Can We Suppress Unwanted Thoughts?
Updated: Jun 23
Student summary by Audrey Kim
Original Source: Isobel Whitcomb, Livescience, October 2, 2022
Image created by Audrey Kim
Abstract
Background: As people live through their lives, they can experience sorrowful or disturbing situations. Those memories sometimes come
back and remind them of that time, making them want to forget everything. Sometimes, people randomly have weird thoughts that never happened. And either way, they make people want to stop thinking about the same things over and over again.
Objective: Psychologists wanted to find out how to help stop people from thinking about certain things, like a terrible memory or a disturbing thought. While so much content passes by a human’s brain everyday, will it be possible to banish unwanted thoughts?
Method: In a 1996 study, researcher Eric Klinger found that people have over 4,000 thoughts in one day. In a 2022 study, 80 volunteers were shown nouns (like “road”) several times and asked to write a related word (like “car”). One group was told not to repeat their answers, while the other group could repeat words. The goal was to see what happens when people try not to think about something connected to a memory.
Results: Participants who were told not to repeat their answers took longer to think of new words because their first response kept coming back to mind. Over time, they became faster, showing the connection was getting weaker. However, the study found that people cannot completely stop unwanted thoughts, and the thoughts often returned after the task ended.
Conclusion: It turns out that trying to avoid the thoughts might not be a very good idea; we should just let them pass our minds, just like the other thousands of thoughts that go by each day. Still, controlling them is possible, but only for short terms.
