Excerpt from George Monbiot's Guardian column, 23 June 2009
a good explanation of how our neurology works against behaviour change...
'Our resistance to change is not peculiar to environmental issues. Even when confronted by crisis, we try to stick to the script. As the coaching theorist David Rock and the research psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz note, just one in nine people who have had coronary bypass surgery take their doctor’s advice to lose weight and exercise more. Part of the problem, they show, is that confronting change means making use of parts of the brain which require more energy to engage.
When you drive along familiar roads, for example, the brain’s basal ganglia function as a kind of autopilot, performing routine functions without the need for conscious thought. When you go abroad, and have to drive on the other side of the road, you must make use of the prefrontal cortex, which burns more energy than the basal ganglia. We perceive high levels of energy use much as we perceive pain. For good biological reasons we seek to avoid them. We engage with change only when we have to.'
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please leave your comment here. Please note these stories are posted for information rather than for debate; if you wish to disagree with something posted, no problem, but since I post both things that I do and don't support, it would be appreciated if the criticism was about the issue.