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
It’s the sum of everything you’ve ever experienced plus the structure of your brain. That’s it. That’s your soul. Don’t worry, it’s still beautiful.
This is a classic question of philosophy. In a causal system, are all our thoughts predetermined? Are we really free to make our own choices?
It extends to the problem of consciousness. I forgot who said it, but consciousness may never be fully studied by humans as we may not have the ability to.
Eli5 answer: We don’t know. And we probably never will.
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…
There’s no definite answer here. The answers to this come more from philosophy than science. That said, I’ll give you my take:
The you of you is an illusion. You are a bag of chemicals, reacting to stimuli, using past experience to navigate survival. You have no “soul.” This is why the you of you can be fundamentally changed by a drop of chemical or a brain injury. We are intrinsically tied to our physical selves.
Thoughts are another form of life. I think they are a ancient cosmic life form that has evolved to be consciousness. We and all life forms capable of having thought. What would be neat is if this is true that the universe is creating a infinity when it comes to thought. So thought never was or will be it just is.
All thoughts are patterns of neurons firing, but unfortunately, our neuroscience is not yet at the point where we can point at group of neurons and say “look! A getting-a-taco thought just formed! There it goes to join the plans-for-the-day train!”
Though maybe one day that will be possible. There have been multiple experiments with using machine learning to decode brain signals and figure out what words, sounds, motions and images the person (or an animal) is thinking of, and with direct brain interface like Neuralink coming up we should get even more data to figure out what’s up with the brain, but it will be a while before we can get to “individual thought” level.
Developing a theory of “how neurons firing leads to thoughts” needs measurements. Accurate measurements are difficult to take because 1. there is a lot of brain and skull between you and those signals, and 2. reaching for them anyway tends to kill the subject or leave them a vegetable, so doing those kinds of experiments is all around problematic.
Sam Harris describes it better than anyone I’ve ever heard. (We don’t know but this helps explain) [Link](https://youtu.be/Xp9zyeZSwDA)
No one knows. This is called the “problem or consciousness”. We have no idea how meat can experience “qualia” or even what part of the brain does it.
Look into all the research and theories. I would recommend a youtube channel called “exurb1a”, a lot of his videos are very educational and also quite funny, they will send you down millions of rabbit holes and really show you how much we do not know about this world. I find it very useful for depression/anxiety sufferers as well as highly intelligent hungry minds.
Survey that asks if you control your own thoughts? What?
How can you choose „No“ if you don’t control your own thoughts?
Also about the conversations in your head: are you the one who speaks or the one who listens?
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