The purpose of this essay is to try to decipher how habits form in the brain, why they persist, and why we cannot get rid of bad habits even though we know aware that they are harmful. This is done by studying habit formation in rats and observing 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 Should Not Be Banned”? Get an Original Essay Before we can delve into how habits form 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 menial tasks and free up brain capacity for more important things. On the other hand, when habits become ingrained, our brains no longer monitor what we are doing and it becomes difficult to realize if a habit is becoming a damaging addiction. Furthermore, even if we realize that we have formed a bad habit, it is extremely difficult to get rid of it. According to Smith and Grabiel (2014), the stubbornness of habits can actually give us insight into how they form. It turns out that the reason it's so hard to get rid of a bad habit, even if we know it's bad, is because of something called reinforcement contingencies. Reinforcement contingencies refer to how the brain decides whether or not to maintain a certain habit. For example, if action A earns you a reward and action B earns you a punishment, then the brain will examine both outcomes and use them to influence your future decisions. Another method the brain uses 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 its prediction was. Based on this comparison, the brain then assigns a positive or negative value to the action, making us more or less likely to repeat it in the future. To take a closer look at how exactly the brain forms habits, Smith and Graybiel (2014) turned to laboratory rats. In a variation of a 1980s experiment, MIT researchers had rats run through a T-shaped maze and turn left or right at the top based on an audio cue; At each end of the maze there would be a reward in the form of food. The usual food was then replaced by food with bad taste. If the rats, after tasting the now devalued reward, still ran towards it, the researchers could conclude that the rat had formed a habit. Now the habit is gone, researchers were able to study the rat's brain to see what had changed. During the first runs, before the habit was formed, the motor control part of the rat's striatum was active the entire time the rat was running. the labyrinth. Once the rat formed a habit, the researchers found that the rat's neurons were primarily active during begging and finishing the run. What had happened was that the rat's striatal cells had turned running the maze into a single prepackaged action. Instead of having to continually make deliberate decisions to navigate the maze, the rat can now do so “without thinking.” As researchers.