Why You Can’t Stop Thinking About Them

The Case for Mental Perturbance

Why can’t you stop thinking about someone—whether you’re in love with them or grieving their loss?

Why does your mind return, again and again, to the same person or concern—sometimes for days, weeks, or even months?

They are examples of what I call mental perturbance: states in which insistent concerns capture or disrupt executive control, making attention difficult to regulate. In other words, perturbance is what happens when something matters so much that it interferes with your ability to control your own mind.

In 1996, I became third author of a paper on emotions as perturbance that drew heavily on my PhD work. It introduced the concept of perturbance in the context of a “design-based” approach to mind. I’m pleased to report that this paper has now been selected for inclusion in the 2026 four-volume reference work Artificial Intelligence: Critical Concepts in Cognitive Science—a collection intended to map the intellectual development of AI as a field contributing to cognitive science.

Here is the abstract of our reprised 1996 paper:

The design-based approach is a methodology for investigating mechanisms capable of generating mental phenomena, whether introspectively or externally observed, and whether they occur in humans, other animals or robots. The study of designs satisfying requirements for autonomous agency can provide new deep theoretical insights at the information processing level of description of mental mechanisms. Designs for working systems (whether on paper or implemented on computers) can systematically explicate old explanatory concepts and generate new concepts that allow new and richer interpretations of human phenomena. To illustrate this, some aspects of human grief are analyzed in terms of a particular information processing architecture being explored in our research group. We do not claim that this architecture is part of the causal structure of the human mind; rather, it represents an early stage in the iterative search for a deeper and more general architecture, capable of explaining more phenomena. However even the current early design provides an interpretative ground for some familiar phenomena, including characteristic features of certain emotional episodes, particularly the phenomenon of perturbance (a partial or total loss of control of attention).

The paper attempts to expound and illustrate the design-based approach to cognitive science and philosophy, to demonstrate the potential effectiveness of the approach in generating interpretative possibilities, and to provide first steps towards an information processing account of “perturbant,” emotional episodes.

Sylwia Hyniewska, Monika Pudlo and I published an update to this paper in 2020. Our paper was titled Mental perturbance: An integrative design-oriented concept for understanding repetitive thought, emotions and related phenomena involving a loss of control of executive functions. Our paper modernizes the concept of perturbance, relating it to the fields of study of repetitive thought, obsession and related phenomena involving disturbances of attention. The 2020 paper uses grief and limerence (romantic ‘love’) as examples of perturbance. Limerence is a term coined by psychologist Dorothy Tennov in 1979 in her book titled Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love. She argued that limerence involves intrusive, involuntary, and persistent attention to the limerent object, combined with difficulty disengaging and heightened sensitivity to signs of reciprocation. In my terms, this is a prototypical case of perturbance: a motivator whose insistence captures executive processes—even when we attempt to disengage. It’s a loss of control of executive functions. Grief falls in the same category.

After I completed my Ph.D. in Birmingham in 1996, Aaron Sloman stopped using the term “perturbance” in favor of “tertiary emotion”, for instance in his extensive paper “How many separately evolved emotional beasties live within us?. I understand Sloman’s reasons for assimilating mental perturbance in a taxonomy of three forms of “emotion”. However, I strongly disagree with his move. The reason I coined the term “perturbance” (in 1992) in the first place (and specified it in my 1994 Ph.D. thesis) was because there is too much debate and confusion about the term “emotion”. See this paper for instance: The Many Meanings/Aspects of Emotion: Definitions, Functions, Activation, and Regulation by Carroll E. Izard, 2010. For example, it is now agreed in the emotion literature that emotions are necessarily short-lived episodes. There’s no such thing as an emotion that lasts for days. In contrast limerence, grief and other forms of perturbance can in fact last for months! Using a technical term such as “perturbance” allows us to avoid needless debate about whether we are actually discussing emotions or not.

The abstract of our 2000 paper on perturbance is:

Understanding intrusive mentation, rumination, obsession, and worry, known also as “repetitive thought” (RT), is important for understanding cognitive and affective processes in general. RT is of transdiagnostic significance—for example obsessive-compulsive disorder, insomnia and addictions involve counterproductive RT. It is also a key but under-acknowledged feature of emotional episodes. We argue that RT cannot be understood in isolation but must rather be considered within models of whole minds and for this purpose we suggest an integrative design- oriented (IDO) approach. This approach involves the design stance of theoretical Artificial Intelligence (the central discipline of cognitive science), augmented by systematic conceptual analysis, aimed at explaining how autonomous agency is possible. This requires developing, exploring and implementing cognitive-affective-conative information-processing architectures. Empirical research on RT and emotions needs to be driven by such theories, and theorizing about RT needs to consider such data. Mental perturbance is an IDO concept that, we argue, can help characterize, explain, and theoretically ground the concept of RT. Briefly, perturbance is a mental state in which motivators tend to disrupt, or otherwise influence, executive processes even if reflective processes were to try to prevent or minimize the motivators’ influence. We draw attention to an IDO architecture of mind, H-CogAff, to illustrate the IDO approach to perturbance. We claim, further, that the intrusive mentation of some affective states— including grief and limerence (the attraction phase of romantic love) — should be conceptualized in terms of perturbance and the IDO architectures that support perturbance. We call for new taxonomies of RT and emotion in terms of IDO architectures such as H-CogAff. We point to areas of research in psychology that would benefit from the concept of perturbance.

Its Keywords are: repetitive thought, emotions, executive functions, cognitive architectures, autonomous agents, affective computing

Speaking of terminology, I moved away from the expression “design-based modeling” because design-based research has taken on a different meaning in the social sciences. I replaced it with the term integrative design-oriented (IDO) R&D. I refined the concept in the 2020 paper and in A Manifesto for an Integrative Design-oriented Approach to Understanding Humans as Autonomous Agents. In an upcoming paper I apply the IDO approach and concept of mental perturbance to the problem of understanding sleep onset and insomnolence: [Beaudoin, L.P. & Guloy, S. (in press). Towards a somnolent information-processing theory: Understanding the human sleep-onset control system from an integrative design-oriented perspective. In J. Dzierzewski, D. Kay & S. J. Aton (Eds), The Cambridge Handbook of Sleep Theories and Models. Cambridge University Press.]

I hope inclusion in the Artificial Intelligence: Critical Concepts in Cognitive Science series of our 1996 paper will increase the visibility of the concept of perturbance. Here’s a blog post of mine, published in Sept 2020, which explains the concept of perturbance: Attention! Have you lost it?