My name is Charles Duhigg. And I'm the author of this book The Power of Habit. So imagine for a minute that, that you have this cookie problem. Okay, a cookie habit every day you go up in the afternoon, let's say you work in a building in Midtown, that's called the New York Times and on the, on the 14th floor is this cafeteria with this amazing, amazing cookie selection. And you put this little note on your monitor that says, Do not eat the cookie. And then every afternoon, you managed to ignore that note and go upstairs and get a cookie. And imagine for a minute that this has caused you to put on a little bit of weight, let's say roughly 8.7 pounds. And when I say you what I actually mean is me because I'm describing my life eating cookies. So I was really interested in why I a successful human being. I won a Pulitzer Prize last week, I think I'm a pretty smart guy, why I have this difficulty resisting cookies, right?

There's a lot of things I can do in my life. And I began researching the science of habits what how habits work, and and what I learned is that we're actually living through this golden age of understanding the neurology of habit formation. And I ended up writing this book out of it. And I want to tell you a little bit about what I learned and what it has to do with teaching kids and mindfulness. But in order to do my first I'll have to tell you a story about a rat. Anyone here ever experiment with rats before? Anyone ever ride the subway?

Okay, then you've done a lot of experience with rats. There's a woman named Dr. Anne Graybeal, who has for years been doing experiments with rats. She's a neurologist, and for years, she was trying to get sensors into rats cranium so she could measure what was going on inside their skulls. This took a long time and a lot of rats, but eventually she got to a point where she could get about 150 sensors inside of rats skull and she could measure its neurological activity. What you do in the tribe after it woke up from the surgeries exact same thing, she would drop it in the world's simplest maze work send me every single time click a partition, remove the rats free to run through the maze and find the chocolate.

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