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Lia Kvavilashvili sat in her office at the University of Hertfordshire, mentallyreviewing a study she had recently published. She knew that therewas a particular statistical measure that might have been useful inthe study, but she could not remember its name. Frustrated, she gotup to make a cup of tea. Suddenly the word "hurdle" popped into her mind,unannounced, uninvited. Kvavilashvili—who grew up in Georgiaspeaking Georgian, Russian and Estonian, and only started to learnEnglish at age 13—had no idea what "hurdle" meant.She looked it up in her dictionary: Hurdle (noun) 1. A portable barrier over which athletes jump in arace. 2. A difficult problem to be overcome; obstacle. The second definition was underlined. Although she had no consciousrecollection of it, Kvavilashvili had evidently looked up themeaning of "hurdle" before. Somehow, she concluded, her subconscious knew that the word was relevant to her difficulty remembering thename of the useful statistical measure. She had just experiencedwhat she and a few other psychologists call"mind-pops"—fragments of knowledge, such as words,images or melodies that drop suddenly and unexpectedly into consciousness. In most cases, mind-pops seem completely irrelevant to the momentsin time and thought into which they intrude. But Kvavilashvili isdiscovering that mind-pops are not truly random—they arelinked to our experiences and knowledge of the world, albeit withhidden threads. Research on mind-pops is preliminary, but so farstudies suggest that the phenomenon is genuine and common. Somepeople notice their mind-pops far more often than others andfrequent mind-popping could quicken problem solving and boost creativity. However, in some people's minds—such as those with schizophrenia —mind-pops might evolve from benign phenomena into unsettling hallucinations . Beyond Proust's legacy In everyday life, people often search their memory for specificinformation: Where did I leave the car keys? Did I really turn theoven off? Other times, they actively reminisce about the past:Remember that crazy night out last week? Man, that was crazy. Butnot all recall is a choice; some forms of memory are involuntary.Perhaps the most famous example of involuntary memory is a scene from French novelist Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time (also called Remembrance of Things Past ). As the narrator drinks some tea and eats a small lemony cakeknown as a madeleine, the taste resurfaces a memory of eating thesame treat at his aunt's house when he was young. More recently,Pixar adapted Proust's madeleine episode for the animated movie Ratatouille , in which the eponymous stewed vegetable dish immediatelytransports a cynical food critic to the dinner table in his boyhoodhome. Although they qualify as a type of involuntary memory, mind-popsdiffer from the classic Proustian example. Mind-pops are more oftenwords or phrases than images or sounds and they usually happen whensomeone is in the middle of a habitual activity that does notdemand much concentration—perhaps when they are brushingtheir teeth or tying their shoes. Most notably, identifying atrigger for a mind-pop in the surrounding environment or even inprevious thoughts is extremely difficult—they seem to comeout of nowhere. Kvavilashvili became interested in mind-pops because sheexperienced them so frequently. In the summer of 1995 she startedto keep a diary of the mental hiccups, eventually recording morethan 100 incidents. When she searched databases of research papersfor mind-pops, she found almost no mention of such unannounced,seemingly arbitrary memories—except in the studies of George Mandler , currently an emeritus of professor of psychology at theUniversity of California, San Diego, who coined the term"mind-pop." Recognizing a mutual interest and a gap in the research literature,Kvavilashvili and Mandler began to collect data, keeping carefuldiaries of their thought patterns and asking volunteers to do thesame. Kvavilashvili personally recorded more than 400 mind-popsover nine months. More than 90 percent of them occurred when shewas alone and more than 80 percent happened during routines andchores that did not require great mental effort, such as brushingher teeth, getting dressed and ironing. Mind-pops seem to be mostcommon when the mind is free to wander and not neccesarily fixated on the task at hand. Most of the mind-pops surprised Kvavilashvili with theirirrelevance to her current actions and thoughts. In each case, shecarefully searched her mind and her surroundings for acue—something that might have triggered the mind-pop. Shecould only identify cues 20 to 30 percent of the time, many ofwhich were subliminal. One time, for example, the phrase"millennium dome" fluttered across her mind like a bannerlost to the wind just after she had been looking in the directionof a shelf on which sat a pack of sesame wheat wafers. WhenKvavilashvili examined the package she discovered the words"Miller's Damsel" printed in a semicircle. Although Kvavilashvili had difficulty identifying cues in hercurrent thoughts or immediate surroundings, in nearly half thecases she determined that she had encountered something directlyrelated to a particular mind-pop a few hours or days earlier. Once,while throwing a used bag into the trash, the word"Acapulco" sprang into her consciousness. She did not know what the word meant until family member remindedher that a television news program they had watched 45 minutesearlier had mentioned the Mexican resort city. Another time, thephrase "corporal punishment" flung open her mind's dooruninvited. The next day, Kvavilashvili discovered the phrase insome work documents that she had been reading five days earlier. "One might think mind-pops are simply errors in cognitivefunctioning—accidental firings that bring up completelyrandom content in your mind," Kvavilashvili says. "Butonce I started recording them, quite often I would notice that whatpopped into my mind wasn't entirely accidental. The contents of themind-pop had been experienced in the recent past." Kvavilashvili and Mandler also asked 58 psychology students to keepsimilar diaries of mind-pops for one week. Like Kvavilashvili, thestudents could only identify specific triggers for their mind-popsin a minority (37 percent) of the cases; they were more successfulat recognizing that they had encountered something related to themind-pops in the recent past, which they were able to do for 42percent of their examples. The collected diary studies were published in 2004 in Cognitive Psychology. Based on these diary studies, Kvavilashvili and Mandler proposethat mind-pops are often explained by a kind of "long-termpriming." Priming describes one way that memory behaves: everynew piece of information that enters memory changes how the mindlater responds to related information. If a psychologist gives avolunteer a list of words including the word "apple" andlater asks the volunteer to write a complete word starting with"app," the subject is more likely to write apple than"appetite" or "application." Kvavilashvili andMandler think that something similar, but subtler, more enduringand more capricious is happening with mind-pops. "Most of information we encounter on a daily basis activatescertain representations in the mind," Kvavilashvili explains."If you go past a fish and chips shop, not only the concept offish may get activated but lots of things related to fish, and theymay stay activated for a certain amount of time—for hours oreven days. Later on, other things in environment may trigger thesealready active concepts, which have the feeling of coming out ofnowhere." From intrusions to delusions Kvavilashvili speculates that people who experience mind-pops mostfrequently might be super primers, which could in turn encourage creativity. "It could help us to process information moreefficiently," she says. "If many different conceptsremain activated in your mind, you can make connections moreefficiently than if activation disappears right away." Mind-pops and other kinds of involuntary memory are relatively newsubjects for psychologists and so far no one has published anystudies examining whether people who experience involuntarymemories more frequently are better at priming tasks or morecreative. Recently, however, Kvavilashvili and her colleaguespublished a study looking at a possible dark side of mind-pops. Theresearchers wondered just how similar everyday involuntary recallis to intrusive thoughts and hallucinations observed in mentaldisorders. Repetitive, intrusive thoughts feature in many mental disorders,namely depression , post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Imaginary sights andsounds—known as auditory and visual hallucinations —often haunt the minds of people with schizophrenia. Likemind-pops, hallucinations come in the form of words or phrases moreoften than they do as images or music, and obvious triggers areusually absent. In previous research, Ia Elua—one ofKvavilashvili's graduate students—suggested thathallucinations are constructed from mind-pops. To begin testing this idea, Elua, Kvavilashvili and her U.H.colleague, psychology professor Keith Laws, surveyed 31 healthyadults, 31 depressed adults and 37 schizophrenic adults about theirmind-pops. All the schizophrenic adults had experienced them, butsix of the depressed adults and five of the healthy adults saidthey had never experienced one in their entire lives. Schizophrenicadults also reported experiencing mind-pops on average three tofour times a week, whereas the average was once to twice a monthfor depressed adults and only once or twice every six months forhealthy subjects. The results appeared online in March 2012 in Psychiatry Research . This preliminary evidence suggests that mind-pops are more commonamong the mentally ill than among the healthy, but it is far toosoon to definitely link the sudden memories to hallucinations.Kvavilashvili says she has been working on more studies about thephenomenon, in particular one on musical mind-pops and theirrelationship to various kinds of "ear worms"—songs that continually replay inpeople's heads . "The study of mind-popping is still in its infancy,"Kvavilashvili says. "So far, recording these cases has made meaware of how wonderfully our perceptual system works. I got curiousabout them because they seemed so random and out of the blue, butthese mind-pops are genuine fragments of knowledge about the world.What it shows us is that our subconscious often knows the meaningof an experience, even if consciously we don't.". We are high quality suppliers, our products such as Custom Lithium ion Batteries , China Heated Jacket Battery for oversee buyer. To know more, please visits Pos Battery.
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