On Friday, I was reminded of why I was looking for the phrase “in praise of habit” earlier.  This summer, in July, I started biking to work every day and locking my bike to one of the racks in front of the Psych dept building.  About a week ago, for the first time, I found myself up in the office with no memory of having locked the bike — leading to the observation that either I’ve established a habit or I’ll be walking home.  Fortunately, the bike was there (locked) when I left.

Then Friday, I walked out the front door and realized I didn’t even know where the bike was parked.  I went to the wrong rack (of two) and had to double back to find it.

That’s 3 months of daily biking, minus a little vacation, meaning around 50 repetitions of the bike-locking habit until it becomes routinized enough not to leave an explicit trace.  I think that lines up pretty well with the log-linear learning rates we’ve been observing with SISL sequence repetitions and how many reps it takes to be statistically reliable.  Nice.

BTW, rather than bemoan my own increasing absent-mindedness (because that ship has already sailed), I would spin this effect as in praise of habit because the routinization implies that my high-order cognitive processes are free to work on more interesting things (grants, papers, fantasy football) rather than guiding me through the bike-locking procedure.  As long as I can find my bike when I’m heading home in the evening, anyway.