The Astounding Number of Thoughts Your Mind Can Produce

• We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental resources.
• The average adult American knows about 46,000 words, and from there we can count our possible thoughts.
• You have about four sextillion thoughts at least potentially in your head

A new study from psychologists at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario reports some interesting observations.  It involves the transition from one thought to another in fMRI brain scans. Though the researchers didn’t detect the content of our thoughts, their method allowed them to count each one. Referred to as “thought worms,” the team says that the average human has 6,200 thoughts per day.

“What we call ‘thought worms’ are adjacent points in a simplified representation of activity patterns in the brain,” said senior study author Jordan Poppenk. “The brain occupies a different point in this ‘state space’ at every moment. When a person moves onto a new thought, they create a new thought worm that we can detect with our methods.”

“Our methods help us detect when a person is thinking something new, without regard to what the new thought is. You could say that we’ve skipped over vocabulary in an effort to understand the punctuation of the language of the mind.”

Here is the question I want you to take seriously: How many different things could you possibly think, given everything you now know? Said more simply, how many thoughts are in your head?

The study was recently published in the journal Nature Communications.

bigthink.com

Author: Dennis Hickey

Welcome to the Learning Center. I’m Dennis, your tutor. tutoringyou.org is a lifelong learning Library helping people improve their English literacy, learning skills, practical knowledge, personal growth, and everyday understanding of the world. Learn something useful, interesting, or enriching every time you visit. View all posts by Dennis Hickey