The Horse

The Horse is the name that we’ll give to our ‘habit centre’ or, to give it its correct medical name, the thymic region. This is an area in your brain that remembers all your habits – a part of your subconscious.

As we have seen, there is conscious activity and subconscious activity – in other words, things you know about at the time you are thinking them, and things that you do without consciously thinking about them at all. Anything new usually figures in your conscious mind, at least for a while. We call the thymic region ‘the Horse’ because it is trained in the same way as you train a horse.

If you owned a riding school and bought a new untrained horse, you would need to train it to a level where you could put a novice on its back and it would reliably circle the riding school with little input needed from the rider. This is achieved by taking the horse along the required route over and over again, until it can almost do it in its sleep. In other words, repetition, persistence and determination are required to arrive at this point. These are the same attributes that are applied when learning a new habit.

The first time you picked up a spoon as a baby, you needed lots of help and guidance to get it from the plate to your mouth reliably. The motivation was there – if you failed, you went hungry!

• Determination was required to keep trying.
• Persistence was needed to succeed.
• Repetition was needed to ensure that the activity was ‘stored’ by your subconscious.

The same applied when you learned to drive or operate any piece of machinery. You first needed to think about every move you made, until you had done it so often it became an unconscious action.