start practicing that power now, with your next quest.
QUEST 6: Stop the Pink Elephant!
Don’t think of a pink elephant. Whatever you do, do not think of a pink elephant.
Stop reading this book for the next ten seconds, and in that time, be absolutely sure you do not once think about a pink elephant. Go!
10 . . . 9 . . . 8 . . .
Did you think of a pink elephant? Of course you did, even though I told you not to. Fortunately, that’s not your quest. At least not yet—not until you have a concrete strategy for controlling your attention spotlight.
The command “Don’t think of an elephant” (or sometimes “Don’t think of a bear”) is one of the most widely employed exercises in cognitive psychology. Devised by Harvard University professor Daniel Wegner and later made popular by University of California at Berkeley professor George Lakoff, the idea is simple: once you evoke a concept in someone’s mind, they are essentially powerless to block it. Despite the instructions to not picture a large gray (or pink) mammal with a trunk and floppy ears, the brain is incapable of obeying. The word elephant calls up the idea of an elephant, and you’re stuck with it, for better or for worse.7
We’re going to try a different experiment here. I want you to keep trying to not think about a pink elephant, but I’m going to give you a strategy for doing just that.
What to do: This time you’re going to control your attention spotlight by focusing your cognitive resources on a challenging, high-attention task.
To stop the pink elephant from commanding your attention, I want you picture a giant letter P and E (short for pink elephant, naturally). P and E. Got it?
Now I’m going to give you sixty seconds—set a timer, or just estimate it—to list as many words that contain both the letter P and the letter E, in any order. Here are a few to get you started: help, hope, pickle, peanut.
Write the words down, or if it’s easier, just think of them and tick them off on your fingers, or keep a mental tally.
If you can think of at least ten more words with a P and an E in sixty seconds, that’s very good. If you can think of twenty or more, that’s amazing. If you can think of thirty or more, you’re a rock star at this, one of the best in the world. Try to aim for at least ten—and remember, while you’re doing it, don’t think about a pink elephant.
Go!
Okay, now I want you to notice two things.
1. Were you better able to stop thinking about a pink elephant while you were engaged in this high-attention, challenging task? I hope so. The higher your word score, the more likely you are to have completely blocked that silly animal out of your mind. (If you don’t like your score or you couldn’t stop the pink elephant from occupying your thoughts, give it another try with these two letters: S and B, for SuperBetter!)
2. As you go back to reading this book or go about the rest of your day, see which is more likely to occur: you keep picturing a pink elephant or you randomly think of or spot another word with the letters P and E in them. If you are like most people, you’re more likely to flash back to the word game than to the mental image of an elephant. That’s because your attention spotlight is more likely to drift back to something that engaged more cognitive resources. Be sure to notice what happens in the next few minutes or hours to see if this is true for you!
Quest complete: If you found this word game an effective technique to control your attention spotlight, congratulations. You now have a new tool in your toolkit for blocking unwanted thoughts, feelings, or physical sensations. Try it anytime, with any two letters, to practice swinging that spotlight of attention quickly and more effectively.
Just for fun: Check out the following footnote for twenty P and E words you could have thought of!*
* People, preach, happen, pamphlet, prairie, prayer, apple, yelp, rope, dampen, patent, prehistoric, petal, penumbra, pennant, sniper, eclipse, epicenter, spine, rapture, empty, prince, poke.
As you’re hopefully starting to see, researchers have figured out all kinds of ways people can get better at controlling their attention spotlight. Let’s take a look at other types of mental and emotional resilience you can develop by mastering this important skill—such as the power to prevent trauma, fight cravings, block anxiety, and heal from depression.
You’ve almost certainly seen Tetris, the falling blocks puzzle game, even if you’ve never played it. It’s estimated to be one of the most widely played video games of all time, with nearly half a billion players to date.
Despite having been around since 1984, it wasn’t until recently that researchers realized that Tetris can do more than entertain us. It can, remarkably, help us recover more quickly from traumatic events.
Post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, is a psychological condition that can develop after an individual witnesses or experiences a terrifying or tragic event. The hallmark symptom of PTSD is recurring flashbacks. Unwanted, intrusive memories can haunt individuals for months or even years after a traumatic event, disrupting sleep, triggering panic attacks, and causing severe emotional distress. Typically, these flashbacks have a strong visual component. Someone repeatedly “sees” a traumatic event in their mind’s eye, as vividly as if it were really happening all over again. Psychologists consider these flashbacks to be the single most stressful and difficult-to-treat symptom of PTSD.
But what if, instead of trying to treat flashbacks as an unavoidable symptom of trauma, we could prevent them in the first place? Cognitive scientists have shown that memories change and take shape for up to six hours after a traumatic event. That has led some researchers to wonder: Is there anything we can do in the first six hours after trauma to inhibit our brains from forming the kinds of visual memories that lead to flashbacks?
Yes, there is. You can play Tetris.
In 2009 and 2010 a team of psychiatrists at Oxford University completed two studies showing that playing Tetris within six hours of viewing traumatic imagery helped reduce flashbacks of the traumatic events. It worked so well, in fact, that the Oxford researchers proposed that a single ten-minute session of Tetris could effectively serve as a “cognitive vaccine” against PTSD. Play the game as soon as possible after a traumatic event, and you may significantly reduce your likelihood of experiencing severe post-traumatic stress.8
How did the Oxford researchers figure this out? It’s not easy to study trauma in a laboratory, as you can imagine. It’s simply not ethical for researchers to do horrible things to study participants just to measure their traumatic response. So the Oxford team used an experimental method that has been tested and validated in hundreds of other trauma studies: they gathered together test subjects in a laboratory and showed them a series of extremely graphic, gory images of death and injury. (Trust me, these are the kind of images you truly hope you will never see.) Then they measured the subjects’ emotional response to the images to ensure that they were truly disturbed.
In the hours that followed, half of the test subjects played Tetris for ten minutes while the other group did nothing special. Here’s what the
