The Enactive Approach to Habits: New Concepts for the Cognitive Science of Bad Habits and Addiction
Susana Ramírez–vizcaya, Tom Froese
Frontiers in Psychology February 26, 2019 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00301 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Review Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Topics | Addiction |
| Keywords | Cognition Cognitive psychology Cognitive science |
| Citations | 105 |
| Key findings | The enactive approach defines a habit as an adaptive, precarious, self-sustaining network of neural, bodily, and interactive processes, and a bad habit as one whose expression impairs well-being by overruling other situationally relevant habits. |
Abstract
Habits are the topic of a venerable history of research that extends back to antiquity, yet they were originally disregarded by the cognitive sciences. They started to become the focus of interdisciplinary research in the 1990s, but since then there has been a stalemate between those who approach habits as a kind of bodily automatism or as a kind of mindful action. This implicit mind-body dualism is ready to be overcome with the rise of interest in embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive (4E) cognition. We review the enactive approach and highlight how it moves beyond the traditional stalemate by integrating both autonomy and sense-making into its theory of agency. It defines a habit as an adaptive, precarious, and self-sustaining network of neural, bodily, and interactive processes that generate dynamical sensorimotor patterns. Habits constitute a central source of normativity for the agent. We identify a potential shortcoming of this enactive account with respect to bad habits, since self-maintenance of a habit would always be intrinsically good. Nevertheless, this is only a problem if, following the mainstream perspective on habits, we treat habits as isolated modules. The enactive approach replaces this atomism with a view of habits as constituting an interdependent whole on whose overall viability the individual habits depend. Accordingly, we propose to define a bad habit as one whose expression, while positive for itself, significantly impairs a person's well-being by overruling the expression of other situationally relevant habits. We conclude by considering implications of this concept of bad habit for psychological and psychiatric research, particularly with respect to addiction research.
Comparable studies
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| Classic psychedelics: An integrative review of epidemiology, therapeutics, mystical experience, and brain network function. General population | 2019 | Integrative review | |
| Mindfulness meditation–based pain relief: a mechanistic account | 2016 | Review | |
| Psychedelics as anti-inflammatory agents Animal models and cellular studies | 2018 | Review | |
| A narrative review of yoga and mindfulness as complementary therapies for addiction. | 2013 | Review | |
| The neuropsychopharmacology of cannabis: A review of human imaging studies | 2018 | Review |
Citations in the library
Cited by 17
- Philosophy of psychiatry: theoretical advances and clinical implications. World Psychiatry June 1, 2024
- Agency From a Radical Embodied Standpoint: An Ecological-Enactive Proposal. Frontiers in Psychology 2020
- Enactive and simondonian reflections on mental disorders. Frontiers in Psychology August 3, 2022
- Habits of affluence: unfeeling, enactivism and the ecological crisis of capitalism Mind & Society August 14, 2024
- Are All Mental Disorders Affective Disorders? Passion July 9, 2026
and 12 more in the library
Cites 15
- The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition Oxford University Press eBooks September 13, 2018
- The entropic brain: a theory of conscious states informed by neuroimaging research with psychedelic drugs Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 2014
- Psilocybin-assisted treatment for alcohol dependence: A proof-of-concept study Journal of Psychopharmacology January 13, 2015
- Long-term follow-up of psilocybin-facilitated smoking cessation The American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse July 21, 2016
- The Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Drugs: Past, Present, and Future. Neuropsychopharmacology April 26, 2017
and 10 more in the library