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“Let it go.” “Think about something else.” “Clear your head.”
In our attempts to declutter our busy minds and make room for new, often more productive thoughts, people are exploiting a range of different approaches. What works best and how does each strategy have a distinct impact on the brain?
Researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of Texas first attempted to answer this question, combining new brain imaging with machine learning techniques to provide an unprecedented window into what happens in the brain when we try to stop thinking about something.
The results, published this month in the journal Nature communications, provide new insight into the basics of cognition and may inform new therapies for problems such as post-traumatic stress disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder. They also provide clues on how to develop better study habits or innovate at work.
“We’ve found that if you really want a new idea to come to mind, you have to deliberately force yourself to stop thinking about the old one,” said co-author Marie Banich, professor of psychology and neuroscience. at CU Boulder.
For the study, Banich teamed up with Jarrod Lewis-Peacock, a cognitive neuroscientist at UT-Austin, to examine the brain activity of 60 volunteers as they tried to clear a thought from their working memory.
As Lewis-Peacock describes, working memory is the “notepad” of the mind where we temporarily store our thoughts to help us complete tasks. But we can only keep three or four thoughts in working memory at a time. Like a sink full of dirty dishes, it needs to be cleaned to allow for new ideas.
“Once we are done using this information to respond to an email or solve a problem, we have to let it go so that it does not clutter our mental resources to do the next thing,” he said. he declares.
When we meditate on something – maybe the fight we had with a friend or an offensive text – it can color new thoughts in a negative light. Such rumination is at the root of many mental health disorders, Banich said.
“In obsessive-compulsive disorder, it might be the thought, ‘If I don’t wash my hands again, I’ll get sick.’ In anxiety, it might be: ‘This plane is going to crash.’ “To determine if and how people can really purge a thought, the team asked each volunteer to lie down inside an Intermountain Neuroimaging Center on the Boulder campus.
They were shown pictures of faces, fruits and scenes and asked to hold the thought of them for 4 seconds. Meanwhile, the researchers created individualized “brain signatures” showing precisely what each person’s brain looked like as they thought of each image.
Next, participants were told to: replace the thought (“replace the apple with the mountain”); clear all thoughts (similar to mindfulness meditation); or suppress the thought (focus on it and deliberately try to stop thinking about it). In each case, the brain signature associated with the image visibly diminished.
“We were thrilled,” Banich said. “This is the first study to go beyond asking someone, ‘Have you stopped thinking about it?’ Rather, you can watch a person’s brain activity, see the thought pattern, and watch it fade away as they suppress it. “
The researchers also found that “replace”, “erase” and “delete” had very different effects.
While “replace” and “erase” made the image’s brain signature fade faster, it did not completely disappear, leaving a shadow in the background as new thoughts were introduced. “Delete”, on the other hand, took longer to induce oblivion, but was more complete to make room for new thought.
Behavioral studies outside of the scanner have yielded similar results.
“The bottom line is: if you want to get something out of your mind quickly, use ‘erase’ or ‘replace’,” Banich said. “But if you want to get something out of your mind so you can put in new information, ‘deleting’ works best.”
More research is needed, but the results suggest that students may want to pack their algebra notes, take a break, and deliberately try not to think about quadratic equations before moving on to physics studies.
Hit a wall on this report at work? Let go for a moment.
“People often think, ‘If I think about it harder, I’m going to solve this problem.’ But the work of clinicians suggests that it may actually give you tunnel vision and keep you in a loop that’s hard to get out of, ”Banich said.
In a counseling setting, the results suggest that in order to completely purge a problematic memory that keeps bubbling up, it may be necessary to deliberately focus on it and then push it away.
One day, the brain imaging technique could potentially be used during sessions as a kind of cognitive mirror to help people learn to clear destructive thoughts from their minds.
Banich and Lewis-Peacock intend to study this next.
“If we can get a feel for what their brains should look like if they can suppress a thought, we can point them to a more effective strategy to get there,” Lewis-Peacock said. “This is an exciting next step.”
Reference:
Kim H, Smolker HR, Smith LL, Banich MT, Lewis-Peacock JA. Changes to information in working memory depend on separate delete operations. Nature communications. 2020; 11 (1): 6239. doi: 10.1038 / s41467-020-20085-4
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