That’s why you never forget how to ride a bike. This is one of the reasons that bad habits are so hard to change. You don’t actually eliminate old habits—they just get weaker as you create newer, stronger ones. Furthermore, once habits are in the dorsal striatum, they no longer care about pleasure. Sure, they usually first get in there because your nucleus accumbens is motivating you to do something, but once a habit is really engrained, it no longer requires the nucleus accumbens to motivate it.
