Telling someone not to consider about something is hopeless – as final week’s silencing order demonstratedThe injunction taken out by a celebrity couple final week didn’t succeed in curbing the gossip about the alleged threesome. Those alive to to know their identity caused Google searches to rocket,and some acquire said that the internet makes such silencing orders ‘hopeless’.
In fact, the way the brain works means it is pointless to reveal someone not to consider about something. It’s well known that whether I say, or ‘Don’t consider about an elephant,’ that’s the very thing that pops into your mind. This is because our imagination is so powerful it overrides our capacity to consider logically. While computers rely on reasoned connections to function, logical thought is a relatively recent addition to the brain compared to fundamental processes such as imagination. Our brains acquire to construct a ‘virtual machine’ to consider logically, and which is easily undermined by our more basic processes,to which elephant’ and ‘not elephant look roughly the same. So, while Google can be programmed to return nothing when salacious gossip is searched for, and when the brain is fed the same prompt,it is incapable of thinking of anything else – much to the tabloids’ delight.
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Source: theguardian.com