PROJECT FINISHED

Habits are an aspect of our behavior commonly mentioned in academic and non-academic realms. Interestingly, their distinctive features are unclear in both fields: do they make our behavior more rigid or more flexible? Are they implemented as non-goal-directed routines or do they help us to set more complex goals? If the former option for each question is assumed, human beings are similar to machines; on the other hand, assuming the alternative entails that humans have a unique growing capacity. 

This dichotomy is found in various academic fields: whereas most neuroscience and experimental psychology consider habits as unconscious, rigid, automatic and non-goal-directed behaviors, certain philosophical currents understand them as dispositions that make our behavior flexible to achieve further goals. 

The Mind-Brain Group has contributed to this debate with theoretical and empirical research works in high impact journals and publishers, introducing a notion that is compatible with all involved disciplines (philosophy, psychology and neuroscience), and with the dichotomy mentioned above: a good habit is a disposition that, through a cognitively-enriched acquisition, ends up in learning; a bad habit, conversely, is cognitively-impoverished and makes behavior more rigid. 

The main goals of the current project are as follows: 1) to clarify what is a disposition from the different interpretations of the mind-brain problem; 2) to achieve a clear-cut definition of ‘cognitive enrichment’; and 3) to investigate how creativity is possible through habit acquisition. To do so, we will establish an interdisciplinary international research network, and we will discuss with renowned artists the relationship between habits and creativity. Overall, this project will help us clarify at what extent human habits are different to those of machines or other animals. A comprehensive anthropology, where interdisciplinary research is radical and generates original questions, is the only means to find a final answer to the question of what is being human.