“Ninety-nine hundredths of our activity is purely automatic,” the psychologist and philosopher William James famously wrote. “All of our life is nothing but a mass of habits.”

James was pointing out that, though we give habits little thought, they define our lives: how much we eat, save or spend, how often we trek to the gym and what we say to our kids each night.

But these compulsions aren’t inscribed in our genes or hard-wired into the brain at birth. Scientists are discovering that habits are simply an extreme form of learning, a behavior that’s so familiar we no longer need to think about it.

The malleability of habits isn’t news to Madison Avenue: Effective commercials show how people can be quickly trained to do something new and then keep on doing it. The secret, it turns out, is the quick combination of a memorable cue and a rewarding experience.

Consider Febreze, a product designed by Procter & Gamble in the 1990s to remove bad odors. As Charles Duhigg recounts in his fascinating new book, “The Power of Habit,” Febreze underperformed in early tests and was in danger of being canceled. Consumers couldn’t fathom what the product was for.

Febreze didn’t become a superstar until the P&G marketing team created an ad campaign based on habit formation. The television spots showed homemakers performing a chore—making a bed, mopping the kitchen—and then spritzing a little scented Febreze into the air. The spritz was always followed by a big smile.

What’s most interesting is that instead of focusing on removing bad smells, the ads set up Febreze—to which perfume had been added—as the reward for a bout of cleaning, satisfying the desire to make things smell nice, not just look good. The ads taught consumers a new habit, training them to associate the rewarding positive cue—a spotless space—with the use of Febreze. Before long, the product was a best seller.

Now we can see how these habits take hold in our brains. In a new paper, the neuroscientist Joe Z. Tsien and colleagues at Georgia Health Sciences University describe a mutant strain of mice that were incapable of developing new habits. While ordinary mice quickly developed the habit of pressing a lever to get a food pellet (leading to overeating), the mutant mice stopped pressing the lever as soon as they felt full.

These mice were missing a protein known as an NMDA receptor on their dopamine neurons. Normally, these receptors help to generate a big electrical response when an animal is repeatedly exposed to a rewarding cue, such as a food pellet. According to Mr. Tsien’s data, this specific response is what transforms ordinary learning into an automatic behavior. It doesn’t matter if we’re learning to overeat or to spray Febreze. That big signal from the NMDA receptor makes the difference.

This isn’t the first time that Mr. Tsien has tinkered with NMDA receptors. A few years ago, he created a mouse strain with too much of the receptor and created a freakishly smart rodent—Mr. Tsien nicknamed it Doogie—that could learn and remember far better than a normal mouse. He has also showed that younger brains have significantly more of this receptor, which is why they absorb new information and acquire new routines so much more rapidly.

William James would appreciate this research. As he pointed out, the intelligence of humans is inseparable from our reliance on habits, the most mindless of behaviors. That’s because they let us reserve brainpower for those things that can’t be predicted in advance, those situations without relevant cues. Those are the circumstances that we actually need to think about. We have habits for everything else.

By KATHLEEN SQUIRES

The 6th Annual International Gourmet Festival, a 10-day cooking event featuring 33 Michelin-starred chefs from a dozen countries, wrapped up late last month in Albufeira, Portugal. Here are some of the most celestial offerings we encountered.

Hernan Rodriguez

Chef Shaun Hergatt

Best Looking

Toro

Pink pieces of tuna belly lined the plate like petits fours, adorned with bright blue borage flowers and beaming yellow cucumber blossoms. Notes of ginger, lime, rice-wine vinegar and a crisp, compressed cucumber accompanied the fish, with a dollop of golden osetra as a rich, salty, grand finale.

The chef: Shaun Hergatt, SHO Shaun Hergatt, New York. “The flowers added a synergy between the fish and vegetables—borage, for example, tastes like oyster and cucumber.”

Best Reinvented Classic

Bouillabaisse en Sashimi

Uncooked fish and cold broth marked this bright reinterpretation of a classic, generously garnished with the bounty of the Algarve (oysters, clams, mussels, snapper, lobster, prawns, shrimp, sea urchin and caviar).

The chef: Laurent Gras, formerly of L2O, Chicago. “I replaced the traditional rouille with a wasabi emulsion. The bouillabaisse is clarified and turned into a consommé, with kombu adding a natural gelatin and shaved bonito bringing smokiness.”

Vasco Célio/Stills

A dish by chef Normand Laprise

Most Festive

Beef With Christmas Tree Scent and Barberry

Sweet berries brightened a supple beef loin, perfumed with pine. Crosnes, tiny winter tubers, added a nutty edge and snappy texture.

The chef: Normand Laprise, Toqué, Montreal. “We have a lot of forest in Quebec, and I like to use its essence in my meals. When I was a child we used pine as a medicine. Barberry is also traditionally a medicine berry, so this dish is meant to be very soothing.”

Most Ingenious

Compression of My Gastronomic Life

Layers of emulsions and foam had all the tricks of modern cuisine and all the taste of traditional Italy. Salty cheese, lush beans and rosemary essence translated to a wild take on pasta fagioli.

The chef: Massimo Bottura, Osteria Francescana, Modena, Italy. “The bottom layer is crème royale, a tribute to Joel Robuchon. The top is rosemary foam, which reminds me of Ferran Adrià. The middle is a crusty Parmigiano-Reggiano, sliced thin like pasta and cooked in a bean sauce, like my grandmother would make. She is the emotional part of the dish.”

Best Faux Caviar

Monkfish Drizzled With Geranium Oil

A painter’s palette of rosy roasted shallots; mossy green spinach in soy butter; and a sunburst of carrot-mustard purée surrounded the florally-scented fish. A bed of tart, caviar-like finger lime seeds gave a surprising pop.

The chef: Alain Passard, L’Arpège, Paris. “The geraniums and lime seed are from my garden. This dish says so much about my cooking because it is light and based on wellness. There is no cream, no sauce. Very surprising for a French chef, no?”

By SIDNEY LAWRENCE

George R. Stroemple Collection/Alexis Rockman

‘Evolution’ (1992), by Alexis Rockman.

Columbus, Ohio

The art of illustration is a respected genre arising most famously from fiction—Sir John Tenniel’s “Alice in Wonderland,” for instance—and science, as in John James Audubon’s “Birds of North America.”

Art that is illustrative is another matter. Purists distrust it because, they say, even the most realistic, topical or narrative artwork must be grounded in aesthetics, not facts, which can deaden the transcendence at the core of great art. This schism keeps the work of Norman Rockwell, Maxfield Parrish and even Salvador Dalí in art-world limbo. You might as well pick up a magazine or look at a photograph, say the detractors. Chill out and open up to the artistry of depiction, say the revisionists.

The work of Manhattan-based painter Alexis Rockman, 49, hovers somewhere between these extremes. In the mid-1980s, Mr. Rockman made his gallery debut with quirky, washy paintings of creature life that some mistook for Conceptual Art but, more accurately, reflected the art world’s embrace of image-based painting and storytelling. Astutely aware of nature displays, with which he grew up visiting New York’s American Museum of Natural History, Mr. Rockman also turned to 19th-century landscapes, sci-fi movies and vernacular culture for inspiration while honing his skills in the studio. His best-known works are sweeping narratives in tune with the ecological movement.

A major Rockman retrospective at the Wexner Center for the Arts features nearly 40 paintings and works on paper that the artist has created since 1986. “Alexis Rockman: A Fable for Tomorrow” was organized and first presented last fall by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington. Slightly condensed for the Columbus showing, it brings into even sharper focus Mr. Rockman’s strengths, and weaknesses, as an artist whose ambition is to be illustrational, personally expressive and didactic at the same time—a tall order.

The earliest paintings on wood (Mr. Rockman’s preference to canvas) look great in the hyperdramatic, elongated galleries of the Wexner. “Amphibian Evolution” (1986), based on a textbook diagram, features branches, roots and Botero-fat frogs and crocodiles above and below a waterline in a bold, free-form composition of controlled chaos that feels very art-world contemporary.

On the other hand, Mr. Rockman’s large-scale “Evolution” (1992) is as old-fashioned looking as the museum-dinosaur murals that inspired it. It’s also crazy fun. This luminously rendered, 8-foot-by-24-foot tropical panorama is jam-packed with meticulously rendered details and fanciful touches. For starters, the smoking volcano in the background is a near-perfect replication of “Cotopaxi,” an expedition-based Latin American painting completed in 1862 by Hudson River master Frederic Edwin Church. The species depicted number 214—among them a Mallard duck and Holstein cow, plus a “Rat-Bat Spider” and three-eyed “Garbage Freak,” hybrids as bizarre as Hieronymus Bosch’s medieval inventions. A bulbous-brained, almond-eyed sci-fi humanoid with male and female attributes surveys the teeming scene. Is this where humanity is headed?

In 1994, Mr. Rockman spent several months in Guyana, vowing to paint only what he saw. “Drainage Ditch: Georgetown” (1995) is a cross-section of that city’s eccentric ecology, including a filthy-looking underwater habitat full of discarded tires and dog-faced fish, one with newborns—gross but poignant. His smaller insect studies, while witty, have a wince-inducing technical quality. But “Bromeliad: Kaieteur Falls” (1994), a cutaway view of the red and green plant (plus curious frogs and worms) with an idyllic rain forest behind, is gloriously poetic.

Humans are largely unrepresented in this exhibition, but our species becomes an irrefutable presence in “The Farm” (2001), a large painting so vivid and satirical you can’t help but love it. This not-so-subtle slam at the dangers of genetic engineering depicts a Grant-Wood-Iowa country-fair display of square tomatoes, a multiteated cow and other oddities in an unmodified soybean field, plus a pathetically overbred Chinese Crested dog, presented on an oval insert like a blue-ribbon prize.

Even more compelling is the cutaway, 3-D miniature diorama “Golf Course” (1997). Under several layers of resin, an actual putter blade taps a golf ball into a cup. Artificial turf and a painted fairway and country club complete the illusion, but below, instead of dirt, is actual trash (cans, bones, plastic bottles, wrappers, etc.) from which emerges a yellow-eyed cartoon monster eating someone’s finger. Yikes!

“Manifest Destiny” (2003-4) is a grandiose shocker, a mural-scaled depiction of Brooklyn in ruins, under water, several centuries hence. This well-researched, humid-seeming, yellowish tableau of crumbling architecture, broken systems and surviving organisms deliberately invokes the final, ravaged landscape of Thomas Cole’s “Course of Empire” (1836). The Brooklyn Bridge is as picturesque as any Romantic ruin but also right out of a postapocalyptic sci-fi film. One also thinks of National Geographic illustrations of lost cultures, the Titanic videos, and global-warming flood maps. It’s pretty eerie.

But is this painting all gloom-and-doom? Not at all. It is an aquarium of catfish, sharks, seals, a giant jellyfish and a notorious northern snakehead (which nibbles on a swimming rat), an aviary for pelicans and gulls, and a garden sprouting healthy vegetation above and below water. It’s all very theatrical and actually rather soothing. In its own way, this is edgy art.

Mr. Rockman’s most recent large-scale opus, “South” (2008), seems dull by comparison. Recounting his sojourn to the Antarctic, the work pays homage to a Church painting of 1861 and marks a departure for the artist, who moves into a more experimental, improvisational mode. Mammoth icebergs are rendered with a palette knife, the polar weather is in gray washes, and drips and drops may—or may not—indicate ice-cap melting. But the 30-foot-wide, seven-paneled work on paper is too big, chopped up, and thematically vague to stir the soul.

Wherever he is headed artistically, Mr. Rockman will remain a passionate illustrator of nature. He interprets current dangers to the natural world and refuses to let us look the other way, prodding us—sometimes gently, sometimes not—to pay attention to their perils. Some people might find this exhibition depressing, but if you like bravado, over-the-top fantasy and God’s cosmos, you’ll come out smiling. It’s a fable, after all. Who cares whether it’s art or illustration?

Correction: An earlier version of this story said that Alexis Rockman was based in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Mr. Lawrence is an artist and writer in Washington.

Here’s how you can tell the auto industry is getting its swagger back: Company executives are teasing us with sports cars again.

Joe White on Lunch Break looks at some standout concept cars from the Detroit auto show, including Acura’s NSX supercar, Chevy’s Code 130R and TRU 140S, a futuristic minivan from Chrysler and a sports car from Lexus and Toyota.

The crop of concept cars at this year’s North American International Auto Show in Detroit came in a wide variety of styles and sizes. But the predominant message seemed to be: “Give the people something fun to dream about.”

Concept cars are the auto industry’s way of road-testing new ideas for automotive styling, interior layouts or integrating technology. Until about a decade ago, auto-show concept cars were often wildly futuristic and fanciful exercises, with little chance of actually hitting the road.

More recently, budget-conscious auto executives have focused on using concept cars to whet appetites for soon-to-be launched production cars (this year’s Honda Accord Coupe concept is one), or to test whether a product idea under serious consideration has legs with potential buyers.

Here’s a sample of the show cars that were on display at Detroit’s cavernous Cobo Center convention hall last week.

You decide—Build it, or bag it?

Acura NSX Concept

With its Acura brand’s sales down 41% from 2005, Honda Motor Co. is attempting to resurrect its NSX supercar as a U.S.-built, all-wheel-drive hybrid aimed at wealthy technophiles who want extreme performance in a refined, eco-friendly package. Acura once set itself apart from its larger rival, Toyota Motor Corp.’s Lexus, with the NSX, but in 2005, Honda killed it and repositioned Acura as a brand for ultrarational people.

Pros: The old NSX had a cult following, for good reason. It offered a close approximation of Ferrari looks and performance, but with Honda reliability and a lower price tag.

Cons: The new NSX looks a lot like the current Audi R8. That may not be daring enough for a car that won’t hit the street for three years

Chevy Code 130R and Tru 140S

Chevrolet is evidently wondering how to offer sporty cars for youths unable to heft the payments for a Camaro or a Corvette. They served up two very different possible answers in Detroit, only one of which will likely get built. The Code 130R is a small, rear-drive car that harks back to Detroit’s glory years. The Tru 140S is a rakish, front-drive car in the Japanese/Korean “Fast and Furious” mode.

Pros: Chevy can use both of these cars to catch younger buyers before they scoot over to the Asian brands.

Cons: Chevy may be too late. The soon-to-launch FR-S from Toyota’s Scion brand will scoop up kids enamored by retro, rear-drive cars like the Code 130R. The TRU 140S looks like the Veloster that Hyundai is already selling.

Chrysler 700C

Have you wondered how Chrysler will re-establish its dominion over the minivan market? Probably not. But someone at Chrysler has to, and one result is the Chrysler 700C, a “surprise concept” it says is aimed at testing audience reaction. With its oddly proportioned roof pillars and side windows, the 700C is a throwback to the days of wacky auto-show concept cars.

Pros: Chrysler still sells more minivans than Honda or Toyota and a more boldly styled minivan could move Chrysler back to No. 1 on more family’s shopping lists.

Cons: Chrysler’s done little to trumpet the car, leaving the auto blogosphere to carry the ball. Unless Hollywood casts it in a live-action “Jetsons” film, the oddball elements of the 700C may not go far.

Toyota NS4/Lexus LF-LC

Toyota is struggling with an adrenaline deficit in both its mass-market Toyota and luxury Lexus brands. Toyota used the Detroit show to signal its plans to juice things up.

The Toyota NS4 plug-in hybrid is described as “a midsize concept for potential global market introduction by 2015.” In other words, it could be what the next Camry hybrid looks like.

The Lexus LF-LC, a sporty hybrid coupe, is a product of the brand’s push to dispel its image as the brand for rich people who like boring cars. The LF-LC’s sharp angles and unusual “spindle” grille shape won a best-concept-in-show award in Detroit.

Pros: The LF-LC says Toyota is serious about giving Lexus a distinctive identity. It’s about time. The NS4 is a breath of fresh air for the staid Toyota brand.

Cons: The Lexus “spindle” grille is a polarizing look that may not age well. The NS4 is a step in the right direction for the Toyota brand, but bolder steps may be needed.

Lincoln MKZ

The Lincoln MKZ is a critical step in Ford Motor Co.’s latest, and possibly last, effort to salvage its Lincoln brand. The MKZ concept replaces the current Lincoln grille with upswept, horizontal bars borrowed from a 1938 Lincoln Zephyr. The roofline gets a more coupe-like arc, the better to distinguish the MKZ from its mechanical sibling, the Ford Fusion.

Pros: This MKZ looks less like a knockoff of the cheaper Ford, and that’s a good thing.

Cons: The MKZ’s toughest competition lives in its own house. Nearly all the buzz about Ford in Detroit was focused on the bold looks and advanced technology of the 2013 Ford Fusion, which wears a grille appropriated from a real luxury brand, Aston Martin.

Write to Joseph B. White at joseph.white@wsj.com

By JULIE V. IOVINE

New York

This city’s zoning codes regulating the size, use and location of buildings could sap the life force out of all but the most zealous urban enthusiasts. Their technical language is intelligible only to initiated bureaucrats—probably with pocket protectors—and a handful of canny developers, certainly with a gleam in their eye.

Or so it is believed. But times have changed and so has the New York City Zoning Resolution, which just passed its 50th anniversary last month. Once regarded with frustration and loathing, zoning in middle age is hot, the cougar of urban regulatory devices: more flexible and dynamic than ever. Actually, urban planners are more likely to invoke a thermostat metaphor—noting that zoning can raise or lower the habitability of the city by degrees. The layperson might also think of it as planning’s magic wand—an implementation technique, not an avoid-at-all-costs, manipulate-as-possible rule or regulation.

Chad Crowe

And in the Bloomberg administration, as wielded by the New York City Planning Commission and its director, Amanda Burden, zoning has assumed a more activist role than ever before. It not only shapes the blocks and writes the skyline, but also aims to curb obesity by offering incentives for fresh-food markets in low-income neighborhoods; buck up the mom-and-pop store; and promote an astonishing range of other quality-of-life benefits.

“Zoning has always concerned itself, for better or worse, with social matters, such as banishing noxious uses,” said Julia Vitullo-Martin, a senior fellow at the Regional Plan Association. “What’s different now is that the planning commission is moving from zoning that’s negative on social issues to being positive, like mandating green markets and bike rooms. It’s reasonable for city government to encourage people to move in a beneficial direction. Whether zoning is the correct device is another matter. A market person might say it’s better to go with incentives than mandates.” As such, zoning is something of which every New Yorker and visitor ought to be aware.

It has all become very cosmopolitan. The city’s selective bus lanes were inspired by the rapid-transit bus system in Bogotá, Colombia; the newly accessible waterfront borrows its sociable seating arrangements from Sydney, Australia; even New York’s controversial bike lanes come by way of close attention to those in Copenhagen. By tweaking the number, type and location of everything from bus lanes to street benches, zoning makes places more welcoming to visit and inviting to use.

Last month, the planning commission submitted a new initiative to public review. Called Zone Green, it will promote energy efficiency by making it easier to add photovoltaic panels, wind turbines, greenhouses and shading devices to the roofs and sides of older buildings. On Jan. 3, Commissioner Burden introduced a zoning amendment that will preserve small shops on avenues with a residential character and force new banks on the Upper West Side to shift most of their services from extended street fronts to second-floor locations. “We want New York to be a walkable city,” Ms. Burden said, “with active, tree-lined streets and active retail frontages. This modest proposal will preserve that small-store character by allowing stores a maximum of 40 feet on the street.” Banks would have a tighter, 25-foot restriction.

Tom Angotti, an urban planner and director of the Hunter College Center for Community Planning & Development, questions the significance of the planning-commission director’s emphasis on fine-grain maneuvers. “Amanda Burden brings a very personal touch because of her interest in design,” Mr. Angotti said. “But I would give greater weight to the directives coming from City Hall. Of the more than 100 rezonings in the past 10 years, most have been about creating opportunities for new real-estate development.”

As now practiced in New York, zoning and its achievements have become the envy of other cities, even Paris. For the first time in an almost 10-year run of urban design conferences held around the world, the French Minister of Sustainable Development selected New York and its zoning innovations for study. The event last July was subtitled “New York Reinvented,” and some 150 French and European mayors, urban planners, developers and architects toured such recent local triumphs as the High Line, Brooklyn Bridge Park and community regeneration projects in the Bronx.

“The resurrection of New York, hit in its very flesh and its pride by the September 11, 2001 attacks, is nothing short of astonishing,” wrote Jean-Louis Cohen in the program’s introduction. Mr. Cohen, a historian and one of the organizers of the event, added in an email that although zoning “was originally a German invention, it has been greatly perfected in New York City since 1916.” The elite European group, he noted, was especially keen on understanding New York’s sharp-cookie culture of negotiation and flexible regulation.

It wasn’t always such a success story. In 1916, New York City wrote into law the country’s first comprehensive Zoning Resolution. Designed to bring light and air down the street even as skyscrapers soared higher, the earliest zoning codes called for setbacks, and left it largely at that. More than 2,000 amendments followed, introducing such notions as superblocks in the 1940s—to limit density by spacing skyscrapers widely apart. In 1961, the Zoning Resolution was overhauled. Architect and historian Robert A.M. Stern recently called it “the pivotal postwar architectural event.”

Eighteen years in the making, the 1961 resolution almost immediately backfired with, among other missteps, its endorsement of the deadening tower-in-a-plaza motif that resulted in wide and windswept public spaces avoided by pedestrians, still in dreadful evidence along the Avenue of the Americas. Zoning in those days focused primarily on the bulk of individual buildings. It was not until the ’70s that it considered the larger context of whole neighborhoods by designating special districts—for theaters around Times Square; for retail on Fifth Avenue—and addressing more subtle issues such as economically diverse housing. At the same time, developers shrewdly learned how to swap public amenities for bigger buildings. Zucotti Park, where the Occupy Wall Street protestors gathered, was created in one such swap in 1968 but, unlike most other so-called privately owned public spaces, it was required to remain open 24 hours a day because its creation included absorbing an alley. Zoning became a game for poker sharks.

The current trend in moving zoning away from shaping big buildings toward how buildings and places are used and perform can already be seen at the recently opened East River Esplanade, where a balustrade as wide as a lunch counter and bar stools are mandated. While Mayor Michael Bloomberg is often portrayed as the developers’ friend, Ms. Burden has kept a steady eye on improving the public realm through the tools close to hand. “Zoning is not going to solve world peace,” she said in a recent interview. “But if we can figure out the issues now and address them, we can lay the foundations for the next administration so that what we start now will carry New York City into a better future.”

Ms. Iovine writes about architecture for the Journal.

Corrections & Amplifications: An earlier version of this story indicated that both banks and retail stores on New York’s Upper West Side would have a store-front restriction of 25 feet.

Riverhead

A novel that explores racism, anti-Semitism and the will to endure against unimaginable odds.

“The Street Sweeper” by Elliot Perlman (Riverhead, Jan. 5).

Mr. Perlman, author of the ingenious 2004 novel “Seven Types of Ambiguity,” tackles the epic struggles of two persecuted peoples, European Jews and African-Americans, and their sometimes tragic intersections. The street sweeper is a paroled felon working at a cancer hospital, where he befriends a patient, a Holocaust survivor. A third character, a history professor, finds a box of recordings of other Holocaust victims recounting their experiences to a psychologist at the end of World War II. All have extraordinary stories to tell—of racism, anti-Semitism and the will to endure against unimaginable odds.

“The Quality of Mercy” by Barry Unsworth (Nan A. Talese, Jan. 10).

If you haven’t read Mr. Unsworth’s majestic historical novel “Sacred Hunger,” I urge you to do that, ideally before reading this deeply moving sequel. But “The Quality of Mercy” stands on its own as a story of capitalism, class and slavery in late 18th-century England. Mr. Unsworth is equally fluent writing about the lives of bankers and coal miners, judges and slaves, and he brings his characters together with authority and grace. As with all of his historical novels, Mr. Unsworth conveys the sights, sounds and smells of life in another century without the slightest hint of pedantry.

Overlook

Mr. Fry is pitiless on the subject of his young self, but he’s also wry and tender and hilarious.

“The Fry Chronicles: An Autobiography” by Stephen Fry (Overlook, Jan. 19).

The second volume of Mr. Fry’s life story (the first was “Moab Is My Washpot”), “The Fry Chronicles” takes the British novelist, playwright and comedian from Cambridge—after a short stint in prison for theft—to his early days in show business with, among other luminaries, his comedic soul mate Hugh Laurie (now Dr. Gregory House). Mr. Fry is pitiless on the subject of his young self, but he’s also wry and tender and hilarious. “I was the luckiest person I knew,” he writes on the penultimate page. Then, when he was about 30 years old, an actor friend “asked me if I fancied a line.” That chapter of his life (15 years of cocaine use) will be the subject of another book.

—Send your questions about books and reading to Cynthia Crossen at booklover@wsj.com.