Humans bite their nails causing bacterial infection and pain in the fingers, birds pluck their own feathers often to the point of harm, cats can gnaw and lick on their paws so much it causes an open wound, and many other animals have similar behavior.
Interestingly, wearing motorcycle helmets, strapping on a seat belt, etc. have to be enforced by law so that people semi-reliably comply with the behavior, yet speeding, a dangerous behavior, happens with almost every driver repeatedly even though it's illegal.
Humans eat junk food, and tend to only eat healthy in short bursts - after being sick, seeing they gained 20 lbs on the scale, or some other shocking event. Even when humans indisputably know a food is bad for them, they tend to eat it anyway, often gorge on it. Even when humans know that eating non-addictive foods makes their bodies feel better, have easier bowel movements, longer waking hours, and better clarity of thought and zest for life, they still do it. Humans also obsess over virtual reality games, like Farmville, spending real money which represents real hours at stressful work to buy virtual coins, pixel buildings, etc. People are also often afraid of spiders or other insects which they know can't even hurt them, or pose very little threat compared to speeding in heavy oncoming traffic.
Furthermore, back to other animals, there are countless dogs out there that will sit on a verbal command from their human owner, yet most cat's don't sit, rollover, or come sharply and reliably on command like dogs. Yet, there are videos on the internet of people teaching cats to do these things - even go through obstacle courses - and having the cats learn these behaviors even more quickly than a dog can.
There is a common interface with all of these organisms - a nervous system. Our internal thoughts, and spoken or unspoken words, do not seem to reliably control our behavior and impulses when it comes to our daily habits.
To really understand ourselves, and what makes us do the things we do, we have to understand behavior. And to understand behavior, we have to understand how all nervous systems learn - from the smallest ones to the most complex. You can apply the same principles to a cockroach as to a human being, the only differences being attention span, methods of communication (sounds vs language), and sensory capabilities (vision, hearing, etc) which are tools in shaping behaviors. A llama has been trained to move a chess piece to make a checkmate on a last move of a chess game and win, even though it hasn't been trained to understand chess itself, due to a language and attention span barrier.
It has been an exciting week for me as the first week I've really gotten into the depths of behavior and conditioning, which I've read about for many years but never realized some crucial aspects about it, such as the importance of order, timing, intensity of rewards, types of rewards, variable scheduling, and gradualism. I'm sure there's many more concepts out there yet. A collection of them will help form a roadmap of how to conciously shape behavior, especially in other animals (of which we are part), but also in ourselves. It also helps us to become aware of the behavioral forces (such as employed by signs, commercials, and scents of the local McDonald's chain, or the deli in your favorite supermarket, especially when you're first exposed in childhood).
Nervous systems learn to do behaviors which are rewarding. Wearing a helmet, strapping on a seat-belt, etc. Is not rewarding other than the tiny feeling it gives you of being safer. The reason this is not reinforced is because it is not proven to actually be safer. You may know it is in your head, but unlike a dog who gets a treat for every time or every 10th time it sits, you really never get this reinforcement, unless you're in an accident in which the seat-belt helps protect you, after which you likely are strongly reinforced/rewarded and always strap in subconsciously. The reason we do often strap in, however, is the constant reinforcement of not having to worry about being pulled over by the cops - which can often happen after seeing a patrol car, rather than when you first start driving. It is absolutely crucial that behaviors be rewarded at least in the attention span of the animal, otherwise they are very weakly enforced. An example is whatever foods you've been eating for the past 7 months - immediately rewarding because of the taste sensations of fulfillment and familiarity, even if they only share some similarities (such as grilled chicken vs grilled turkey). Different foods, which have very different tastes (being cold, uncooked, full of bacteria, harder to chew, etc) do not evoke any of the familiar cues and sensations, they are in the short term void of any reward. Hours, or days, or months later, they will surely pay off, but to a learning organism that means nothing about what it will do the next time it needs to feed.
Behavior
-
panacea
- Posts: 990
- https://cutt.ly/meble-kuchenne-wroclaw
- Joined: Wed 23 Jun 2010 22:08
Re: Behavior
Are you proposing that after each time we buckle our seatbelts we should have the car vocalize a happy sound? To reward us for wearing our seatbelts in a car? Or getting a vocal praise from the helmet, every time we wear a helmet?
The problem with junk food is that even the packaging is rewarding. So colourful and so snappish and zippish and clickish, you can hear the container and it is rewarding. Fruit peels are quite silent (excellent engineering there, would be good for car makers to take hints.), but pales in comparison to junk food. Do you think healthy foods can outcompete junk food's territory?
The problem with junk food is that even the packaging is rewarding. So colourful and so snappish and zippish and clickish, you can hear the container and it is rewarding. Fruit peels are quite silent (excellent engineering there, would be good for car makers to take hints.), but pales in comparison to junk food. Do you think healthy foods can outcompete junk food's territory?
A tundra where will we be without trees? Thannnks!
Re: Behavior
most new cars already employ an annoyance when your seatbealt isn't on - an annoying sound that doesn't stop until you put it on. the reason a "rewarding sound" won't work is that the sound isn't actually rewarding in any way, but silencing the annoying sound is.
can't really do that for a helmet like a seatbelt in a car though.
the packaging of junk food isn't rewarding, but you're on to something. the packaging, the logo, the scents, everything is actually a behavior cue - like seeing a greenlight at a traffic intersection. it means that you're now free to go - you don't have to, but generally you always want to, and it's reminding you that you can. cues are very powerful, usually even more powerful than the food or drug itself. that's why there's endless commercials, big signs for fast food chains, etc... cues work.
They've done studies on rats, letting them eat until they're completely full, on their own time and choice. They give the rats the possibility to eat more, 24/7, but they never eat more than they need (and they don't get obese) unless the scientists cue the rat with a sound, or light, associated with eating some food. Then the rat eats it, even if it's already full, and gets obese. The cue itself was recorded to have increased dopamine levels in the brain more than actually eating the food (and before eating the food). It's the anticipation of eating the food that excited the rat's brain, and it's similar in humans. You get happy and feel a dopamine rush when you know you're about to get some flavorful food - while eating it you also get a temporary rush, and afterwards a relatively small one. It's all a behavior train, like when a cat or dog run an obstacle course. They have been trained to recognize cues, and do behaviors that navigate the obstacle course. Because most people don't recognize all of this is going on, corporate companies have been mostly unwittingly manipulating the modern public into eating junk food, downright unhealthy toxins like cigerette's, and generally eating more than they need with cues.
For a truly healthy person, raw meat for example actually tastes quite nice after awhile - the same can be seen even in domesticated dogs raised on kibble their entire lives. If you throw it the cold breast of a raw chicken for the first time - skin and all, it will sniff at it, especially if not really hungry, and be wary of the skin, etc. because this is a relatively new sensory experience (assuming the dog hasn't killed and eaten something outside on its own over the years). They can get diarrhea at first, just like us when we transition to healthier food, and they typically eat much less or slower (when given processed food they tend to overeat or eat quickly, just like us). There are several factors at play for humans, including the ability to handle the food. The healthier the body is in the first place, the easier it can digest raw foods and the less likely you'll feel fatigued or sick after eating.
The question of how to start eating healthy food, or even marginally healthier food, is the main subject of my research. So far, there appears to be no way straight forward magic-pill type method to making yourself eat healthy or healthier just because it's better for you, you resonate with health-related improvement, or you want to rid yourself of acne. It seems like that would be a great motivator, but it takes too much time to pay off, and behavior is largely determined by quicker reward schemes, especially in not-so-healthy individuals, who live for quick-rewarding vices like junk food, smoking, gaming, etc.
There are many behavior-related things I've found that seem promising to building a method to overcome this, and I have a hunch there must be a way. One method that I know would work would be self-electrical stimulation of dopamine(reward) centers in the brain, but this technology isn't here yet for the layman and it's pretty dangerous. So I'm confined to looking for how to alter one's own behavior with pretty limited technology. I believe that a videogame kind of like HabitRPG, but spiced up and geared for tracking everyone diet (with a wai-type diet being the goal), with the ability for the community to provide praise & feedback, the ability to earn awards as milestones, and see your own progress visually on graphs etc (tracking and rewarding even the smallest improvement, but not punishing failures), would also work, but that is not only slightly beyond my programming skills, it's also extremely hard to get people initially started in something like that - it would take a large community for it to really work.
Another thing to keep in mind concerning rewards is that variable or random rewards are a lot more pleasurable that consistent ones. If you train a dog to sit and give it a treat every time, you may not get a very good sit behavior as it always expects a treat after, moves its head looking for one, etc. You can reward the dog every other time it sits, then every 3 times, 4 times, and so on pretty much indefinitely, and counter-intuitively the dog will be even more vigorous in doing the sitting behavior because it doesn't know when it's going to get the reward. You can also vary the size of the reward, sometimes giving the dog lots of food, sometimes a little, which is also exciting for them. It's the same in humans, when you abstain from a cigarette lets say for a whole week, and then give in to smoking a pack one day, and then stop for another week, you're making it very hard to quit. It'd actually be easier to quit if you had 1 cigerette a day every day for a year, and then abprubtly stop, than if you did the constant-week quitting attempt behavior. I noticed this in myself when I finally quit dairy and caffiene - I was drinking dairy/caffiene consistently right before I quit.
Another trick I used is to keep soft drinks in the corner of my room (I had bought them, placed them there, and when I decided to try quitting again, I simply didn't throw them away), and every day I have to pass by that corner and see the bottles several times. Rather than being tempting, they were off-putting, and I was able not to drink them. I trained a behavior not to drink them, and that became associated with the image of the bottle. If I had thrown them away, my internal imagination would've imagined the bottle as more pleasurable than it appears in real life, all the good feelings related to drinking it would've flooded my mind, dopamine would've rushed in my brain as I made the decision to give in and go get some, and it would've been an irresistible behavior chain to finish doing.
However, I had an equally good substitute - evian water with lots of sugar in it, which tasted great. I don't have equal substitutes for fried chicken, for example, so that particular method doesn't work for that.
My current idea that I dreamed up just last night is to find out if it's possible to associate eating fried chicken with something arbitrary, like a sound (a unique type of "beep" for example that I can produce with my smartphone), and then make that sound every time I get fried chicken, or any meal I really enjoy, any type of experience I really enjoy (like the ending of a great movie, produce a beep) and slowly over time associate countless good feelings with the beep, until the beep on its own produces a dopamine response. Then, while eating something like raw beef, I could produce the beep before hand and make myself produce dopamine, associate dopamine induction with subsequently eating raw beef, and therefore program my own behavior. Unfortunately my landlord doesn't allow me to have animals of any kind, to test if associating a beep with pleasurable experiences, and then associating it with not so pleasurable ones or neutral ones will "die-out" the effect quickly or not at all, or very slowly, which is absolutely crucial to know. Hopefully I can find something about it on the internet this weekend.
can't really do that for a helmet like a seatbelt in a car though.
the packaging of junk food isn't rewarding, but you're on to something. the packaging, the logo, the scents, everything is actually a behavior cue - like seeing a greenlight at a traffic intersection. it means that you're now free to go - you don't have to, but generally you always want to, and it's reminding you that you can. cues are very powerful, usually even more powerful than the food or drug itself. that's why there's endless commercials, big signs for fast food chains, etc... cues work.
They've done studies on rats, letting them eat until they're completely full, on their own time and choice. They give the rats the possibility to eat more, 24/7, but they never eat more than they need (and they don't get obese) unless the scientists cue the rat with a sound, or light, associated with eating some food. Then the rat eats it, even if it's already full, and gets obese. The cue itself was recorded to have increased dopamine levels in the brain more than actually eating the food (and before eating the food). It's the anticipation of eating the food that excited the rat's brain, and it's similar in humans. You get happy and feel a dopamine rush when you know you're about to get some flavorful food - while eating it you also get a temporary rush, and afterwards a relatively small one. It's all a behavior train, like when a cat or dog run an obstacle course. They have been trained to recognize cues, and do behaviors that navigate the obstacle course. Because most people don't recognize all of this is going on, corporate companies have been mostly unwittingly manipulating the modern public into eating junk food, downright unhealthy toxins like cigerette's, and generally eating more than they need with cues.
For a truly healthy person, raw meat for example actually tastes quite nice after awhile - the same can be seen even in domesticated dogs raised on kibble their entire lives. If you throw it the cold breast of a raw chicken for the first time - skin and all, it will sniff at it, especially if not really hungry, and be wary of the skin, etc. because this is a relatively new sensory experience (assuming the dog hasn't killed and eaten something outside on its own over the years). They can get diarrhea at first, just like us when we transition to healthier food, and they typically eat much less or slower (when given processed food they tend to overeat or eat quickly, just like us). There are several factors at play for humans, including the ability to handle the food. The healthier the body is in the first place, the easier it can digest raw foods and the less likely you'll feel fatigued or sick after eating.
The question of how to start eating healthy food, or even marginally healthier food, is the main subject of my research. So far, there appears to be no way straight forward magic-pill type method to making yourself eat healthy or healthier just because it's better for you, you resonate with health-related improvement, or you want to rid yourself of acne. It seems like that would be a great motivator, but it takes too much time to pay off, and behavior is largely determined by quicker reward schemes, especially in not-so-healthy individuals, who live for quick-rewarding vices like junk food, smoking, gaming, etc.
There are many behavior-related things I've found that seem promising to building a method to overcome this, and I have a hunch there must be a way. One method that I know would work would be self-electrical stimulation of dopamine(reward) centers in the brain, but this technology isn't here yet for the layman and it's pretty dangerous. So I'm confined to looking for how to alter one's own behavior with pretty limited technology. I believe that a videogame kind of like HabitRPG, but spiced up and geared for tracking everyone diet (with a wai-type diet being the goal), with the ability for the community to provide praise & feedback, the ability to earn awards as milestones, and see your own progress visually on graphs etc (tracking and rewarding even the smallest improvement, but not punishing failures), would also work, but that is not only slightly beyond my programming skills, it's also extremely hard to get people initially started in something like that - it would take a large community for it to really work.
Another thing to keep in mind concerning rewards is that variable or random rewards are a lot more pleasurable that consistent ones. If you train a dog to sit and give it a treat every time, you may not get a very good sit behavior as it always expects a treat after, moves its head looking for one, etc. You can reward the dog every other time it sits, then every 3 times, 4 times, and so on pretty much indefinitely, and counter-intuitively the dog will be even more vigorous in doing the sitting behavior because it doesn't know when it's going to get the reward. You can also vary the size of the reward, sometimes giving the dog lots of food, sometimes a little, which is also exciting for them. It's the same in humans, when you abstain from a cigarette lets say for a whole week, and then give in to smoking a pack one day, and then stop for another week, you're making it very hard to quit. It'd actually be easier to quit if you had 1 cigerette a day every day for a year, and then abprubtly stop, than if you did the constant-week quitting attempt behavior. I noticed this in myself when I finally quit dairy and caffiene - I was drinking dairy/caffiene consistently right before I quit.
Another trick I used is to keep soft drinks in the corner of my room (I had bought them, placed them there, and when I decided to try quitting again, I simply didn't throw them away), and every day I have to pass by that corner and see the bottles several times. Rather than being tempting, they were off-putting, and I was able not to drink them. I trained a behavior not to drink them, and that became associated with the image of the bottle. If I had thrown them away, my internal imagination would've imagined the bottle as more pleasurable than it appears in real life, all the good feelings related to drinking it would've flooded my mind, dopamine would've rushed in my brain as I made the decision to give in and go get some, and it would've been an irresistible behavior chain to finish doing.
However, I had an equally good substitute - evian water with lots of sugar in it, which tasted great. I don't have equal substitutes for fried chicken, for example, so that particular method doesn't work for that.
My current idea that I dreamed up just last night is to find out if it's possible to associate eating fried chicken with something arbitrary, like a sound (a unique type of "beep" for example that I can produce with my smartphone), and then make that sound every time I get fried chicken, or any meal I really enjoy, any type of experience I really enjoy (like the ending of a great movie, produce a beep) and slowly over time associate countless good feelings with the beep, until the beep on its own produces a dopamine response. Then, while eating something like raw beef, I could produce the beep before hand and make myself produce dopamine, associate dopamine induction with subsequently eating raw beef, and therefore program my own behavior. Unfortunately my landlord doesn't allow me to have animals of any kind, to test if associating a beep with pleasurable experiences, and then associating it with not so pleasurable ones or neutral ones will "die-out" the effect quickly or not at all, or very slowly, which is absolutely crucial to know. Hopefully I can find something about it on the internet this weekend.
Re: Behavior
My initial reaction was that you are so mean to yourself.
On second thought, you made some interesting observations.
Could you integrate your own successful strategies for changing behaviour into your game?
How would that look?
On second thought, you made some interesting observations.
interesting way to use the not random variable.panacea wrote: I noticed this in myself when I finally quit dairy and caffiene - I was drinking dairy/caffiene consistently right before I quit.
Interesting that you should point that out. In any good game, like farmville, that you mentioned before, what keeps people playing the game is the curiosity. Will I get that animal next or that machine next or an mystery item next? I guess some gamers are rendered to be pets to computers.panacea wrote:Another thing to keep in mind concerning rewards is that variable or random rewards... it doesn't know when it's going to get the reward.
The visual affect of a mess, is a negative reward. I like how you tricked yourself out of soft drinks.panacea wrote:another trick I used is to keep soft drinks in the corner of my room (I had bought them, placed them there, and when I decided to try quitting again, I simply didn't throw them away), and every day I have to pass by that corner and see the bottles several times.
you mentioned you want to make a game.panacea wrote:(with a wai-type diet being the goal), with the ability for the community to provide praise & feedback, the ability to earn awards as milestones, and see your own progress visually on graphs etc (tracking and rewarding even the smallest improvement, but not punishing failures), would also work, but that is not only slightly beyond my programming skills,
Could you integrate your own successful strategies for changing behaviour into your game?
How would that look?
A tundra where will we be without trees? Thannnks!
Re: Behavior
the videogame is a dead-end for the current time
there's already known methods to achieve a healthy lifestyle - for example military bootcamps repurposed for healthy living would work wonders
but they all require other people to cooperate, understand, and contribute.. impractical to get any time soon
therefore im looking into ways to control myself mostly or all on my own - which is tricky
the tricks i've used so far are momentary victories, they are not methodologies which can replicate success in myself later or in others
my new idea is to use Splenda sugar cubes as rewards (like electrical stimulation for the brain), interfacing them with the tongue and my brains reaction should be quick enough to use operant conditioning on myself. im hoping of course they taste good plain (I tend to like sweets).. google says they're sweeter than sugar, don't get absorbed, etc, so we'll see if it can trick my body well enough
there's already known methods to achieve a healthy lifestyle - for example military bootcamps repurposed for healthy living would work wonders
but they all require other people to cooperate, understand, and contribute.. impractical to get any time soon
therefore im looking into ways to control myself mostly or all on my own - which is tricky
the tricks i've used so far are momentary victories, they are not methodologies which can replicate success in myself later or in others
my new idea is to use Splenda sugar cubes as rewards (like electrical stimulation for the brain), interfacing them with the tongue and my brains reaction should be quick enough to use operant conditioning on myself. im hoping of course they taste good plain (I tend to like sweets).. google says they're sweeter than sugar, don't get absorbed, etc, so we'll see if it can trick my body well enough
Re: Behavior
For me personally, the methods that Tony Robbins uses has been the most effective in changing my behavior. He may be a little bit american like over the top (at least from a dutch perspective), but it has helped me incredibly. I used to only be able to control me behavior using ritalin, but using strategies that I learned from tony robbins over the years (and maybe also just getting older/healthier, who knows), I feel like I've very much control over my life.
I'm able to exercise on a daily basis, I eat for 95% of the time what I think is healthy. My study is going well.
It has been surely going up and down, but in general, I've been going upwards since I've been experimentating with the principles that Tony Robbins teaches. Being able to live without any kind of adhd medication for months now, surely feels for me like the next step.
For me this next step began after I did "Time Of Your Life" program (together with a friend). Doing it together with someone else surely helps. I plan my day, projects, goals etc using that method (in OneNote 2013). For me this feels a bit like a game. I've been also fancying the idea of turning this life management system in some real game/app, which progress bars, and the stuff panacea talks about sounds very cool.
I'm able to exercise on a daily basis, I eat for 95% of the time what I think is healthy. My study is going well.
It has been surely going up and down, but in general, I've been going upwards since I've been experimentating with the principles that Tony Robbins teaches. Being able to live without any kind of adhd medication for months now, surely feels for me like the next step.
For me this next step began after I did "Time Of Your Life" program (together with a friend). Doing it together with someone else surely helps. I plan my day, projects, goals etc using that method (in OneNote 2013). For me this feels a bit like a game. I've been also fancying the idea of turning this life management system in some real game/app, which progress bars, and the stuff panacea talks about sounds very cool.
Re: Behavior
kasper sorry I haven't been clear in this post, I guess what I'm really after is removing cravings from childhood unhealthy foods like processed/cooked foods/dairy/grain etc, and CREATE cravings for healthy food like fish/yolks/fruits/etc. if one could experimentally do that, it would be very useful. im using myself as a test rat because if i can do it, anyone can.. but i still havent 
the splenda tablets suck - they may be sweeter (though it feels like a factory toxin sting rather than sweetness). I knew it would be too sweet, but not so much it's painful lol. Guess I'm going to have use regular sugar cubes.
my next experiment is to create a computer program that repetitively flashes images on the screen on hotkey (whenever I eat a sugar cube for example I press the hot key and images start flashing), the images for the sugar cube will be things I conciously want to desire like oranges, strawberries, yolks, fish, etc) and then maybe have flashing images of soft drinks, cooked food, grain, dairy etc. flash across the screen as I eat something bitter (even if it's good for me, I hate bitter)
maybe then I can trick my brain into stopping cravings for the bad stuff, and hopefully create cravings for the good
im going off the observation that when im asleep i dont crave foods of any kind, when im asleep my brain is doing other things, so i concluded that the brain is ultimately responsible for cravings - therefore target the brain (the nervous system) by operant conditioning to change its habits of cravings. even if the body is being told to crave certain things, the brain ultimately interprets this, and can be overriden by operant conditioning. this is evident in the fact that some kids in the world crave tarantulas, some the american SAD diet, depending on where you grow up and what conditioning you have
the splenda tablets suck - they may be sweeter (though it feels like a factory toxin sting rather than sweetness). I knew it would be too sweet, but not so much it's painful lol. Guess I'm going to have use regular sugar cubes.
my next experiment is to create a computer program that repetitively flashes images on the screen on hotkey (whenever I eat a sugar cube for example I press the hot key and images start flashing), the images for the sugar cube will be things I conciously want to desire like oranges, strawberries, yolks, fish, etc) and then maybe have flashing images of soft drinks, cooked food, grain, dairy etc. flash across the screen as I eat something bitter (even if it's good for me, I hate bitter)
maybe then I can trick my brain into stopping cravings for the bad stuff, and hopefully create cravings for the good
im going off the observation that when im asleep i dont crave foods of any kind, when im asleep my brain is doing other things, so i concluded that the brain is ultimately responsible for cravings - therefore target the brain (the nervous system) by operant conditioning to change its habits of cravings. even if the body is being told to crave certain things, the brain ultimately interprets this, and can be overriden by operant conditioning. this is evident in the fact that some kids in the world crave tarantulas, some the american SAD diet, depending on where you grow up and what conditioning you have
Re: Behavior
It sounds like you are going to try an operant conditioning approach, against previous operant conditioned responses.
Re: Behavior
Panacea, I have a game for you to play here. Do you want to try?
A tundra where will we be without trees? Thannnks!
Re: Behavior
A tundra where will we be without trees? Thannnks!