Controlling our thoughts is central to mental well-being, and its failure is at the crux of a number of mental disorders. Paradoxically, behavioral evidence shows that thought suppression often fails. Despite the broad importance of understanding the mechanisms of thought control, little is known about the fate of neural representations of suppressed thoughts. Using fMRI, we investigated the brain areas involved in controlling visual thoughts and tracked suppressed thought representations using multivoxel pattern analysis. Participants were asked to either visualize a vegetable/fruit or suppress any visual thoughts about those objects. Surprisingly, the content (object identity) of successfully suppressed thoughts was still decodable in visual areas with algorithms trained on imagery. This suggests that visual representations of suppressed thoughts are still present despite reports that they are not. Thought generation was associated with the left hemisphere, whereas thought suppression was associated with right hemisphere engagement. Furthermore, general linear model analyses showed that subjective success in thought suppression was correlated with engagement of executive areas, whereas thought-suppression failure was associated with engagement of visual and memory-related areas. These results suggest that the content of suppressed thoughts exists hidden from awareness, seemingly without an individual's knowledge, providing a compelling reason why thought suppression is so ineffective. These data inform models of unconscious thought production and could be used to develop new treatment approaches to disorders involving maladaptive thoughts.

控制我们的思想是心理健康的核心，它的失败是许多精神障碍的症结所在。矛盾的是，行为证据表明，思想抑制往往失败。尽管理解思想控制机制具有广泛的重要性，但人们对抑制思想的神经表征的命运知之甚少。使用 fMRI，我们调查了参与控制视觉思维的大脑区域，并使用多体素模式分析跟踪抑制的思维表征。参与者被要求要么想象一种蔬菜/水果，要么抑制任何关于这些物体的视觉想法。令人惊讶的是，成功抑制思想的内容（对象身份）仍然可以在视觉区域中通过图像训练的算法进行解码。这表明尽管有报道称它们不存在，但仍存在抑制思想的视觉表现。思想产生与左半球有关，而思想抑制与右半球参与有关。此外，一般线性模型分析表明，思想抑制的主观成功与执行区域的参与相关，而思想抑制失败与视觉和记忆相关区域的参与相关。这些结果表明，抑制思想的内容隐藏在意识之外，似乎没有个人的知识，这为思想抑制如此无效提供了一个令人信服的理由。