Is it possible to consciously remove 'superfluous thoughts' from the brain?



If you think about unnecessary things during work, your efficiency will deteriorate, and if you lose your concentration while driving a car, in the worst case it will lead to an accident, so if possible, you want to eliminate unnecessary thoughts. Also, some people may not be able to sleep because they are always thinking when they enter the futon. In this way, recent research on the theme of thoughts that keep popping up in your head has revealed that it is possible to consciously eliminate certain thoughts from your mind through training.

If you don't let it in, you don't have to get it out: Thought preemption as a method to control unwanted thoughts | PLOS Computational Biology

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1010285

Research probes how people control unwanted t | EurekAlert!
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/957743

Is it possible to avoid unwanted thoughts? | Live Science
https://www.livescience.com/suppress-unwanted-thoughts

The human brain processes a huge amount of data every day, including memories that are important for survival and judgments that are essential for social life, but also random thoughts. . For example, a 1996 study by Eric Klinger, a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota, found that the average human has more than 4,000 thoughts per day, but each thought lasts an average of five seconds. It was said that it was not done.



In order to investigate whether it is possible to suppress such thoughts that float and disappear one after another, a research team of Mr. Isaac Fradkin and Mr. Elan Elder, who are studying psychology at the Hebrew University of Israel , conducted an experiment in which 80 paid volunteers were divided into two groups and challenged an association game.

An associative game is a game in which a random theme is presented, for example, if the theme is 'table', 'chair', and the subject is asked to answer the words related to it as quickly as possible. One group was allowed to repeat the same answer to the same theme, but the other group had a large difference from the first answer, such as 'meal' for the second 'table'. I was informed that I would not receive an additional reward unless I answered differently.

Due to this rule, for example, after answering 'chair' for 'table', if you answer 'desk' which is similar to chair in terms of furniture, points will be deducted. This is to make the person aware of the fact that he or she answered 'chair' at first, but to think of a different answer. It's a mechanism to reproduce the situation you're trying to get out of your head.

When the experiment ended, the group that had to give different answers each time, as expected by the research team, took longer to associate than the group that did not. However, every time I saw the same theme, the time required for association became shorter and shorter. This indicates that as a result of repeated efforts not to think about unnecessary thoughts, the connection between the question and the first answer, in the previous example, 'table' and 'chair' became weaker. The research team thinks



About this, Mr. Fradkin said, ``Since thinking is self-reinforcing, a certain thought strengthens the memory and makes it more likely that you will think the same thing. However, this study shows that you can avoid certain thoughts by being proactive and trying not to think of them as much as possible.' .

in Science, Posted by log1l_ks