The Domesticated Brain: A Pelican Introduction (Pelican Books) by Bruce Hood

Author:Bruce Hood [Hood, Bruce]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141974873
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2014-04-30T21:00:00+00:00

Rebounding earworms and white bears

Rebound effects can happen when you least expect them and often can be very irritating.

Have you ever had that annoying experience where a tune gets stuck in your head – even one that you really hate? No matter how you try, it will simply not go away. The more you try to ignore it, the stronger the song becomes. Like some type of musical itch you cannot scratch.

This is because you are experiencing an earworm. Earworm is a direct translation of the German term ohrwurm, which means ‘earwig’. These are the tunes that we can’t forget, no matter how hard we try. It may be a catchy pop song or some advert jingle. Often we hate the tune but it simply will not go away. They intrude into our consciousness uninvited and, once there, overstay their welcome.

Around nine out of ten have experienced an earworm and diary studies indicate that most of us have an earworm episode at least once per week.39 Most people find them annoying, but no matter how hard they try, these earworms just will not go away on command. And it is not just tunes that get stuck in our head; mental images can lodge in your mind as well.

You can assess your own mental-image suppression with the following test. Say out loud each thought or image that comes into your head over the next five minutes. Time yourself. You can say anything, but the only rule is that you must not think about a white bear. Remember that – anything but a white bear. Now try it.

Did the image of a polar bear pop into your mind? When my Harvard colleague Dan Wegner conducted this simple experiment, he found that participants could not help but think of a white bear and the more they tried to suppress the thought of a white bear, the more it rebounded back.40 The reason for this obstinate effect is that in attempting not to think about the white bear, processes in our mind actively seek out white bears so as to monitor them and prevent them from entering awareness. However that monitoring in itself brings them into consciousness.

When people try to suppress unwanted thoughts, they come thundering back into consciousness with even greater strength. This failure of self-control can have implications for our domestication. Inappropriate sexual thoughts and racist stereotypes are both things that we would rather not think about, but in doing so, they become all the more vivid in our minds. In one study, adults were shown a picture of a skinhead and asked to write an essay about a day in the life of the individual portrayed in the photograph. Half of them were instructed not to use any stereotypes. After the essay, they were taken to a room with a row of eight empty chairs and told that the jacket on the end chair belonged to the skinhead they had just written about and were about to meet. Those who had

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