Editing consciousness: How bereaved people control their thoughts without knowing it

Editing consciousness: How bereaved people control their thoughts without knowing it
A control process (i.e. selective attention) is used by avoidant grievers to block mental representations (i.e. thoughts of the deceased loved one) from entering consciousness (yellow section). When this is happening, avoidant grievers are suppressing (yellow section). This suppression likely exhausts energy and ultimately leads to the mental representations breaking through attempted control and reaching consciousness (red section). Contrasting avoidant grievers those with a less avoidant style simply focus on what is in front of them without trying to monitor their internal mental state as much (blue section). Credit: Noam Schneck/Columbia Engineering



Co-directed by Paul Sajda, professor of biomedical engineering, , and radiology, and John J. Mann, Paul Janssen Professor of Translational Neuroscience (in Psychiatry and in Radiology), the researchers used a new approach to track the interactions between mental processes: a machine-learning approach to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) called "neural decoding," which establishes a neural pattern or fingerprint that can be used to determine when a given mental process is happening.

"The major challenge of our study was to be able 'look under the hood' of a person's natural mind-wandering state to see what underlying processes were actually controlling their experience," says Noam Schneck, lead author of the study, a postdoctoral fellow in Sajda's lab and now assistant professor of clinical medical psychology (in psychiatry) at Columbia University Department of Psychiatry/ New York State Psychiatric Institute. "No one has done this kind of work before, showing this type of consistent control of one mental process—thinking about loss—by another—selective attention—as it happens spontaneously and unconsciously. These findings are significant because they open the door to building a fuller picture of the unconscious mind. We know that the experiences we have arise as a combination of constantly interacting networks. Now we have shown this interaction as it happens naturalistically as well as the way it controls experiences."

Editing consciousness: How bereaved people control their thoughts without knowing it


"Our findings show that avoidant grief involves attentional control to reduce the likelihood that deceased-related representations reach full conscious awareness," says Schneck. "Even though they are not aware of it, avoidant grievers actively control their so that spontaneous thoughts of loss do not enter their consciousness. This kind of tailoring of mind-wandering likely exhausts mental energy and leads to time periods when the thoughts actually do break through. It is like an ineffective pop-up blocker that runs in the background of your computer. You might not be aware that it's there but it slows down the overall operating speed and eventually breaks down and the pop ups get through."


"This research approach is an innovative collaboration between engineering and psychiatry that optimizes the tools of engineering to address critical questions in psychiatry," says Sajda, who is also a member of Columbia's Data Science Institute. "What we've shown in this paper is that outside of our , we are constantly editing our own mental experiences to what does and does not get in. And this process of editing is not always helpful."

The researchers are now planning a longitudinal study to see if avoidant grievers' internal vigilance might predict poor grief outcomes over the long term.

The study is titled "Ongoing Monitoring of Mindwandering in Avoidant Grief Through Cortico-Basal-Ganglia Interactions."

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More information: Noam Schneck et al, Ongoing Monitoring of Mindwandering in Avoidant Grief Through Cortico-Basal-Ganglia Interactions, Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (2018). DOI: 10.1093/scan/nsy114
Citation: Editing consciousness: How bereaved people control their thoughts without knowing it (2018, December 10) retrieved 15 August 2020 from https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-12-consciousness-bereaved-people-thoughts.html

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