How do you change behaviour?

I’m going to get a bit geeky today but it will explain WHY your dog does what he does.

I want you to imagine a field full of long grass and around the edge of that field, there’s a well-trodden path. Whenever a person wants to get to the other side, they follow that path around the edge like everyone before them. 

One day someone walks into the field and thinks ‘sod this for a game of soldiers’ and walks straight across the field through the long grass ignoring the well-used but longer route around the edge. This bends down the grass as they cross the field. The treading down of this grass leaves, a new but not very clear route.

Hang with me

Over time more people cross the field, some will still walk around the edge as it is the route they have always taken, but some people try the new quicker route. Once the path through the middle becomes the more visible it will become the favoured route for everyone and the long route round the edge of the field will become neglected and overgrown as now everyone uses the new route.

This describes a behavioural change; a well-practised old behaviour being replaced with a new, stronger behaviour. 

This same thing is happening in your dog’s brain when it comes to decision-making. The route that the chemical signal takes and the responses your dog gives are as a direct result of using the neural pathways that have been most frequently used in the past.

Those pathways in your dog’s case obviously aren’t grass in a field, they are strings of neurons that, through frequent firing, become increasingly sensitive to their neighbouring neurons in the chain so that they start to travel faster through the brain. Over time the connections strengthen and the more that pathway is used it will become your dog’s automatic behavior in that situation.

So this is why it is important that your dog doesn’t practice the behaviour you want to change and we teach a new behaviour that will eventually become stronger than the old one.

Behaviour change can take time and practice in order for your dog to learn because from a neurobiological level, our training is actually changing your dog’s brain; creating new neural pathways, and practicing using those new neural pathways until they’re the pathway of choice when a dog appears

So training with me will strengthen the connections we want and weaken the ones we don’t want.

Behaviour doesn’t start in the brain, we change behaviour, which then, in turn, changes the brain for future decision making.