Pile On Motivation

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Tag: Basal Ganglia

  • Are you FAILING to ADOPT a GOOD HABIT?Learn how to TRIGGER the HABIT LOOP..

    Adopted from the following great insight shared by Charles Duhigg from the book The Power of Habit

    Habits develop in a region of limbic brain named “basal ganglia”.

    The habit loop consists of three components.

    1)Cue – The trigger based on which brain decides whether to consider sequence of actions as habits.

    2)Routine – Repetitive sequence of mental , emotional , physical activities that form a repetitive routine.

    3)Reward – The reward that is expected out of automating the loop whether good or bad .

    It is the ability of the brain to continuously automate repetitive patterns as habits to reduce size of brain and increase efficiency of the brain.

    This is an awesome book to understand how to develop good habits & update wrong habits with nicer habits..

  • Working memory of brain is limited – Use it judiciously for top performance

    Our brain’s working memory like a computer’s RAM is of limited capacity.

    Though there is still dispute on maximum number of items that can be kept in working memory at one time , the number 4 is the mostly accepted number.

    This being said a lot of the great personalities can efficiently multi task for top performance.

    How this is done is through rigorous practice , to convert mundane work into routines that become habit patterns in the basal ganglia.

    Habits do not occupy the conscious mind and can operative out of our subconscious mind , thus enabling efficient multi tasking by tricking the brain.

  • How to train our brain to effectively “Multi-Task”

    David Rock in his book Your Brain at Work, clearly explains the limitation of working memory capacity of the new rational human brain i.e. Prefrontal Cortex

    As a result of this trying to perform more than one conscious task at a time can be detrimental in terms of performance.

    Yet few people effectively multi task.They practice and practice to create habits out of mundane tasks e.g driving a car.The habits sit in long term memory i.e. Basal Ganglia and have nothing to do with working memory.This is precisely the reason that few have mastered the art of driving as well as taking conference calls at the same time.

  • “Hook Model” – How to “Hook” a customer to a product?

    “Hooked” by Nir Eyal makes a mention of the Hook Model and ways to ingrain a product in the mind’s of a customer.

    To hook a customer to a product , the product should get ingrained with the habit of the customer.The following are important takeaways:

    1. Hook Model – Start with and move subsequently a) Trigger b) Action c) variable Rewards d) Investment
    2. Habit Zone – A product should start as a vitamin(nice to have) and should end up being a pain killer(must have).When the frequency v/s Perceived utility crosses the Habit Zone threshold the customer cannot live without the product e.g. FB , Instagram
    3. Habit formation is a  key for a product’s high performance and repeat value in the mind of a customer.