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Inside the Narrative System: Why It's Hard Not to Think About a White Bear

The great novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky proposed a challenge: Try not to think about a white bear. Close your eyes and do it now. After a minute, come back here.

What happened? For most people, that bear keeps intruding behind your eyelids despite all your efforts to push him away. This phenomenon is so well-known that Dostoevsky's "trying not to think about a white bear" exercise has become the standard example of why thought suppression is such a difficult task. In fact, trying to consciously suppress a particular thought usually tends to increase the frequency of that thought, a phenomenon confirmed by meta-analysis of controlled studies. The same principle holds in efforts to help someone decrease a problematic behavior: It's hard to just stop doing something, but easier to replace it with an alternate behavior. People who try to quit smoking cigarettes, for example, are often encouraged to do something else like chew gum instead, or to fiddle with a ring instead of holding a cigarette in their hand during conversation. 

The problem of thought suppression is particularly challenging for people with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), in which repetitive and intrusive thoughts are often the driving force behind repetitive or problematic behaviors. A neurocognitive study found that people with OCD do in fact have more difficulty with thought suppression than peers who either were non-anxious or had other anxiety disorders. Many people have said that they feel "obsessive" about cleaning during the COVID-19 pandemic, but for most of us that probably differs from true OCD because we don't think excessively about germs and contamination at times when we aren't likely to be at risk. It's not the cleaning behavior itself that's the distinguishing feature of OCD, but the tendency to think about germs even when you don't have to and don't want to. In other words, in true OCD the mental obsessions always come before behavioral compulsions. Sometimes when we try to treat OCD, we even find that people substitute a mental ritual when we are trying to help them give up a behavioral one -- for instance, they might repeat "clean, clean, clean" in their mind instead of physically washing their hands. This might be less disruptive because the behavior is covert, but it still might be equally distressing to the person. On the other hand, one way of getting control of OCD is to deliberately change the ritual behavior associated with them, which can help to generate an experience of control over the compulsion. But even when the compulsion fades, the obsessive thought itself may still be present.

Two Minds Theory suggests that conscious thoughts arise out of the Narrative mind, and that we are aware of our Narratives in a way that we aren't aware of the below-the-surface processes that take place in the Intuitive mind. If our Narratives are conscious, rational, and based in language, why don't we have better control over them? As I have pointed out previously, the Narrative system isn't completely reasonable either, even though it is the part of the brain that is capable of math and formal logic. Our Narratives are shaded by emotions and perceptions that come up from the Intuitive mind, and we aren't always aware of those non-conscious sources. 

A similar lack of control over our own mental activity is seen in mind-wandering, in which we actively try to think about one thing but end up thinking about something else. Even though this is in some ways the opposite case from the white-bear problem (in which we were trying not to think of some specific thing), it follows a similar pattern: When we prompt people at random times to indicate what they were thinking about, we find that people's thoughts are off-task about 50% of the time. There are some other interesting patterns in the data: Lower levels of mind-wandering are associated with better task performance, but more difficult tasks also produce less mind-wandering, presumably because we have a greater need for focus to complete the assignment. Older people report that their minds wander less than young people do. And people report more mind-wandering when randomly prompted to ask them about it, compared to when they are asked to self-monitor and self-identify instances of wandering mind. This might indicate that we not only tend to wander mentally, we also have a lack of insight into the times when we are doing it, a sort of meta-level lack of control over our own mental lack of control!

Even though intrusive thoughts are difficult to remove via conscious effort, we can predict with some accuracy the conditions under which they are more or less likely to occur. The white-bear example is a kind of priming effect in which what we have just heard or seen provides the filter through which we see or hear whatever comes next. Particularly if what we see or hear next is a blank screen (e.g., closing our eyes and trying to keep our mind clear), the last thing we saw continues to echo in our mind. If we look at something else, however, the white bear tends to fade as the new stimulus takes precedence in our minds. Distraction, therefore, works better than deliberate effort in redirecting our thoughts. Focus, on the other hand, can be harder to maintain. The best advice for increasing one's mental focus is to pick a very engaging task! That could be because it's intrinsically enjoyable, because it's difficult, because it seems very important to you, or all of the above. Choosing a productive time and practicing to increase your focus are also habits of mind that can help. The more engaged you are in the task at hand, the less likely it is that white bears will intrude on your conscious mind.

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