Just picking up this book is already half the battle - Neuroscientist Professor Jaeseung Jeong
The algorithm of habits discovered by a Stanford psychology professor,
Unraveling the secrets of brain science that govern human habits!

American actor Philip Seymour Hoffman was a world-renowned actor known for his charming and outstanding acting.
He abused drugs and alcohol during his college years, but has remained drug-free for over 20 years through a drug addiction program.
However, in 2013, due to personal problems, my addiction relapsed and I fell back into that black hole.
Despite receiving treatment for drug addiction again, he died from an overdose of several drugs, including heroin, cocaine, and amphetamines, less than a year later.
Why did the addiction relapse even though I had endured it for a long time?

It's not just a drug addiction problem.
Many people make resolutions to diet, exercise, quit drinking, or quit smoking, but fail again and again.
What's the reason? Why do people who are habitually late, frequently late for meetings, and repeatedly postpone appointments continue to do so? Why is it so difficult to form good habits, while bad ones stubbornly follow us? We've long attributed these issues to a matter of willpower or mindset.
But Russell Poldrack, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, says habits aren't just a matter of will or passion.
Habits are formed and become fixed because of a special algorithm that arises when the human psychology and brain system interlock.
According to his argument, we have been perceiving and fighting habits in the wrong way so far.

In "The Algorithm of Habit," Russell Poldrack uses the latest brain science and psychology research to uncover how habits work and suggests ways to change behavior through these principles.
Strongly recommended by world-renowned scholars, including neuroscientist Professor Jaeseung Jeong, Angela Duckworth of Grit, and Wendy Wood of Habit, this book delivers depth of content and the joy of reading through the reliability of scientific research and vivid, rich examples.
Anyone curious about the truths and misconceptions surrounding habits, and the relationship between habits and brain science, will enjoy unraveling these mysterious secrets one by one.

“I can’t give you any ‘easy tricks’ to break bad habits.
In fact, many of the magical solutions to habits you've read about in other books are nothing more than mirages when viewed through the eyes of real science.
But I can promise you this one thing.
After reading this book, you will have a deep understanding of why habits are so persistent and why breaking them is so difficult.” This sentence, presented by the author at the beginning of the book, encapsulates the core of what the author ultimately wants to convey to the readers and conveys the essence of what he wants to say.

If habits were truly central to how the mind works, we should find them everywhere we look, and indeed we do.
We all have a number of routines, complex patterns of behavior that we perform automatically within specific contexts.
These routines usually refer to behaviors that are performed on a daily basis, but may also occur rarely.
In the morning, I drink coffee, drive to work on a set route, prepare a meal before dinner, and brush my teeth before going to bed.
Of course, each action has its own purpose, but more often than not, we are not even aware that we are performing the action, let alone consciously thinking about that purpose while performing the action.
This unconscious nature of routines runs counter to the long-held belief in psychology that human behavior is primarily driven by purpose and beliefs.
---From Chapter 1, “What is a Habit?”

At any given moment, the actions we can take are nearly infinite.
Even the simple act of picking up a cup of coffee can be performed in countless ways.
Quickly, slowly, calmly, hastily, directly, indirectly, etc.
This is the important question we must ask to understand why we do what we do.
What is our "goal" when choosing an action? On the one hand, we seek to maximize the rewards we receive from the action.
It could be taking a sip of coffee without spilling it, or winning the maximum payout on a slot machine.
On the other hand, we want to minimize the cost of the action in terms of physical and mental effort and time.
You could lift a coffee cup over your head and lower it five times before bringing it to your mouth, but no one actually does that.
This is because the risk of spilling coffee increases, and the costs in terms of physical effort and time increase.
The basal ganglia and dopaminergic system appear to play a key role in the computations that determine what we will do at any given moment and how we will do it.
---From "Chapter 2 Understanding the Brain's Habit System"

When we look around the world, there are bound to be things that capture our attention more than others.
Often it's because of features like size or color, but sometimes it's because of something more unique that it catches your attention.
If you're a car enthusiast, your eyes might be drawn to the 1957 Ford Thunderbird, but if you're an ornithologist, you might be even more drawn to the green jay perched on the mailbox next to the car.
This phenomenon, commonly known as attentional bias, is a prominent feature of addiction.
---From Chapter 3, “Once a habit, always a habit”

Before participating in a variation of the marshmallow experiment, subjects aged 3 to 6 years had time to first meet the experimenter as part of an "art lesson."
The experimenter informed the children that they could either play with the old set of crayons or wait until the experimenter returned with a new set of art supplies.
For one group of children, the experimenter brought new supplies as promised, but for the other group of children, the experimenter returned and apologized, saying that there were no new supplies.
Afterwards, the children participated in a delay of gratification task, and as expected, children who perceived the experimenter as untrustworthy showed significantly less willingness to wait for a reward than children who believed the experimenter kept his promise.
Other studies have also shown that children are much less likely to wait when they do not trust the experimenter or when they do not trust people in general.
These results highlight the considerable difficulty of distinguishing between the various factors that may influence the association between delayed gratification and academic performance.
But even so, the ability to delay gratification is crucial for future success and
It is undeniable that it provides a theoretical foundation for demonstrating a reliable correlation.
---From Chapter 5, “There is nothing wrong with self-control”

Even the common belief that addiction is simply a "failure of willpower" implies that addiction is a phenomenon that occurs when the level of goal-oriented control is reduced.
But when you ask addicts, as Ankh Snoke and her colleagues did, their answers are less about a failure of willpower and more about powerful, goal-directed behavior toward the goal of obtaining and taking the drug.
As one of the participants in the study put it:
“You have such a strong will (laughs).
That's the problem.
“I’m just a very strong-willed person.” A growing number of researchers are beginning to believe that drug seeking may be more goal-directed than habitual.
---From Chapter 6, “Why It’s More Difficult to Break Bad Habits”

Studies of quitting smoking and drinking consistently show that only about one-third of people maintain abstinence for a year.
Losing weight is similarly difficult (regardless of what diet plan you follow), and while almost everyone loses weight in the short term, few keep it off for more than two years, and many end up gaining more weight than before.
Meanwhile, several studies examining people who have maintained change over time have provided some insights into key principles of successful behavior change, which we will explore in the next chapter.
---From Chapter 7: Can Habits Really Be Changed?

To give you an idea of ​​what future precision behavior change therapies might look like, imagine someone trying to cut down on drinking.
When you first visit your doctor, you'll likely undergo a series of cognitive tests, a brain scan using an fMRI to measure brain connectivity, and a blood test for genomic analysis.
Genetic analysis could reveal a person's risk for various problems, as well as their sensitivity to alcohol rewards and how poor their executive functioning is, and cognitive tests could be tailored to measure only specific aspects of each function.
Doctors combine the results of various tests above with brain imaging analysis to uncover the brain mechanisms underlying an individual's drinking problem.
Based on this information, doctors choose a possible treatment regimen that would be most beneficial to the patient and test these different treatments individually or in combination in an N-of-1 trial.
It is our hope that the neuroscience research presented in this book will ultimately provide this approach to understanding the mechanisms underlying behavioral change problems.

---From Chapter 9, Hacking the 'Brain of Habit'