Automaticity—Supercharge Your Brain Today in 4 Easy Steps

Automaticity in the Brain

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When we consider automatic behaviors, digestion, blood circulation, and breathing are often mentioned. But what about making a grilled cheese sandwich or shaving? Are they in any way automatic? Yes, to a greater extent than many people realize.

What Is Automaticity?

Automaticity is the mysterious process through which the brain frees up energy for other tasks. Here’s a simple experiment that illustrates automaticity and its role in your life: Prepare your morning coffee or tea as usual, but document every step (e.g., which hand measured the coffee or tea, the number of spoon stirs, how many times you blew on the liquid to cool it). Two weeks later, repeat the activity without looking at your notes. Now, prepare to be amazed.

When I finished the experiment, I realized that every morning, without thinking, I stirred my coffee three times, held the cup a certain way, and blew on my coffee twice to cool it off. But what about showering, buttering toast, or using the bathroom? I noticed the same kind of repetition in those and countless other daily activities. You can’t explain the repetition by citing "long-term memory" or "muscle memory." So, how does it develop?

How Does Automaticity Develop?

There are many things our brains do that mystify neurologists and neuroscientists. Automaticity is one of them, but we can gain insight into the process by observing a toddler’s first steps. With each attempt to walk, the brain euphemistically lays down a memory of what helped the child to stay upright and what ended in a plop to the floor.

As successful steps increase and plops decrease, memories of how to walk strengthen. With practice, the memory of the “walking pattern” becomes so ingrained that the first movement in the sequence triggers the retrieval of the complete pattern. This is the same process that creates automaticity in other repetitive behaviors, such as running, planting flowers, and Steph Curry’s three-point shots from midcourt.

Memorized patterns please the brain because it finds them easier to recall than the individual movements required to perform an action, such as the four complex components for walking up stairs.

How Is Automaticity Impaired or Destroyed?

Automatic behaviors can decline when their strength diminishes. This can happen if they are neglected or disrupted by illness or disease. Since aging often involves all these factors, entering your golden years typically leads to a decrease in the quality of automatic behaviors. That perfect golf swing may now result in slices, and flawless running can degenerate into a series of toe stubs.

While a disruption of certain automatic behaviors, such as entering a password, may be merely embarrassing or inconvenient, others, like a defective walking pattern, can be life-threatening. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 25 percent of adults aged 65 and older will fall this year, and 3.5 million will require treatment in an emergency department.

How Do You Regain Automaticity?

There’s an old joke about someone asking for directions to Carnegie Hall. “Practice, practice, practice,” a smart-aleck responds. As it turns out, the not-so-helpful wise guy expressed an important neurological finding: Automaticity can be improved or regained through guided practice. Here are four steps that will help achieve it.

Step 1: Become aware and monitor. You cannot change what you are not aware of. Therefore, identify each step in a behavior that was once automatic but is now defective. For me, it is the correct placement of my foot while running. By monitoring my behavior, I realized that I was stubbing my right foot almost one hundred times during a four-mile run—one hundred opportunities for a serious fall.

Step 2: Create a perfect model of the behavior. It is reported that Bob Bowman, Mark Phelps’s swimming coach, would allow Phelps to remain in the water and practice as long as his form was perfect. Bowman would pull Phelps from the pool at the first sign of any imperfection. His rationale was that if he permitted Phelps to practice anything less than a perfect model, it would be repeated in competition.

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Sometimes it might be difficult to create a perfect behavior model without the use of cues. I clicked a counter before each foot placement to remind myself that the sole of my shoe should hit the ground before my toes. After many repetitions of the correct foot placement, I no longer needed the counter. When cues are used, gradually phase them out as they become unnecessary.

Step 3: Execute slowly. Practice should initially be done at a speed slower than normal, as this allows the brain to sync instructions with the body. For example, 30 years ago, I could run 15-minute miles for four-mile workouts, three days a week. Not particularly fast, but far beyond my current abilities at 80. To execute my “non-stubbing” running as someone with Parkinson’s, I reduced my speed to 20-minute miles, a pace that resulted in people passing me who used walkers. Slowing down reduced the toe stubs from almost 100 over four miles to fewer than 10 after the first few runs.

Step 4: Practice. Memories that lead to automation are strengthened through repetition. The significance of repetition is not lost on basketball players practicing free throws, opera singers memorizing librettos, or short-order cooks tasked with making uniformly sized hamburgers. While the research on the duration required for something to become automatic is questionable, research shows that the more frequently a behavior is practiced, the faster and more likely it is to become automatic.

The Takeaway

Automaticity is a fundamental aspect of human volitional behavior. It represents a learning outcome that, in many cases, can be achieved through four simple steps. When consistently applied over time, behaviors previously considered unresponsive to rehabilitation due to age, illness, or disease may be partially or fully regained.