By PsyBlog, June 28, 2015
This post has been viewed 4,172 times.
A recent study, though, suggests that concentrating on something for a long period of time actually makes it ‘disappear’ from the mind.
Professor Alejandro Lleras, one of the study’s authors, likens it to wearing clothes.
Over time we get used to the sensation of clothes touching our skin and don’t notice them.
The same is true when we work on a task or problem for any length of time, he says:
“Constant stimulation is registered by our brains as unimportant, to the point that the brain erases it from our awareness.
So I thought, well, if there’s some kind of analogy about the ways the brain fundamentally processes information, things that are true for sensations ought to be true for thoughts.
If sustained attention to a sensation makes that sensation vanish from our awareness, sustained attention to a thought should also lead to that thought’s disappearance from our mind!”
