Can you unsee something

Highly-rated answerer. Read more comments. English US Finnish. How could I forget that I saw this? Phinn Thanks! CommanderKeen haha I got it : Thanks a lot! The one learning a language! With this new cue—to see the logo as a facepalm—the yellow part becomes an arm with its hand pressed into a green head. And, as Brockwell indicated, once you see this second possibility, you can't unsee it.

People report this kind of thing all the time, and they use this same phrase: cannot unsee. Someone points out something and suddenly a secondary interpretation of an image appears. There's something a little scary about this process, even when the images are harmless. We have a flash of insight and a new pattern is revealed hiding within the world we thought we knew. It surprises us. That's not a vine, that's a snake!

That's an LG logo. NO—it's Pac-Man! But usually the image hasn't changed; only what we think about it has. What's going on here? I couldn't find anyone who studies the really specific cannot-unsee phenomenon that I'm talking about here.

But Villanova psychologist Tom Toppino has been studying phenomena like this for decades. He sent me a famous image from the academic literature that gets at what's happening with the World Cup logo. I'm not going to tell you what it is yet, but there is a figure in this field of spots.

Don't scroll ahead! And if you ever encounter this image again, you will immediately see the dalmatian again. What's interesting is that the visual stimulus the picture doesn't change, but once your mind knows what kind of organization to impose, it's obvious that the dalmatian is there.

It also importantly involves fitting prior knowledge to the current situation to create a meaningful interpretation. One way psychologists and other people who study the brain have been probing these questions is through the use of ambiguous figures.

These are images for which there are two totally plausible alternative interpretations. All rights reserved. This image may not be used by other entities without the express written consent of wikiHow, Inc.

Use thought substitution to overwrite the horrible image. The idea behind thought substitution sometimes called thought displacement is that you have the ability to control what you think and how you react. You can intentionally forget bad memories by filling your mind with more positive things. Try to replace the negative memory by exposing your brain to something brighter.

Watch a happy or inspirational video, lose yourself in a story, or just look at pictures of cute animals. Try to redirect your attention to whatever activity you're doing to bring yourself back to the present. Replace the memory with something positive, but equivalent. Thought substitution works best when there is some relation between the replaced thought and the "overwriting" thought.

Thus: if you watched a horrifying video, find an inspirational video that grips your emotions just as powerfully. If you saw a nasty picture, look at images that make you smile. If you read something that triggered you, try reading a story that calms your mind. Do something positive. Video chat with a friend, play a sport, or do some yoga.

Do something wholly unrelated to the internet, especially if it can get both your mind and your body moving. Look at pictures of something that makes you happy. Browse lists of memes or photos of cute animals. Scroll through photos of something dear to you: good memories with friends and family, pictures of pets, pictures of places. Run a web image search for, say, "cute baby pandas" or "lazy sloths" to find the photos you need. Watch positive videos. Browse comedy videos on YouTube, or watch an episode of your favorite show.

Look for videos of simple things: a baby laughing, an ecstatic puppy, or someone smiling. Find videos of peaceful things: the lull of the waves, the hum of a summer forest, or a panoramic mountaintop view.

Run a web search for the sort of videos that you want to find. Search for "happy videos" or "puppy playing" to find content to soothe your mind. Check out YouTube Haiku or Vine for short but absorptive videos. Method 2. Try to push down the memory whenever it emerges. Suppressing memories, like thought substitution, has been proven to help people forget negative memories. If you can force yourself to ignore the memory when it comes back into your head, you might be able to break these "episodic" links and let go.

Understand how memory suppression works. Cognitive scientists divide memories into two patterns: episodic and semantic. Episodic memory is experiential and subjective, while semantic memory is factual and objective. When you see something horrible online, it triggers an immediate and viscerally negative reaction, and it is linked in your episodic memory to things that remind you of what you saw.

By forming new associations with these triggers, you may be able to gradually "forget" what you saw. These memories are usually tied to the emotional context of what happened. Thus, the memory of this horrible thing that you saw might be linked to triggers that continually bring back the image. Semantic memory is a more structured record of facts, meanings, ideas, and observations about our external world. Our brains tend to store this knowledge independently from our personal experience.

Conversely, if you want to "un-see" something, do something distracting! Because it is so absorbing, the video game Tetris is currently being tested as a potential prophylaxis for posttraumatic stress disorder.

Once our experiences have made their way into longterm memory, they are much more robust, but are still surprisingly plastic. Our memories are not perfect reproductions of past events that we pull up like files on a computer when we need them.

Rather, our perception of the world is constantly colored by the things we think, believe and know, all of which reside in our memories. Cognitive science has revealed the surprising fact that there is no clear line between remembering and creating, that recalling a memory actually changes it. Consequently, although we might not be able to unsee those things which have made their way into long term memory, we can change those experiences and how we relate to them in dramatic and surprising ways.

Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Southern Mississippi, specializing in long term episodic memory, memory of past emotions, and memory of long term relationships. The question, I assume, refers to the idea that you see something you didn't want to see, and then somehow want to unsee it—in other words, wipe it out of your memory.

My short answer is no; you can't unsee something in the sense that you have very little control over blocking something out like that. The way memory works for arousing stimuli, such as disturbing footage of a police shooting or of a war scene, is that the emotional arousal primes the memory for strong consolidation, and then the epinephrine and other excitatory neurotransmitters strengthen the consolidation over a period of minutes, hours, and days.

All of this is out of our conscious control. All we can do is wait for time to help the memory fade through a process of decay involving the very gradual breaking down of synapses , although if we revisit the scene often, the memory will be continually restrengthened, thus delaying the decay process. The only other way you might be able to prevent the disturbing scene from consolidating strongly would be to take a drug that counteracts the epinephrine release that follows a disturbing scene.

For example propranolol see Pitman et al. Rape victims are 6. There is probably a neuroscience way of explaining how eyes receive and process sensory data. How the brain then acts upon it, how the data acts upon the brain, and how all of that shapes and is shaped by the complexity of the always-changing body including other sensory processing outlets such as ears, skin, nose in motion in the world.

I engage with these processes where they show up in a person who wants to overcome obstacles to interacting with self, other and the world. I try to help with the seeing and acting upon troublesome psychosocial-emotional-spiritual things that formed along the way to help that person survive up until now, but which no longer serve.