What word describes when an image or thought gets stuck in your head?

Is there an English word that describes when you do the something all day and then it gets stuck in your head.

Examples of what I'm describing:

  • You spend 12 hours straight solving crossword puzzles and afterwords, you look at a restaurant menu and find your self counting the letters of the words and thinking of synonyms
  • You spend all day on a rocky boat and when you get back to land, you still feel rocking - even hours later.
  • You spend all day at a theme park, wading through people, and later in bed, when you close your eyes, you see people everywhere even if you try to stop the thought.

The closest word I've found is "earworm", but this is only for music replaying in your head, not images, thought processes, or tasks.


The Tetris Effect describes the condition, although not necessarily the object of fixation. From Wikipedia:

The Tetris effect (also known as Tetris Syndrome) occurs when people devote so much time and attention to an activity that it begins to pattern their thoughts, mental images, and dreams. It takes its name from the video game Tetris.

and:

It has also been known to occur with non-video games, such as the illusion of curved lines after doing a jigsaw puzzle...

and:

On a perceptual level, sea legs are a kind of Tetris effect.


If this were a song, it would be called an Earworm. Also from Wikipedia:

An earworm, sometimes known as a brainworm, sticky music, or stuck song syndrome, is a catchy piece of music that continually repeats through a person's mind after it is no longer playing.


Some people literally call it a 'stuck thought' as for example in this extract where these words are used in the context of certain anxiety disorders:

Stuck thoughts; thoughts, mental images, concepts, songs, or melodies that stick in your mind and replay over and over again.

Source: http://www.anxietycentre.com/anxiety-symptoms/thoughts-that-seem-stuck.shtml


The concept you described, if it is a repeated picture in the mind, is also sometimes called a mental afterimage as in these examples:

From 'Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel' By Kristiaan Versluys on google books:

several months after the events [...] the author is still incessantly re-enacting the collapse in his mind. More precisely, he sees a mental afterimage of the glowing tower from different perspectives and distances.

Another example in a literary context:

Major Lund smiles at him encouragingly, and then leaves the room, trying hard to erase the mental afterimage of Beckstrand's [...] face and neck.

Note that 'afterimage' literally refers to a transient anomaly of vision and 'mental afterimage' is its equivalent in the mind.

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afterimage