Habit and the Corpus Callosum: A Theoretical Essay on Human Psychology
By Brent D. Scheihagen

When a person does something habitually it suggests that they are recurrently engaging in an action without conscious awareness being fully present. A person who smokes, for example as I did, is aware of the action of smoking a cigarette, but a serious addict may have the behavior so entrenched that certain thought processes which lead to the behavior are bypassed; a function of the part of the brain known as the corpus callosum. As a result, these thought processes do not reach a person’s conscious awareness. This would suggest that much of our day-to-day behavior and perhaps our very sense of self may be a result of learned patterns that, in their formation, became so regular in their occurrence that conscious awareness was unnecessary to enact the behavior. The corpus callosum is the bridge between the right and left hemispheres of the brain, serving as a sort of mediator allowing the exchange of information between the two hemispheres. As such, it also serves as a filter for what are called the association and projection fibers of the brain; these fibers do basically what their names suggest. The association fibers, in conjunction with the association cortex, integrates sensory and motor information; this means translating and processing external stimuli which is essential to the development of human intelligence. The projection fibers carry the impulses (in response to the stimuli) from the brain to the nervous system. Our brains take in all the stimuli within their sphere of experience and, on some level, we are aware of every single sound, smell, sight, and tactile sensation that we are receiving in that sphere of experience (as you are at this very moment). As the filter to all that stimuli, the corpus callosum determines which information being received is of the highest priority and based on the level of importance determines what stimuli is present in our conscious awareness; information of little or no importance is disregarded and we just don’t think about … whatever it is we aren’t thinking about. This filter, however, suggests something much greater than simply disregarding unimportant information and allowing important information to pass through; the greater question is why some information is regarded as being of greater importance than other information. What makes the filter, this corpus callosum, work as it does? The suggestion is that, as with all our behaviors, the corpus callosum’s role begins to be formed from birth (if not sooner) in determining how it will filter the stimuli of the world around us. For example, as a trained musician, I have a conditioned disposition towards sound and music in particular and in a setting such as a restaurant my corpus callosum tends to filter the stimuli around me such that I may notice the music that is playing, especially if it is a song I already know. Were it a song I did not know or a song that did not contain elements of music to which I am particularly attracted, my corpus callosum would not bother to bring it to my conscious attention. Basically, I can hear the music. I’m just not listening. In regards to our habits then, the role that this part of our brain plays becomes clear; our conditioning and development since birth has resulted in certain programming that becomes our day-to-day activities. Not only that, but it could account for the various ways that we relate and interact with the world around us that, as a whole, become our personalities. In essence, who we think and believe ourselves to be are conglomerations of our various habitual patterns of interactions – what we love, what we hate, what we are indifferent to; habits are not only our physical actions but the mental processes that spur them on. Though only anecdotal, my own experience as a smoker may provide some further evidence for the theory I have set down above. I first smoked a cigarette as a freshman in high school while attending a party with a friend. At that time in my life I was a bit shy and like most people, I wanted to be liked by those around me and to be perceived favorably; I wanted people to like me, so I made an effort to “fit in” and create an image of myself that I believed those around me wanted to see. So, my association cortex was processing the data and filtering it through my corpus callosum and, based on conditioning that led me to have a certain judgmental perception of myself, I did what I believed was necessary to be accepted and feel at ease with my situation. Essentially, my initial reason for wanting to smoke was a result of conditioning based not on an objective response to stimuli, but to a subjective response based on self-perception; the perception of self, again, being a result of conditioned responses to people, places and things and how we interact with them. If this isn’t tricky enough as it is, let me put it this way: my conditioning led me to beliefs about myself and due to my ability or lack thereof to maintain those beliefs, I would judge myself accordingly. I should point out that there is a distinction between rational judgment and value judgment; the ability to know the difference between these two types of judgment is a valuable skill. In my own case with smoking, a false conception of self and what I believed was necessary to project that concept to others resulted in a pattern of behavior that I would continue for about ten years; so, one prior set of conditioning (self-perception) leads to another (smoking). This is how, I propose, that most if not all behavior patterns are a result of perceptions becoming so deeply entrenched in the mind that they inevitably become habitual and lacking in awareness. Having first taken up an action on a premise that was not all that well thought out to begin with and by continuing to repeat it, it became less and less essential for the corpus callosum to bring to my attention why I chose to smoke in the first place. The pattern continued until it developed into a physical, bodily craving, though the root cause never changed. Not being aware, naturally, of the initial self-perception, it is only in hindsight that it becomes apparent that it continued to be the root cause of my smoking habit. For example, I might have said “it gives me something to do with my hands.” Translation: “My hands look weird to me so maybe if I do something with them it will distract everyone from noticing how weird my hands look.” Or in other words, “I look weird because my hands look weird and give away my inherent weirdness. If I do something normal and acceptable to those around me, maybe they won’t notice my weirdness.” Seriously, for many years, I thought my hands looked strange and was self-conscious about them; smoking was a way of sublimating that particular thought process. 1 | Next

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