compulsivos: estos comportamientos compulsivos son parte del sistema de hábitos del encéfalo. Por supuesto, los hábitos son una parte importante de la vida. Sin embargo, se sabe poco sobre si se pueden crear hábitos más sólidos y rígidos mediante el diseño y si se pueden desarrollar métodos novedosos para poner fin a los hábitos más inflexibles. En el proyecto HABIT, financiado con fondos europeos, se aprovecharán las diferencias conocidas en la dinámica temporal de cada sistema de hábitos, en los que la automaticidad estímulo-respuesta es rápida y el comportamiento dirigido a objetivo es lento. Se combinará la precisión de milisegundos de la electrofisiología con la amplitud del fenotipado a gran escala a través de teléfonos inteligentes para desarrollar un nuevo modelo mecanicista del funcionamiento independiente de estos sistemas y su interacción.
Objetivo
Every minute of every day, our brain’s 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.
Ámbito científico
Palabras clave
Programa(s)
Régimen de financiación
ERC-STG - Starting GrantInstitución de acogida
D02 CX56 DUBLIN 2
Irlanda