Thoughts about thinking

1,000 words. They say that a picture is worth it, and that professional writers should shoot for it. If those words were money it’s an interesting amount – enough to be of great assistance yet not nearly enough for comfort. To write 1,000 words in an hour means 16 and two-thirds words a minute, including revisions. Doesn’t sound like much, especially when you consider that an even somewhat competent typist can word through at least 45 words per minute; that is until I actually I started to word count my own mind.

While it’s always interesting to think about thinking, says the philosophy major, actually counting the number of words that comprise our thoughts can be a strangely revealing exercise. Before I could count though, I had to figure out what qualifies as a countable word at all. It’s just so tempting to think the “Ow!” that comes with a stubbed toe may count, and that even more useful is the constant running dialogue that most of have (Freud, the Buddhists and the New Agers would call it the Ego). These words however are what I would consider white noise and as such have absolutely no place in what I was trying to do.

The problem lies in the fact that it has become apparent as of late that there seems to be a distinct lack of thought; plenty of response and reaction, yet not much thinking to go along with it. Consider the internal dialogue, the one that seems to tumble through our minds independent of our wills. The one that says “You can/can’t do this”, “You are/aren’t good enough” etc. – it seems to me that we aren’t actually telling ourselves anything and instead are simply receiving unsolicited advice for our self perception. Debatably important, but not really thoughtful – this voice runs as a reaction to the stimuli presented to our world through the filter of what we believe that we are capable of.

What then is the kind of thought then do I believe is ‘countable’? Since I’m new to this project, tired, and still getting into things, I’ll simply use the idea of conscious, constructive thought. Thought that is conscious in that it is self directed – our minds aren’t speaking with us, we’re choosing to think with it. Constructive in that it’s a thought that is goal directed and meant to make some sort of progress towards an end.

What then about daydreaming? I would absolutely argue that it should count, as long as you’re daydreaming in words as opposed to images. I’m not sure anyone would think that we would be able or want to word count our representation of a sunset on the beach, strikes me as similar to trying to word count a television program. The Boston Globe has a bit more about the kind of daydreaming I’m talking about (http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/08/31/daydream_achiever/) but the crux of the story is that daydreaming comes in multiple varieties, but at minimum we have the “I need to get away from the present” and the “I need my mind to solve a problem” varieties. The former is a response to the unsatisfactory present while the latter is using the incredible power of the mind to process. We each in our minds have more potential neuron connections that there are believed to be stars in the sky.

Read that again: we have more possible connections between the neurons in our minds as there are stars in the sky. The trouble with our common thought is that to prevent being overwhelmed by our daily routine we must reinforce certain connections and use them as the basic, unchanging constituents of our lives. Imagine if you had to discover anew the best way to use your toothbrush, or had to continuously find new motivations to find your fantasies appealing; I know that the last thing I want is to be paralyzed by which color expo marker I’m planning to write on the whiteboard with. The downside of this efficiency is that we are missing out on other potentials that we cannot see because we are afraid of getting too far afield from the issue at hand – since the mind has about 100 billion neurons, if each one fired one at a time with a unique neighbor once per second it would take 3,170.98 years to run through them all. Factor in our habits, and the ability of each neuron to interact with almost any number of the others nearby, and it quickly becomes clear that we simply do not have the power to think all of the thoughts that have yet to be thought; especially when you consider that at least to my knowledge we have very little understanding of just how powerful an individual neuron can be. If each one can ultimately be responsible for multiple ideas, then the sun will burn out before humanity can truly exhaust all that is out there.

Now hopefully this will help make the ‘countable’ version of daydreaming accessible, and with all the features that a more traditional countable thought would also be. Rather than being random, daydreaming of a more constructive kind involves a hunt and peck method of trying to open of new avenues of thought; not passive, goal oriented. The mind will Look toward new synthesis, unique integrations of other ideas, and sui generis modes of understanding trying to take advantage of the genius that we all necessarily possess.

So, daydreaming, traditional problem solving, creative focused word countable ideas, at what rate per minute do we think in this fashion? It’s funny, 700 words later the question seems much less pressing than it did before. Tied in with the question of its importance is the real world value of such a thing. We all know people who think quickly and present worthless ideas, others who think very carefully yet thoroughly and everything in between. Sitting at the other end of the no longer blank page the important question seems to be no longer “how fast” but “the fact that we are” truly thinking and not simply reacting.

While the idea that we spend much of our mental life in some sort of hibernation mode, engaged in what I don’t even particularly consider thinking is interesting, it is also to be left for another day. However, my plan is to try to think of solutions rather than worry about the problem, and if it works for even just one problem I need to solve then my 12.0 words per minute thought count will be a success after all - fun or fruitful remains to be seen, yet never a dull moment.