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IMAGINE jumping into a swimming pool. It鈥檚 cold, right? But then, a few minutes later, you are used to the temperature. Or how about walking into a room filled with cigarette smoke. It stinks, but give it a while and you don鈥檛 notice it any more.

This is habituation 鈥� the brain鈥檚 ability to stop paying attention to certain things. It doesn鈥檛 only apply to sensory perceptions. It is also why new clothes or a new home lose their shine over time. And it doesn鈥檛 only apply to good things: it can explain why people stay in bad relationships, why we don鈥檛 raise an eyebrow at the fact that most CEOs are male and why we stop noticing the smog engulfing our cities.

Habituation is a fundamental neurological process vital to our evolution, helping us to quickly adapt to our environments so we are ready for the stuff that is new and potentially beneficial or the hazards that may be threatening. But there are benefits to seeing the things we are used to in a fresh light or 鈥� as and put it in their book Look Again: The power of noticing what was always there 鈥� 鈥渄ishabituating鈥�.

Sharot, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London, tells New 杏吧原创 why learning how to dishabituate can improve our happiness, increase our awareness of misinformation and even help us fight climate change.

Alison Flood: Why have we evolved a brain that habituates?

Tali Sharot: The brain cares about what is new, rather than what has always been there. It makes evolutionary sense to stop responding to things that have always been there or that are changing very gradually, so you can be ready for the next thing that is coming. But like anything in evolution, those things that may be good for us on average can also have a negative effect.

In the book, you talk about how we can become habituated to being lied to 鈥� and to misinformation. Tell me more about that.

There鈥檚 a well-known effect in psychology called the illusory truth effect, which is basically that when you hear something more than once, you鈥檙e more likely to believe it. One of the reasons for this is that when the brain encounters anything again, it responds to it less. The first time you hear a piece of information, you鈥檙e really processing it 鈥� say, 鈥渁 shrimp鈥檚 heart is in its head鈥�. When you hear it for the first time, you鈥檙e really thinking about the sentence, you鈥檙e imagining the heart in the head. But the second time I say it, your brain doesn鈥檛 have to process it any more and so it鈥檚 not responding to it. It is familiar, and we are accustomed to the idea that if something is familiar, it is probably true.

We usually have a surprise signal in our brain that indicates something is not true. But if that surprise signal is reduced or eliminated, and it could be only because we鈥檝e heard something more than once, then we are not attuned to look at things carefully and be suspicious of their validity.

Can you become habituated to your own lying, if you do it a lot?

I was part of a team that published , where we showed that when people get the opportunity to lie at the expense of another person for their own gain, they start with really little lies. But over time, they get used to this, and then they lie more and more. While they were doing this, we recorded their brain activity. At the beginning, when they lied, there was a strong response in the amygdala, the part of the brain that is important for emotional reactions. We know that people think lying is bad, so it makes sense that people feel bad when they lie. They have this strong emotional negative reaction.

But the amygdala habituates over time in response to the same stimuli. It鈥檚 emotional habituation. So the next time people lied, there was less of a response, and so on. Usually one of the reasons we don鈥檛 lie is we feel bad about it, but the more you do it, the less bad you feel.

Is social media habituating us to images of terrible things, like war?

I believe it is, which is concerning. Social media has also completely changed what we perceive as acceptable discourse. This is a problem that needs to be solved at a higher level, involving regulations and changes to the structure of the platforms, not at an individual level.

Do we also get used to pollution because of habituation?

The most fundamental examples of habituation are to perceptual things, like what we see, what we hear, what we feel. There鈥檚 a great study in which with different levels of smog and they were asked to say whether the photos were smoggy or not. What they found is that people who lived in Los Angeles, one of the most polluted areas in the US, were much less likely to be able to detect the smog, versus people who lived in places with fresh air, like Wyoming. This is also a problem in detecting the consequences of climate change, because climate change is so slow that people get used to it.

Is it possible to overcome habituation?

You can dishabituate yourself by taking yourself out of an environment, because when you come back you鈥檙e going to see it with fresh eyes, whether it鈥檚 a few days away from home, making changes to your routine, trying a new skill. I have begun taking courses in a field different from my own. I work on different projects in different industries and on different topics. By diversifying your life, you are more likely to dishabituate, which means learning new things, but also seeing the things that are already there in a new way. Basically, any breaks that we have from people, from environments, will cause us to dishabituate.

So even small breaks can help?

It鈥檚 very counterintuitive in some ways, because when you鈥檙e having fun, you don鈥檛 want to have breaks. But in , researchers asked people if they wanted to listen to a whole song from start to finish with no interruptions, or with interruptions. Almost everyone said: 鈥淚 don鈥檛 want interruptions.鈥� But then the people with the breaks ended up enjoying the song more. That鈥檚 not something we would intuitively predict. But with anything that鈥檚 good, it鈥檚 really good in the beginning and then the joy dwindles because we habituate. But if you take a break and then you go back, now the joy is high again.

On a similar note, having shorter vacations may be better than having one long vacation. We found that . From then on, it just starts going down.

How can we stop ourselves from being habituated to something huge like air pollution or climate change?

This is a difficult one because there are things that you could do in the short term, like it might be interesting to put some clean air chambers around town, where you go into the chamber and then when you come out, you鈥檙e dishabituated to the air quality and you鈥檙e able to perceive the smog. However, I think that by realising we cannot perceive climate change, it should really make us rely on the data, right? Our feelings can deceive us. And so we need to go with the measurements and what they鈥檙e telling us.

Talking of measurements, you write that women鈥檚 self-reported happiness has actually gone down as gains have been made in terms of equal rights. How does habituation come into this?

In the 50s and 60s, before the women鈥檚 rights movement really accomplished many gains, and self-confidence than women there do now. That鈥檚 surprising because it seems that as we gain equality, we are actually becoming less happy. This is partly a matter of habituation and how it affects our expectations. Back then, women had become habituated to the status quo: they would not expect to get high-level jobs, they didn鈥檛 expect to have their own wealth. Nowadays, we do expect that, and we鈥檙e told that we can do it. But, of course, that鈥檚 not quite true because there鈥檚 a lot of hurdles.

So we think we should get as good a job as our male colleague, but we don鈥檛 actually achieve that. And that then creates what we call a negative prediction error in neuroscience 鈥� basically the difference between what you expect and what the outcome is. When the outcome is not as good as the expectation, there is a negative prediction error, and these are correlated with negative mood. But negative mood is not necessarily a bad thing. It indicates that reality is not as good as I expect it to be. And so I need to act, I need to change it.

We are living in a world full of bias and discrimination. How do we dishabituate so that there can be change?

Say, for example, you go on a plane and the pilot is male. That鈥檚 not surprising because we often see that pilots are male. So there鈥檚 no prediction error, we don鈥檛 react. And not only do we not react, our brain automatically infers why the situation is as it is 鈥� that males are probably better at navigating large equipment. And because we infer this thing that is not necessarily true, we then use those inferences to make decisions that can make things worse. For example, we鈥檙e hiring pilots and, because of this inference, we鈥檒l be more likely to go with a male.

The solution here is to make those discrepancies salient and to show how they are not rational. There is a professor at Princeton University called . She lists all the conferences in the neuroscience field and next to each is the name of the organisers, how many female and male speakers are at the conference and what the ratio is of males and females in that specific field.

So say there鈥檚 a conference on computational psychiatry and the ratio is 60:40 in the population of people who do this, but then in the conference it is eight males and two females. That suggests the conference ratio is not quite right and that makes it very salient, and it also has accountability because there鈥檚 the name of the organisers. No one wants to be associated with such discrimination. And so people are then motivated not to have this happen.

Niv sounds like what you describe as a 鈥渄ishabituation entrepreneur鈥�. Are some people less likely to habituate than others?

It鈥檚 definitely a scale. What鈥檚 interesting is that it has been found that . If you鈥檙e slower to habituate, you鈥檙e more attentive, your brain responds to more sounds, more images, to more bits of information. And those individuals are the ones who tend to have more creative outputs.

Can just being aware of the fact we habituate make a difference?

Yes it can 鈥� and I hope it motivates people to try new things and take more chances, big and small.

Alison Flood is comment and culture聽editor at New 杏吧原创