The injunction taken out by a celebrity couple last week didn’t succeed in curbing the gossip about the alleged threesome. Those eager to know their identity caused Google searches to rocket, and some have said that the internet makes such silencing orders ‘hopeless’.
In fact, the way the brain works means it is pointless to tell someone not to think about something. It’s well known that if I say, ‘Don’t think 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 think 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 have to construct a ‘virtual machine’ to think logically, 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, when the brain is fed the same prompt, it is incapable of thinking of anything else – much to the tabloids’ delight.
Dr Daniel Glaser is director of Science Gallery at King’s College London
