• Question: how do bad memories or bad thoughts occur ? and how do you get rid of them? :(

    Asked by weekeenan to Anne, Carolyn, Joe, Mariana, Nick on 24 Mar 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Carolyn McGettigan

      Carolyn McGettigan answered on 24 Mar 2010:

      We humans have a lot of memories stored up in our brains, and we have a great capacity for imagination and thought construction. So, sometimes a thought or a memory can sort of ‘pop up’ that we don’t really want to experience at all. It’s probably not surprising given how much information is floating around in our heads. I’m not really sure how or why this happens, but it can definitely be unpleasant. Of course, our memory also offers us a way to revisit all the great things that have happened before too.

      There has been some work trying to see whether people can ‘suppress’ their memories. Some of these studies have been in the context of simple lab experiments, where different cueing methods were used to see if you could encourage people to ‘forget’ things they saw before, like lists of words. There was some evidence that these approaches can work. However, it seems there is a lot of debate about this – it would be good if Mariana were still around in this zone to help out on this topic!

      But we humans don’t just go around learning lists of words in life. There may be very good reasons why we shouldn’t try to *suppress* memories for past events, even if these are bad, but rather talk through them and understand them. I guess that is the kind of thing that psychologists know much more about than neuroscientists do. When it comes to bad thoughts, i think it’s similar. When I was a teenager I used to get quite anxious and sometimes these horrible thoughts would come into my head, crazy things like if I didn’t switch the light on and off a certain number of times then something really bad would happen. It sounds a bit like OCD, I suppose. I learned to control my anxiety by realising that the thoughts didn’t necessarily reflect *me* and my intentions. For me, the best thing to ‘get rid’ of the thoughts was to put my mind to other things that I really enjoyed, like spending time with friends or playing music. But, as I said, psychologists know much more than this about me!

    • Photo: Joseph Devlin

      Joseph Devlin answered on 24 Mar 2010:

      Good question — one that no one truly knows the answer to. The problem is that we don’t really know how any thoughts occur, let alone bad ones.

      There are, however, a variety of strategies to help get rid of bad thoughts. One is something called ‘cognitive behavioural therapy’ in which a person purposely exposes themselves to the bad thoughts but gets a kind of reward/encouragement to help change them from bad to good. More traditional forms of therapy are another approach. Often bad thoughts are associated with particularly painful or difficult memories and coming to terms with them can help to reduce the bad thoughts. In more severe cases like clinical depression or schizophrenia, there are also drugs that help to break the cycle. Nick is our expert there.

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