Thin Blue Mind / Smokey Heroes
Police Psychology | Managing Your Inner Zombie
by Doug Gentz, Ph.D.
All of us have a complex, pervasive, extensive network of habits that we might as well think of as our “Inner Zombie.” It’s responsible for most of our behavior. That turns out to be a good thing because most 
things we do are best done “mindlessly” and automatically. Imagine how little we could get done if we had to deliberately figure out or remember how to walk, talk, or drive our cars. In general, learning is just acquiring new and useful habits. We like to get them out of the initially awkward and conscious stage and turn them over to our “inner zombie” for execution as soon as possible. When your Inner Zombie took over the job of lining up your thumbs below the slide of your Glock, your range scores probably improved.
At a neurological level habits are just synaptic connections between nerves. The more a habitual behavior is performed, the stronger the synaptic connection (and the more likely it is to be performed again). This is the physiological fact that leads to the first axiom of learning theory: All habits are permanent. Read the rest of this entry »
