habituation

Habituation refers to decreased energy exchange or less widespread inner response when something happens over and over. Habituation allows our system to filter out excessive amounts of information and save time and energy by using established routes of organisation.

When a stimulus repeats many times our system soon identifies the similarity in essential pathways and stops linking its immediate response to other associative patterns. There is thus less side-activity in the form of emotional or conscious outflow. For this reason habituation is usually an unconscious process. The principle of similarity is an important aspect of habituation. It is through the similarity of repeated experiences that the pathways for habituation are created and maintained. When we hear and smell the air conditioner in the same way day after day, our hearing and immune system handle its noise and chemicals with fewer interrelated feedback networks, and, for example, our mindset and autonomic nervous system no longer get involved. Soon we do not hear the humming of the air conditioner or feel the nausea which bothered us shortly after we started to work in that particular building.