I’m sure most of us all received the survey maybe 6 months ago asking “Do you control your own thoughts?”
Obviously I chose “No” I do not control my own thoughts.
Since then the question has been on my mind. “Where do our thoughts actually come from?”
For instance, when we all of sudden get a great new idea from out of nowhere.
Another instance, when you have a conversation with yourself inside your head, who is the voice that answers your questions?
In: 5
Thoughs come from the “reactions” of our brain, explaining it in any more detail would require going massively in depth about neurophysiology… I believe its a bit better to present it from the psychiatric perspective, more than where do they come from, why do they look the way they do.
They look a certain way, meaning we behave a certain way, as a result of our experienced live and our instincts, if we had no experience we would react to things on pure instinct and reflex, which is like a decision making strategy our brain has by default, like hungry->eat, but once experience is formed that default decision making strategy gets more complex and complex hungry->still not lunch time->snack
The process of generating thoughs depends on experience and a stimulus that males us have a thought that’s why when we see something or feel something we think related to that, a previous thought can also be the stimulus for the next one, thats why we will have inner dialogue with ourselves or go from one though to another.
Since we rely on experience for our thoughs process the brain has a mechanism that when we are not concentrated on doing something an automated mechanism called the default mode network takes the reigns of the though process and its what makes us imagine stuff and think about situations when we are not bussy…
Have you noticed when you get distracted you will start to think about situations and conversations and what you would do in that situation? Thats the default mode network generating thoughs for you to “practice” and get experience on life… If you have never done a particular thing, but you have thought about doing it a lot of times you have effectively created a certain degree of experience for your brain to work with…
Sometimes some of these mechanisms dont work as expected and people get what are called intrusive throughs, thoughs that you experience in your head but that dont feel like they are yours, i cant really explain well why but these thoughs tend to be disturbing, things like thinking “jump” when you’re next to a clif… Everyone has some from time to time, but some people have a disproportionate ammount of them, multiple times a day, and with very disturbing content, this can be or become a mental health issue and be really hard to live with…
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