Mankind has been trying to ‘let go’ long before Queen Elsa began singing the frozen solo. Now that many in the world are facing their longer quarantines, it is becoming increasingly difficult to stop pondering our new concerns.
A new psychological study has come at the right time. Brain imaging and behavioral analysis are now the top three ways to take thinking away from your mind.
When people focus on replacing an idea with another, or ‘clearing’ their mind through meditation, researchers have found that brain signatures put the thought down more quickly, leaving just a shadow behind.
When people focus on dismissing new thinking, however, it takes a longer name to disappear, although in the end it does, it becomes more complete.
“We were thrilled,” said psychology professor Marie Banich of the University of Colorado, Boulder, about the results.
“This is the first study that moved beyond just asking someone,‘ Did you stop thinking about that? ’Instead, you can look at a person’s brain activity, see the pattern of the think and then watch it go down as they take it away. “
Rumination, or overthinking, is a symptom of a number of psychiatric disorders, including depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and obsessive-compulsive disorder, and believes that it arises from a deficiency of some kind in a person’s working memory.
Working memory is the part of our brains that is involved manually, and can only hold so much information, usually around three or four concepts at a time. It is therefore essential to get rid of inappropriate thoughts about storing and storing appropriate ones for the future.
Unfortunately, negative thoughts are harder to suppress, but when we put our minds consciously, we have little control over how the information is processed in our brain. Some mental training has been shown to clear the mind faster, others slower, and there are ways that do not work at all.
However, many of these results are simply based on self-reports or indirect behavioral tests. Brain imaging gives us a more accurate measurement.
Previous image research from 2015 showed that changing content to working memory activates the parietal region of the brain, where we receive and process sensory information. Clearing the contents of your working memory, however, activates the prefrontal cortex, which is involved in complex cognitive processes such as decision-making.
Interestingly, volunteers in this study who had more trouble controlling their inner thoughts showed more activity in the prefrontal cortex and Broca area, which is associated with internal speech.
The 2015 research was conducted by several of the same authors involved in this new study and focuses on three specific strategies for removing thoughts in your mind.
Lying inside an active magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) device, 50 participants were randomly assigned pictures of famous faces, fruits and recognizable scenes, which they thought actively for four seconds apiece .
Creating ‘brain signatures’ for each of these items, participants were then asked to clear the mind with reflection, suppress the thinking by focusing and then forget it. active, or instead of other thinking seen in the study.
Analyzing the data derived from machine learning, researchers found a hierarchy of brain regions involved to varying degrees in controlling our thoughts, including the parietal and frontopolar, as well as the dorsolateral prefrontal, which is associated with attention and working memory.
What areas were involved in each situation and to what extent depended on the mindset used by participants, ultimately leading to different outcomes.
By looking at patterns of brain activity, the team was able to show when an idea was taken out of a person’s working memory – a first for the field.
It is not yet clear what happens to all this information in the brain, but it appears that thinking can be quickly and for a time removed from our working memory with the right attention. It can also be removed more permanently, making room for new ideas, through proactive ‘mental intervention’.
“We’ve found that if you really want a new idea to come into your mind, you have to deliberately stop thinking about the old one,” Banich said.
“The bottom line is: If you want to get something out of your mind quickly use ‘clear’ or ‘replace’. But if you want to get something out of your mind so you can To submit new information, suppress is the best job. ”
If you are studying one subject, for example, and need to dive into another subject, you may want to try to keep your working memory down first.
When it comes to mental health, erasing long-term memories is often seen as a bad thing. In cases of PTSD, as the researchers point out, it can allow trauma to move below the surface, thus increasing its impact. As a result of this thinking, exposure therapy is often used to actively deal with and restructure some traumatic memories, and thus carry less emotional and mental stress in the long run.
These new findings, however, suggest that working memory may be focused on healing, although this time through prevention.
Further research is needed to examine how brain names and brain function are damaged or disturbed in those with depression, anxiety, or PTSD. But once memory has reached consciousness and entered a person’s working memory, the authors believe that adoption may be a valuable original tool for some, “since the This process allows the information to be removed from the mind. “
In contrast, repositioning or clearing thinking from working memory only takes that thing out of our conscious attention. While this removes the object’s neural signature, it still leaves the information intact.
“Training an individual to divert attention by redirecting (ie, repositioning) thinking or through cognitive techniques (ie, clearing thoughts) may be the first step. a fruitful step followed by training to exercise mind control to suppress the mind, thus reducing its strength, ”the authors conclude.
“Further work is needed to explore these ideas, but our findings, however, point to a potentially fruitful translation into clinical practice. “
The study was published in Nature Communication.