Mental instructions free up space for productive thoughts, study shows

Giving yourself verbal or mental instructions to clear your mind can help make room in your brain for more productive thoughts, a new study reveals. US researchers used brain imaging scans and machine learning to investigate what happens to the brain when we try to stop thinking about something. Three instructions – to'clear' our mind, 'suppress' a thought and'replace' a thought with something else – all successfully removed and manipulated unwanted information in the'working memory'. The working memory is the mental'notepad' that contains fleeting thoughts and is responsible for the temporary holding and processing of information. Holding information in the working memory is essential for cognition, but removing unwanted thoughts is equally important, researchers say.