{"id":80886,"date":"2018-07-23T23:03:19","date_gmt":"2018-07-24T06:03:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/07\/researchers-explore-how-information-enters-our-brains"},"modified":"2018-07-23T23:03:19","modified_gmt":"2018-07-24T06:03:19","slug":"researchers-explore-how-information-enters-our-brains","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/07\/researchers-explore-how-information-enters-our-brains","title":{"rendered":"Researchers explore how information enters our brains"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/researchers-explore-how-information-enters-our-brains.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Think you\u2019re totally in control of your thoughts? Maybe not as much as you think, according to a new San Francisco State University study that examines how thoughts that lead to actions enter our consciousness.<\/p>\n<p>While we can \u201cdecide\u201d to think about certain things, other information\u2014including activities we have learned like counting\u2014can enter our subconscious and cause us to think about something else, whether we want to or not. Psychologists call these dispositions \u201csets,\u201d explains SF State Associate Professor of Psychology Ezequiel Morsella, one of four authors on a new study that examines how sets influence what we end up thinking about.<\/p>\n<p>Morsella and the other researchers conducted two experiments with SF State students. In the first experiment, 35 students were told beforehand to not count an array of objects presented to them. In 90 percent of the trials, students counted the objects involuntarily. In a second experiment, students were presented with differently colored geometric shapes and given the option of either naming the colors (one set) or counting the shapes (a different set). Even though students chose one over the other, around 40 percent <a href=\"https:\/\/medicalxpress.com\/tags\/thought\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">thought<\/a> about both sets.<\/p>\n<p><!-- Link: <a href=\"https:\/\/medicalxpress.com\/news\/2018-07-explore-brains.html\">https:\/\/medicalxpress.com\/news\/2018&#45;07-explore-brains.html<\/a> --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Think you\u2019re totally in control of your thoughts? Maybe not as much as you think, according to a new San Francisco State University study that examines how thoughts that lead to actions enter our consciousness. While we can \u201cdecide\u201d to think about certain things, other information\u2014including activities we have learned like counting\u2014can enter our subconscious [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":367,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-80886","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80886","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/367"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80886"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80886\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}