Lay on the sofa after work and eat a bag of chips, we can get used to it too easily. It is not just the power of habit that makes us lazy and cumbersome. Behind it are originally sensible instincts that help us to fill up our energy supplies as easily and quickly as possible.
However, habits become health risks in the prosperity society. The result: obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes and so on. This is to blame for our brain, which has learned in millions of millions of evolution, to react to certain key stimuli. The Danish molecular biologist Nicklas Brendborg explains the mode of action of the biological mechanisms entertaining and easy to understand, with examples from the wildlife.
In this way, Australian splendid beetles can be deceived when choosing the partner of empty beer bottles. The males buzz around during the mating season and look for a weak brownish glitter. You can usually recognize females ready for mating. However, a thrown away brown glass bottle that glitters in the sunlight has a much greater attraction for the male magnificent beetles. Guided by congenital instincts, they prefer the bottles, and the females of the magnificent beetles remain unmoved.
Evolution rewards the search for brownish glitter. Stupid that in today’s world the glass of beer bottles glitters more than the females. The brain is flooded with the reward hormone dopamine, but the reward runs into nothing. Behind it are so -called superstimuli: unnaturally strong stimuli that animal and humans react more than to the original goals of our instincts. So our desire for sugar, fat or salt is innate. The food industry shamelessly uses this. The bag of chips as a superstimulus becomes a habit that we can no longer leave from.
In his second book, Nicklas Brendborg again manages to present complicated processes understandably. As with his first -time “jelly ages backwards”, he manages not only to inform with many, sometimes bizarre stories from nature, but also to entertain, without taking his explosiveness to the important topic. Michael Lange
Nicklas Brendborg
Habit
How industry and science manipulate our instincts
Quadriga, 320 pages, € 24, –
ISBN 978-3-86995-146-1