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The article begins with a rather dubious "citation": > According to the National Science Foundation, an average person has about 12,000 to 60,000 thoughts per
by miles 8y ago
The article begins with a rather dubious "citation":
> According to the National Science Foundation, an average person has about 12,000 to 60,000 thoughts per day. Of those, 80% are negative and 95% are repetitive thoughts.
There is no link to the alleged NSF work (as a funding organization, it is unlikely they'd be doing this sort of research), and despite the claim being repeated around the web, there is apparently no legitimate source for it: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2012/05/09/the-70000-thoughts-per-day-myth/ http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2012/05/09/th... .
- wruza 8y agoJust to note, a day has only 86400 seconds in it (and 28800 of them belong to sleep). It is also a funny coincidence that seconds-per-day is a multiple of a 14.4k baud rate.
- qwerty456127 8y ago86400 - 28800 = 57600 ≈ 60000. This looks fairly realistic if you ask yourself about just how much time a day do you maintain perfect inner silence and equilibrium. I really doubt it's more than about the 400 seconds for the majority of the people who don't practice meditation (and even these 400 seconds are usually just the unconscious moments). Also ask yourself about how long do you usually maintain concentration at one single atomic thought contiguously without switching to random related and unrelated thoughts for even a moment.
- wruza 8y agoIt is tempting to say that I spend many time in conscious-inactive mode, but then it heavily doesn’t add up with what you say. What is a distinct thought exactly? Do people experience a constant caleidoscope of inner images/sounds/etc? For me thinking is retrieving conceptions from subconscious and lining them up on ‘internal board’ to produce results. Another notable mode is simply recalling events (including feelings) and turning them into speech. This usually takes many seconds. Can fragmentary distractions in these processes count as thoughts? If yes, then I should agree, but I’m not sure if it’s a fair definition. That’s interesting. I never meditated, but I can easily stare at wall clock or cursor blinking for few minutes, not experiencing inner visual or acoustic ‘things’. Edit: btw, I began to do that after reading Colin Wilson’s “Spider World” in ‘00s, where mind control was described in a scifi series. Didn’t know it, but now looks like consciousness problems are his main interest.
- qwerty456127 8y agoYou're cool, dude! Definitely not an average person. What you describe is a meditation of a kind (there are many) actually. Have you tried the next level? Given you can silence your inner dialogue/monologue/etc while maintaining awake conscious mind and concentrated attention, "turn around" (your attention) and try staring at the still space that is the background to where endogenous mental stimuli (verbal/conceptual thoughts, images, feelings etc) normally appear, try to find where the point of "you" hides from which you look at all the images thoughts, stare in this direction rather than on a physical object or a thought. It sounds crazy like a camera filming itself without a mirror but it's possible in this realm and feels awesome once you succeed.
- wruza 8y agoWell, thanks! No, I never "turned around", nor do I think that what I described is particularly cool, since it puts some ~ consequences on the way I communicate, like e.g. I'm falling off conversation for few seconds before an answer emerges. But is this next thing safe and pragmatic? Any good read on that? Asking out of curiosity and because I'm not really into that... 'spiritual' thing that accompanies many mind-related areas.
- qwerty456127 8y agoIf you feel like looking at your self may be unsafe for you then it probably is.