Incoming longish HABIT RAMBLE, off the top of my musician head.
Grab coffee. Don't drink it yet.
You'll see why.
"What is moving my arm?" -Lim
I. Observe
Habit, or "crystallized cognition," is an essential (and oft-overlooked) part of being human.
Habit acts as the controlling, real-time intermediary between desired movements of the body (or of just the mind, but that's another story) and of what actually happens.
Let's say you desire a particular outcome:
(I want to pick up my coffee cup)
Well,
IF your bodymind has already internalized the right complex sequences to achieve that outcome,
mind already understands the motion
body has already practiced the motion
both got there by iterating trial &error through many repetitions, both separately and together)
THEN your desired action will be completed effortlessly, automatically, and invisibly.
In a word,
Habit.
Having formed your desired intention, you will shortly find yourself already holding your coffee cup, faster than your own mind can conceive of the rapidly unfolding execution of the vast number of your own body's necessarily complex and interrelated micro-movements...
…how?
What is going on?
II. Orient
The habit mechanism is a human universal. It is an elegant workaround for a biological set of firmware constraints we all share:
slow nerve impulses
lots of moving body parts to coordinate
limited attentional resources
Habit is an [oft-overlooked by its very nature, but] essential member of what I call HIRE, the four horsemen of human decision-making:
Habit
Instinct
Reason
Emotion
NOTE: My study of human decision-making emphasizes habit. This is because I came to my study of decision-making out of decades as a professional cellist.
In music, habit-building is king.
Habits are great. They allow us to execute arbitrarily complex patterns of thought AND of motion, more or less effectively, in what looks like real time.
(Even though it isn't in real time, not really, because most of the habit-building work has been done before the habits are needed. It just looks that way.)
Habits work. They work so VERY well that we cannot see how well they work!
(Or HOW they work, or how MANY habits we have, or how MUCH of the heavy lifting they are doing...)
Together, the power and invisibility of habits are what make them so very worth studying.
And music is a potent window into the study of habit.
What essential characteristics of habit can that window show us?
Here are eight.
III. Decide
1. Habits run on familiarity. If the expected thing happens as expected, than it does not need to rise into your conscious awareness.
Congratulations, now you have more room to be smarter!
2. Habits are prediction machines. If I begin a habituated motion or concept, I can have some reasonable idea where and how it will end.
“One, Two, Thr__.”
In this way, habits bypass the slow speed limit of your nerve impulses, letting you see into the future.
3. Habits evolve in tangles. New habits are built top-down “I studied calculus” AND bottom-up “suddenly my commute drives itself” AND sideways “hey, fishing is a lot like chess” all at once, not just either/or.
True, the habit-building machinery itself runs in only two dimensions at once: top-down & bottom-up, intentional & accidental, conscious & unconscious. But analogies “hey, fishing is a lot like chess” add a third dimension of depth, providing key insights at unexpected times. Serendipity plays an outsized role.
4. Habits can be wrong. Limited attention (or why we needed habits in the first place) ensures that "all familiarity is local,” which in turn affects the scope of habit formation. As every music student knows, something that worked perfectly well at home may not work in front of an audience! Not all analogies are good analogies.
So, when we fail unexpectedly in new situations, we go home, re-tool, and practice some more.
5. Habits can be updated. Any given habit can be rewritten. All you have to do is
discover it (remember, established habits are invisible), AND
reframe it, AND
repeat the new version enough times within the neurologically defined training window, about four consecutive days (hammer the same synapses with enough frequency, and they raise sensitivity by growing more terminals), in order for it to take effect.
In music, we call this "practicing."
6. Habits cannot ALL be updated. Limited attention guarantees this, yes? You have a lifetime collection of curated habits, but
it is far too large to sort
it is too deeply buried to untangle
it contains unknown, unpredictably weird, invisible contradictions
it is evolving too fast to keep up, as new information comes in
Pure rationality, just like micro-control of every body movement in real time, is not possible in this environment. This has broad, but not unsolvable, implications for human decision-making. A hybrid frame is required.
7. Habits stack. Right now, as you are reading this, your mind is processing
letters
syllables
words
phrases
sentences
meanings
implications
Meanwhile, your body is also
breathing
scrolling
having bad posture
suddenly having to stretch
even though you were not conscious of many of these things, not until just now. Habits stack, entangling each other in all directions.
8. Habits stack arbitrarily deep. Stack enough habits, and you can do anything!
Even learn to play the cello.
Just be prepared to spend a lot of time.
IV. Act
Finally, here is my six-point strategic guide to habit-building.
I built it for cello players, but it has worked for students of all ages across a variety of topics.
1. Start small. Alinsky helps here. Pick a target, freeze it, personalize it. Familiarize yourself with a VERY basic piece of the puzzle.
2. Make it repeatable. Practice your basics not until you can get them right, but until you cannot get them wrong! Strive for consistency. Make your movements accurate to the millimeter, if need be. Get so that you never mis-identify a single letter in that new alphabet you are learning.
If it isn’t working, go even more basic. Isolate, slow down, go smaller, and try again.
3. Level up. Successful habits, once successful, will by definition slip below the waterline of consciousness. By operating invisibly, they will make new room in your mind. This is what makes attentional space for the top-down formation of new habits.
Learn your basics so well that they become effortless. Then, as new horizons open in their basic patterns of interaction, pursue them.
4. Focus on small transitions. Ask yourself, “from this to that, what changes?” When learning a language, compare two consecutive letters. How is this new letter DIFFERENT from that previous letter? Can you identify the EXACT difference? Is it characteristic? Repeatable? What is the shape of the transition between the two letters?
You can also do this verbally, with the feel-sound-shapes the letters make in your mouth and ears as you speak them. Whether in thought or in action, the strategic template is the same: figure out at a micro level how to get from here to there.
If it still isn’t working? Slow down, go smaller, and try again.
5. Keep stacking. Habit-stacking is the mechanism that matters. With practice, a hi-fidelity library of well-learned letter-shapes will stack into hi-fidelity transitions, yes? So, go and practice your transitions.
Hi-fidelity libraries of well-learned transitions will stack into hi-fidelity syllables, yes? Practice them too.
It keeps going. Hi-fidelity libraries of syllables stack into words. Hi-fidelity libraries of words stack into sentences. Grammar emerges. Hi-fidelity libraries of grammatical sentences stack into paragraphs, and so on up the chain.
If at any point it isn’t working, just slow down, go smaller, and try again.
Finally,
6. Loop back. From time to time, review. look for unexpected ways your top-down learning may have evolved, optimized, and/or drifted while you weren’t looking. Bottom-up habit creep is real! Most of the time it just adds fluency, but occasionally it causes problems. Be ready for both.
And that’s your six-point strategic guide to learning by habit-building.
Go, and have fun!
Thanks for rambling with me! I hope you've enjoyed the road.
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