The habituation effect

After repeated exposure to a stimuli, a person's response to it begins to diminish. This is a process known in behavioural psychology as habituation. The more you see something, the more forgettable it becomes.

Noise from an outdated air conditioning machine might irritate you when you first enter a room, but 20 minutes later you may hardly notice. It goes back to something I’ve discussed previously - ​the brain​ is an expensive machine constantly making predictions of the world around us. Something new and unexpected is immediately jarring. But if it’s constant, you won’t spend any additional time processing it.

Despite our incredible intellect, we spend the majority of our days on autopilot.

How frequently do you check your phone? I want you to guess, and then quickly check - on an iphone you'll see it under screen time.

Here’s mine - I’d been up for 3 hours and thought I’d ‘barely touched’ my phone since waking up. Yikes!

Here’s another quick demonstration. Read the sentences below out loud: