The Brain and Behavioural Change

The parts of the brain that enable us to change - or not

Behavioural change is a fascinating topic and one that attracts a lot of attention for good and bad. But if it were so easy, it would be easy. As the pandemic continues to simmer, we are seeing continued strange behaviours – some behaviours have changed and some have not, and some refuse to change. Three new pieces of research gives us some insight into what is happening in the brain.

Behavioural change is a big topic, so I won’t get bogged down into all the ins and outs this time. We will have plenty of space to cover various aspects of this in future articles. The ongoing pandemic also throws a fascinating spotlight onto human beings and behavioural change. The resistance to some of this, and the inability of some to change. This is all confused with conspiracy theories with political standpoints (see later in this article) and all sorts of misinformation. So, it is a rich body to pick and analyse human decision-making. Next month I will focus on some of the risk-taking biases but let’s review some research I have reported on in my Quick Hits series on Medium.

Behavioural change centre in the brain?

The saying goes “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” This obviously refers to doing the same thing over and over and continually getting a bad result.

Well, the good news is we now know what part of the brain seems to be instrumental in controlling this and when faced with changed outcomes helps you to adapt your behaviour in place of doing the insane thing in the above quote.

Research by Duan et al. from Cambridge University recently published shows that that Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC) is heavily involved in this. Or rather, if you shut this area down, you stop changing behaviours.