Behaviour

As we speak, the research vessel S.A. Agulhas II is steaming back to port. Aboard is an international expedition tasked with finding the wreck of the ship Endurance. The project is led by John Shears, with over 25 years of experience working in the polar regions with the British Antarctic Survey and the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge. Recently they’ve struck gold, as he explains to Robert Spencer. But to understand this find, we have to cast ourselves back to story which began over a hundred years ago...

Radio announcement - Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months in complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful, honour and recognition in case of success.

Robert - So ran the apocryphal advertisement calling for adventurers to join Earnest Shackleton on his fateful mission to cross Antarctica. Fresh out of St. John's College Cambridge, physicist Reginald W. James answered the call as his son, John recounts.

John - My father was visiting a friend in part of Cambridge that he'd never visited before. When somebody stuck his head out of a window and said, "Hey, Jimmy, do you want to go to the South Pole?"

Robert - After a brief interview with Shackleton where he was asked. Among other things, if he minded losing any toes, James and 27 other men set sail on the ship, Endurance.

John - The Endurance was actually a yacht that was built to take wealthy tourists hunting polar bears in the Arctic.

Robert - Pressed into this new scientific service, and despite the concurrent outbreak of the First World War, Endurance set sail from south Georgia for the Weddell Sea. The weather was rough and experienced 'sea-hands' had advised Shackleton to wait.

John - Shackleton said, 'No, we are going to go' in spite of the advice from the waiting captains.

Robert - It wasn't long before the ship was stuck in ice. Endurance broke free several times, but eventually the flow held it fast. The decision was taken to spend the winter in the ship and to try and complete the expedition the next year, but the elements would have different plans. Nonetheless, RW James got to work with his experiments.

John - There's a picture of him taking observations under the stern of endurance. He was doing magnetic observations, but he got very interested in the navigation side of it.

Robert - They observed eclipses of the stars by the moon, so-called occultations to maintain the time on their clocks, critical for navigation in the early 20th century. 9 long months passed.

John - But then, suddenly on Sunday afternoon, the ice opened, and it went down like a stone.

Robert - Endurance sank, 3000 meters to the bottom of the Antarctic Sea and into another world.

Adrian - The deep Antarctic is quite rich in biodiversity. You have a big range of invertebrate life, animals without backbones. For example, all kinds of sponges and corals and sea squirts. And then you have quite a high abundance of things like starfish and sea cucumbers and lots and lots of small worm-like things and molluscs in the sea bed as well.

Robert - Adrian Glover from the Natural History Museum has been studying Antarctic sea environments for years.

Adrian - All those animals are typically eating food, which has fallen from the surface layers of the ocean.

Robert - In any other waters, the sinking endurance would be part of that food chain.

Adrian - Wood gets eaten by these peculiar animals called ship worms.

Robert - Experiments run by Glover published in 2013, showed that ship worms were absent in these seas. Partly due to a lack of natural food and partly due to the strong circumpolar currents that act as a buffer between these waters and the rest of the Earth's oceans. Thus hope was high that the Endurance, if ever found by an expedition, would be in good condition. Earlier this year, such a mission set sail on the S.A. Agulhas II, a research icebreaker operated South Africa. The only clue was the rough last recorded position of the ship by his captain aided by James's timekeeping as the director for exploration, Menson Bound explains.

Menson - It wasn't like 'X marks the spot' at all.

Robert - They broke the search area up into sectors.

Menson - Eventually, just by really working in a very strict regiment manner, covering one box, then the next, then the next, we found the Endurance.

Adrian - The pictures are just remarkable. It's just sitting on the sea floor.

Menson - The ship is there. It's intact. You can see the paperwork. It's it's as good as that and doesn't get any better. It is a beautiful wreck.

John - It is quite emotional to see it again.

Robert - John's brother Viv describes a photo he has of the ship from his father's ordeal.

Viv - I'm looking at it on my wall here, right now. It just hangs there and it looks exactly the same, what we saw on the floor of the sea and what I can see on the wall here.

Menson - By definition, life after this has got to be kind of downhill.

Robert - The 28 men watching endurance sink in 1915 might have agreed. With little hope left, they set out across the frigid waters in the ship's lifeboats. They made land on Elephant Island before Shackleton and a small crew went further on to South Georgia. It's an epic tale of survival as frigid months passed for the men awaiting rescue. They were besiege by frostbite, heart attacks, mental breakdowns, and a diet almost entirely consistent of seals and penguins. Eventually at the end of August 1916, Shackleton returned on a Chilean Navy tug boat and rescued the crew. Over two years had passed since the Endurance sailed and despite the ordeal and having to shoot this sledding dogs and ships cat, not a single man perished. RW James would go on to become vice chancellor of the University of Cape Town, and two of his students would win Nobel prizes. But the ship that could so easily have been as grave rests serenely at the bottom of the Weddell Sea, almost untouched sailing into immortality.

When you look up at the stars in the sky, what do you see? You may group certain stars into constellations, or asterisms, terms used to describe groups of stars that we like to view as related in some way. Humans have been doing this since time immemorial, placing significance on certain asterisms to tell stories and feel connected to each other and the universe. Now, a new study by Charles Kemp and a team of researchers from The University of Melbourne in Australia has been looking at the striking way in which cultures from throughout history have developed similar groupings of stars, and what this can tell us about how our brains interpret what our eyes are seeing, as James Tytko found out...

James - The night sky is a mystery which connects us all. The great cosmic questions of why and how are defining characteristics of what makes us human, and nothing brings these questions to the forefront of our minds as universally as simply staring directly up on a clear night.

Charles - Of course, people in different parts of the world see different parts of the night sky. People in the Northern hemisphere and Southern hemisphere have have different experiences, but still, it's a very important thing that's seen all around the world and it plays such an important role in culture as well.

James - Charles Kemp and a team of scientists from Melbourne have been trying to show that the shared experience of star gazing actually runs a lot deeper than we think.

Charles - We looked at a total of 27 different cultures drawn from all around the world, including cultures from Europe, Asia, North America, South America, some from Oceania and Australia as well.

James - Their work amalgamates the groupings of stars from astronomers all over the world in a bid to understand more about the way our brains interpret visual stimuli.

Charles - Maybe not surprisingly, it's rare to find an anthropologist who is expert in astronomy as well, and so is able to align what the local people are saying with the star names and accepted groupings that a Western astronomer would know. And so, because of this, there are a few really impressive anthropologists/astronomers who've had a background in both of those areas. The contributions of those people are incredibly important to the sorts of analyses across cultures that we were trying to do in our work.

James - And what were the broad conclusions you drew from this comparison?

Charles - I suppose the number one conclusion was that we think perceptual factors play a bigger role in shaping constellations across cultures than previously realised. Previous researchers would have agreed that there's a small handful of constellations that are near universal: these would include things like the Big Dipper and the Pleiadies, and so on. But, normally, when scholars talk about this, there's a list of usual suspects that includes maybe four or five groupings, but no others. But if you think about it, if there are these groupings that are near universal across cultures, and there are groupings that are one off, there's probably going to be some kind of gradient in between those two extremes, and there just hasn't been the data before to ask, for example, "So not universal by any means, but if they're appearing in half of the constellations across cultures, well, there's a striking regularity there." People all around the globe are working with essentially the same visual system and there are certain groupings that just jump out. It's well known from more than a century of research now, in visual perception, that factors like brightness, proximity and symmetry affect the patterns that people are able to see when you give them visual displays.

James - Through their work, Charles and his team are advancing the Gestalt theories of perception - Gestalt translating from German as 'pattern' or 'configuration'. Appearing in the early 20th century, they were the people who first developed the idea that characteristics such as brightness, proximity and distance between objects were responsible for how we view individual elements and grouped them together into a hole.

Charles - In fact, some of them informally mentioned constellations, star groupings, as examples of exactly the sort of grouping that they were interested in. As far as I know, nobody ever followed that up experimentally. There are experiments where, in the lab, people are presented with random dot patterns and what's interesting is to see how those patterns get organised into groups, but no one has ever really tried to use stimuli that look a bit more like actual stars and, for example, vary in brightness.

James - I wonder if we could zoom in on some striking similarities, maybe, between two very disparate sets of astronomers. Disparate by way of age or by distance. Examples that really leap out as surprising that people have connected together.

Charles - Well, maybe just one example that comes to mind: in the Western tradition, if you look at the accepted official 88 constellations, there's Corona Astralis and Corona Borealis, and both of them are groupings of stars that fall along the arch of a circle - kind of these smooth curves. They're both known as crowns or wreaths; I think maybe in the Greek tradition wreaths would be just as accurate a description. One of the cultures in our dataset, the people of the Marshall Islands, identify the same two constellations pretty much. Not only that, they refer to them as wreaths as well. So, in their culture, I think the relevant wreaths are wreaths made out of flowers. To me, that's a striking convergence. People have not only identified the same groupings across these two cultures, but they've interpreted them in the same way.

Fun activities and doing something social can help motivate change. But why do we need interventions or tricks to push ourselves to do the things we actually want to do in the first place? Trevor Robbins, from University of Cambridge, and Ingo Willuhn, from the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, gave Harry Lewis an insight while Julia Ravey had her habit tendancies assessed by Leor Zmigrod from the University of Cambridge…

Trevor - So one notion is that there are 3 basic systems controlling our behavioural output. One of these is a very ancient system, a Pavlovian system.

Harry - This system is key for making associations. If every time a bell rang, you got a piece of chocolate, over time you'd come to expect that little sweet treat upon hearing the sound.

Trevor - From the Pavlovian system, you can assess causal things in the world, but you can't do very much about them. To give you control, you need what we call 'instrumental behaviour' or 'goal-directed behaviour.'

Harry - If you walk into a dark room, you might flip the light switch on so you can see what is there. Now that is goal-directed. The aim is to see and the action of turning light on makes it possible.

Trevor - Then the third system here, which is probably very ancient, is a so-called 'habit system'.

Harry - This system links situations and responses so behaviours can be performed in an almost-automatic way, without much concern for the outcome. Say you walked into a room and one time you switched the light on to find the bulb was broken, but the next time you walked in, even without replacing it, you press a switch again anyway. That would show that the behaviour is habitual because you aren't getting the outcome - the light - you desire, but perform the action anyway.

Trevor - The balance in our everyday behaviour is among these 3 controlled systems and they work rather dynamically between themselves.

Harry - When we are trying to introduce a new behaviour, like going to the gym or eating more fruit or studying for a test, these are goal-directed. We're performing an action with an outcome in mind. But this system isn't always the best to use as Ingo Willuhn from the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience explains...

Ingo - Goal-directed behaviour requires more computational power, more brain power. You need more brain power to execute them because they're more complicated. You are also more flexible and you're more precise and you know the big picture of everything that your behaviour is taking place in, but it's more costly in a way. The habitual behaviour is the low-cost eco-mode of your brain. It's not very costly for your brain to compute just a reaction to some stimulus that pops into your visual field.

Harry - Making behaviours habitual can be beneficial. Over time, with repetition or under certain emotional conditions like feelings of pleasure or avoidance, once-new behaviours can transition into habitual responses, saving the brain costly energy. Ingo studies this transition in animals...

Ingo - What we do with our rats is we teach them that they get food for a certain action, and then at some point you take the food away and see if the rat stops doing this behaviour. That would be a goal-directed decision. 'There's no food anymore. Why would I keep doing this?' However if it's habitual, then you know that the animal will keep pressing that lever, even though there's no outcome anymore. It's extinction-resistant in a sense.

Harry - Exactly what happens in the brain when a behaviour transitions from goal-directed to habitual is still under investigation. These behavioural systems are governed by certain brain circuits, like highways whose traffic levels are influenced by different chemicals, including a common one you'll know called dopamine.

Ingo - The idea was that this control of the behaviour would switch from one highway to the next and to the next.

Harry - But Ingo's latest study found something different about dopamine.

Ingo - And in our study, we actually found that this switching doesn't really happen. It seems like dopamine is present and important in all these highways throughout the entire development of habits.

Harry - While scientists continue to unpick what happens in the brain when a behaviour moves from being goal-directed to habitual, we can learn more about our own preferences for routine responses using questionnaires. Julia volunteered to have her habit tendencies assessed. Good luck, Jules.

Julia - I've just logged on to do a questionnaire about personality, behavioural preferences, and problem solving. We'll see how I get on. In the questionnaire I am being asked to rank certain traits that I think about myself. 'I tend to change my plans last minute.' Disagree. 'I avoid situations where unexpected things happen.' Agree. 'Life is boring if you never take risks and always play it safe.' Somewhat disagree, I am boring. 'I like to plan ahead in detail rather than leading things to chance.' Strongly agree. 'I like being able to organise everything in advance.' Strongly agree. 'I feel anxious when things change frequently.' Agree. It's done. That was really quick. Now I will await my results. I wonder what that analysis will show.

Leor - Hi Julia.

Julia - I spoke to Leor Zmigrod from the University of Cambridge who designed this questionnaire.

Leor - I look at what makes some individuals more flexible and adaptable and other people more habitual.

Julia - I've done the questionnaire. Do you have my results?

Leor - I do. Julia, you are one of the most creatures of habits that I've ever seen. It's not a bad thing - we're all different. When I look at your habit profile, we see that your highest score is on what is called 'preference for regularity'. You really like having routines and you feel that they're comforting. Is that true?

Julia - Yes, I find real comfort in routine and if I don't have routine, I feel all over the place.

Leor - When it comes to aversion to novelty, that was your least habitual domain. You actually did look forward to new experiences. This can help us see what kinds of contexts you will like more, or you will like less, where you will thrive, what kind of disorders you might be at higher risk for, or more resilient to. But again, all these individual differences always interact with the environment.

Julia - Wow. So I'm obviously a creature of habit.

Harry - You are indeed. You're an absolute routine-fiend Ravey with that chocolate fixation of yours.

BJ Fogg, the author of “Tiny Habits” from Stanford University, has offered a helping hand to Julia Ravey & Harry Lewis in finally kick-starting New Years Resolutions resolutions using his approach for change…

BJ - Make it super tiny - set the bar really low. Let's say you want to read more books. Many people say, "Oh, I'm going to read a chapter a day." Well, that takes a lot of time. So, instead, in the tiny habits way, you scale back the chapter to a paragraph, or even one sentence, and then you find where that fits naturally in your life: "Okay, I'll read one paragraph of my book after I sit down with my morning tea." And if you want to read more than one paragraph, you can, but you set the bar so low that every day you can do it really reliably. And you say, "good for me. I did my habit," and you move on with your day.

Julia - And you mentioned a few processes there. You were saying, "Sit down with my tea, then I read, and then I say well done me."

BJ - Yes, exactly. And those three parts are A, B, C. What is going to remind me to do the new habit? We call that an anchor. The anchor is something you already do, like sitting down for tea or turning off the telly. Then, the B is the new behaviour you want to make a habit of, so reading a paragraph from a book. Then, as you do the habit, or immediately after, you say, "Good for me." You reinforce yourself. You cause yourself to feel successful. So, that's ABC: anchor, behaviour, celebration.

Julia - So, Harry and I, we had new year's resolutions this year. It's March. We haven't been successful with them right now. I thought I'd put them to you to try and tiny habit-ify them. So, one of them was to build strength: to get stronger and feel more healthy. What would you do for that type of behaviour?

BJ - Pick the upper body exercise that you want the most. So, what do you think Harry's going to want the most?

Julia - Let's say he'll do a push up. I'll make him do them.

BJ - Okay. You don't do 10 or 20, you do 1 or 2. You make it so tiny that it's just super easy to do. Then, it's finding where does this fit naturally in Harry's life? What does it come after? It's hard for me to know Harry's routine. Where do you think it would fit for Harry?

Julia - He loves a cup of tea. He's always in the kitchen here, boiling the kettle.

BJ - Okay, good. The tiny habit recipe becomes, "After I start the kettle, I will do two pushups." And then as Harry stands up, "Good for me," or, "Way to go," or just say "I did it." Harry, dive in and practice that, and if for some reason that doesn't fit, after you start the tea, then look for another place where it might fit.

Julia - My one was, I have a terrible sweet tooth, but only in the evening. After I've had my dinner, I feel like I have to have a chocolate bar or a cake. I really want to replace it with eating something a bit healthier, like fruit. How can I tiny habit-ify that?

BJ - Well, first of all, you are not alone, for sure. You know that, right? This is really common. The first thing is to make a list of all the snacks that you might eat after dinner that you consider healthy. On your side, what might be on your list of healthy snacks?

Julia - I love strawberries with Greek yogurt.

BJ - So, the next step for that is to buy the yogurt and prep the strawberries. Wash the strawberries, get them ready. If you like them sliced up, get them pre-sliced. Then you would design it into your routine like we did with the pushups. What would be the specific moment after dinner that you would do that?

Julia - It would be taking my plate to the sink, because that's when I go to the cupboard.

BJ - So then, and you would actually write this down, you'd write it down on a note card, "After I put my plate by the sink, I will prepare my snack for the evening." And then, as you open the fridge and you see those two things, tell yourself, "Good for me. I'm on my game plan." Let yourself feel successful that you're following through with this game plan you designed for yourself. Now, in addition to that, remove the chocolate from your home. I know, I know, but this is part of it. You don't have to do this, but if you want to increase your chances, try it for three days and see how it goes.

Julia - I'm going to give that a go. I'm sure it will help me.

BJ - It will. And if it works, you keep going and if it doesn't, that's okay. You don't beat yourself up. It's sort of like decorating a room where you want to put a new painting on the wall, and if it doesn't fit there, you don't beat yourself up. You just redesign. In the tiny habits method, a big part of it is to iterate, to try things out. And if it doesn't work, you don't blame yourself because it's a design process, and you just accept that as a positive. You've learnt something, and you redesign it and try again. You change best by feeling good, not by feeling bad.

Julia - It's been a week since I set the team the walking challenge. So, I'm going to see how we've done and which intervention fared best. The results are in, and I've had everyone's results except for Harry. Where are your steps?

Harry - I didn't record my steps.

Julia - Why?

Harry - There wasn't much motivation. I think I have walked a lot more, but I didn't switch on the health tracker on my iPhone.

Julia - You need the trundle wheel.

Harry - What the heck's a trundle wheel?

Julia - I've given Harry a rough average for his steps. The counts were all added together and this is what the results showed. What I can say is that, for all of us, no matter what the intervention was, everyone has improved in their step count in the past week. Maybe that's because we were all under a challenge, but the best intervention based on the percentage increase was Otis'. Otis improved by 55%. Remind us what your intervention was, Otis.

Otis - During the walking process, I would be listening to an audio book.

Julia - So, this week, we've walked, as a collective, 425,467 steps.

Anoushka  - Not far enough.

Julia - That's 177.3 miles. We almost got there. The target was 460,800 (steps). We pretty much hit Warrington. From my house, to Warrington, you can drive there in about 15 minutes. So, I'd say we're not far off and you know what, because we've done so well, Shelly will come and pick us up in the car.

Harry - Shelly's your mom, Julia?

Julia - Yeah, Shelly's my mum.

Harry - Is that a round of applause?

Julia - That is a round of applause. Well done everyone.