What Is Thought?

Is that some sort of trick question?Everyone knows what thought is. Or do they...  My questions for you today are:How do you define “a thought” (yes, a single thought)? Where is the boundary from one thought to the next?What is “thought” more generally? Does this cognitive activity require conscious awareness? Or language? We don ' t want to be linguistic chauvinists, now do we, so let ' s assume mice have them. But how about shrimp? Or worms?What is “a thought”?Can you define what a discrete “thought” is?  This question was motivated by a persistent brain myth:You have an estimated 70,000 thoughts per day.Where did this number come from? How do you tally up 70,000 thoughts? Do some thoughts last 10 seconds, while others are finished in one tenth of a second?Over 24 hours, one thought per second would yield 86,400 thoughts. If “thoughts” are restricted to 16 waking hours, the number would be 57,600. But we ' re almost certainly thinking while we ' re dreaming (for abouttwo hours every night), so that would be 64,800 seconds, with an ultimate result of one thought every 0.9257 seconds, on average.LONI®, the Laboratory of Neuroimaging at USC, included this claim on theirBrain Trivia page, so perhaps it ' s all their fault.1How many thoughts does the average person have per day?*70,000*This is still an open question (how many thoughts does the average human brain processes in 1 day). LONI faculty have done some very preliminary studies using underg...
Source: The Neurocritic - Category: Neuroscience Authors: Source Type: blogs