Extinction Burst

Sent to you by Rio via Google Reader: Extinction Burst via You Are Not
So Smart by David McRaney on 7/7/10

The Misconception: If you stop engaging in a bad habit, the habit will
gradually diminish until it disappears from your life.

The Truth: Any time you quit something cold turkey, your brain will
make a last-ditch effort to return you to your habit.

Source: Corie Howell

You’ve been there.

You get serious about losing weight and start to watch every calorie.
You read labels, stock up on fruit and vegetables, hit the gym.

Everything is going fine. You feel great. You feel like a champion. You
think, “This is easy.”

One day you give in to temptation and eat some candy, or a doughnut, or
a cheeseburger. Maybe, you buy a bag of chips. You order the fettuccine
alfredo.

That afternoon, you decide not only will you eat whatever you want, but
to celebrate the occasion you will eat a pint of ice cream.

The diet ends in a catastrophic binge.

What the hell? How did your smooth transition from comfort food to
human Dumpster happen?

You just experienced an extinction burst.

Once you become accustomed to reward, you get really upset when you
can’t have it.

Food, of course, is a powerful reward. It keeps you alive.

Your brain didn’t evolve in an environment where there was an abundance
of food, so whenever you find a high-calorie, high fat, high sodium
source, your natural inclination is to eat a lot of it and then go back
to it over and over again.

If you take away a reward like that, you throw an internal tantrum.

Extinction bursts are a component of extinction, one of the principles
of conditioning.

Much of your behavior is the result of conditioning. It is among the
most basic factors shaping the way any organism reacts to the world.

If you get rewarded by your actions, you are more likely to continue
them. If punished, you are more likely to stop. Over time, you begin to
predict reward and punishment by linking longer and longer series of
events to their eventual outcomes.

If you want some chicken nuggets, you know you can’t just snap your
fingers and wait for them to appear. You must engage in a long sequence
of actions – acquire language, acquire money, acquire car, acquire
clothes, acquire fuel, learn to drive, learn to use money, learn where
nuggets are sold, drive to nuggets, use language, exchange money, etc..

This string of behaviors could be sliced up into smaller and smaller
components if we wanted to really dig down into the conditioning you
have endured in order to be able to get nuggets in your mouth.

Just driving the car from point A to point B is a complex performance
which becomes automatic after hundreds of hours of practice.

Millions of tiny behaviors, each one a single step in a process, add up
to a single operation you have learned will payoff in reward.

Think of rats in a maze, learning a complicated series of steps – turn
left two times, turn right once, turn left, right, left, get cheese.

Even microorganisms can be conditioned to react to stimuli and predict
outcomes.

For a while in psychology, conditioning was the cat’s pajamas.

Source: Time Magazine

In the 1960s and ’70s, Burrhus Frederic Skinner became a scientist
celebrity by scaring the shit out of America with an invention called
the operant conditioning chamber – the Skinner Box.

The box is an enclosure which can have any combination of levers, food
dispensers, an electric floor, lights and loudspeakers.

Scientists place animals in the box and either reward them or punish
them to either encourage or discourage their behavior.

Rats, for example, can be taught to push a lever when a green light
appears to get a food pellet.

Skinner demonstrated how he could teach a pigeon to spin in circles at
his command by offering food only when it turned in one direction.
Gradually, he withheld the food until the pigeon had turned a little
farther and farther until he had it going round and round.

He could even get the pigeon to distinguish between the word “peck” and
“turn” and get them to perform the corresponding behavior just by
showing them a sign.

Yes, in a sense, he taught a bird to read.

Skinner discovered you could get pigeons and rats to do complicated
tasks by slowly building up chains of behaviors through handing out
pellets of food. For example, if you want to teach a squirrel to water
ski, you just need to start small and work your way up.

Other researchers added punishment to the routines and discovered it
too could be used like the pellets to encourage and discourage behavior.

Skinner became convinced conditioning was the root of all behavior and
didn’t believe rational thinking had anything to do with your personal
life. He considered introspection to be a “collateral product” of
conditioning.

Like Freud and Einstein, Skinner was a celebrity in his day, and his
belief we were all robots was unsettling. He made the cover of Time
magazine in 1971.

“My book,” says Skinner, ”is an effort to demonstrate how things go bad
when you make a fetish out of individual freedom and dignity. If you
insist that individual rights are the summum bonum, then the whole
structure of society falls down.”

- Time Magazine, 1971

Some psychologists and philosophers still hold to the idea you are
nothing but a sophisticated automaton, like a spider or a fish. You
have no freedom, no free will.

Your brain is made of atoms and molecules which must obey the laws of
physics and chemistry, so some say your mind is locked into service of
the rules of the universe like a clock. Everything you have thought,
felt and done in your life was the natural mathematical aftermath of
the Big Bang.

To this wing of psychology, you are the same as an insect, just with a
more complex nervous system responding to stimuli with a wider array of
denser behavioral routines which only appear to give rise to
consciousness.

You may take comfort knowing this is a hotly contested idea, one which
is as old as the Greek philosophers who imagined the unconscious as
wild horses pulling a chariot helmed by your upper-level reasoning.

Whether or not you have free will, conditioning is real, and the impact
of conditioning can’t be ignored.

The Supernanny

There are two kinds of conditioning – classical and operant.

In classical conditioning, something which normally doesn’t have any
influence becomes a trigger for a response.

If you are taking a shower and someone flushes the toilet which then
causes the water to become a scolding torrent, you become conditioned
to recoil in terror the next time you hear the toilet flush while
lathering up.

That’s classical conditioning. Something neutral – the toilet flushing
– becomes charged with meaning and expectation. You have no control
over it. You recoil from the water without ever thinking, “I should
recoil from this water else I get scalded.”

If you have ever been sick after eating or drinking something you love,
you will avoid it in the future. The smell of it, or even the thought
of it, can make you ill.

For me, it’s tequila. Ugh, gross.

Classical conditioning keeps you alive. You learn quickly to avoid that
which may harm you and seek out that which makes you happy, like an
amoeba.

The sort of complex behavior Skinner produced in animals was the result
of operant conditioning.

Operant conditioning changes your desires. Your inclinations becomes
greater through reinforcement, or diminish through punishment.

You go to work, you get paid. You turn on the air conditioning and stop
sweating. You don’t run the red light, you don’t get a ticket. You pay
the rent, you don’t get evicted.

It’s all operant conditioning, punishment and reward.

Which finally brings us back to the third factor – extinction.

When you expect a reward or a punishment and nothing happens, your
conditioned response starts to fade away.

If you stop feeding your cat, he will stop hanging around the food bowl
and meowing. His behavior will go extinct.

If you were to keep going to work and not get paid, eventually you
would stop.

This is when the extinction burst happens, right as the behavior is
breathing its final breath.

You wouldn’t just not go to work anymore. You would probably storm into
the boss’s office and demand an explanation. If you got nowhere after
gesticulating wildly and inventing new curse words out of your boss’s
last name, you might scoop your arm across his desk and leave in
handcuffs.

Just before you give up on a long-practiced routine, you freak out.
It’s a final desperate attempt by the oldest parts of your brain to
keep getting rewarded.

If you use the same elevator every day, and one day you press the
button and nothing happens, you start jamming the button over and over
again instead of just giving up.

You lock your keys in your apartment, but your roommate is asleep. You
ring the doorbell and knock, but they don’t come. You ring the doorbell
over and over and over. You start pounding on the door.

If your computer freezes up you don’t just walk away, you start
clicking all over the place and maybe go so far as to bang your fists
on the keyboard.

If a child doesn’t get any candy at the checkout line, he or she may
throw a giant spit-slinging tantrum.

These are all extinction bursts. A temporary increase in an old
behavior, a plea from the recesses of your psyche.

The worst thing you could ever do is give in to a temper tantrum. This
goes for adults too, because if you spend enough time observing other
people you will notice that people who are used to getting their way
will start a temper tantrum immediately after you have refused their
request. If you patiently restate your position and stay calm you will
see the person eventually give up. Depending upon how long he carries
on will tell you how other people have responded to the person in the
past. If he has been rewarded for having a fit often enough the
extinction burst will be spectacular, enjoy! If it’s short lived, it
will be over as quick as it started and you can feel good that you
haven’t encouraged it. The best way to eliminate a tantrum is to not
give in, wait out the extinction burst (walking away works wonders) and
reinforce the absence of the tantrum with your attention as soon as the
person stops.

- From the Canine University’s training statement

So, back to that diet.

You eliminate a reward from your life: awesome and delicious
high-calorie foods. Right as you are ready to give it up forever, an
extinction burst threatens to demolish your willpower.

You become like a two-year-old in a conniption fit, and like the child,
if you give in to the demands, the behavior will be strengthened.

Compulsive overeating is a frenzied state of mind, food addiction under
pressure until it bursts.

Diets fail for many reasons, much of them associated with your body
trying to survive in a situation where surviving starvation is much
less of an issue.

To give up overeating, or smoking, or gambling, or “World of Warcraft,”
or any bad habit which was formed through conditioning, you must be
prepared to weather the secret weapon of your unconscious – the
extinction burst.

Become your own Supernanny, your own Dog Whisperer. Look for
alternative rewards and positive reinforcement. Set goals, and when you
achieve them, shower yourself with garlands of your choosing.

Don’t freak out when it turns out to be difficult. Habits form because
you are not so smart, and they cease under the same conditions.



Links:

The 1971 Time Magazine Article on Skinner

The Supernanny

The Dog Whisperer

Operant or Classical Conditioning?

Classical Conditioning at Changingminds.org

Operant Conditioning at Changingminds.org

Extinction at Changingminds.org


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