Category Archives: Cognitive Science

Captures intersections of psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, AI, and philosophy.

6,200 thoughts per day

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“A new study from psychologists at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario Canada reports observations of the transition from one thought to another in fMRI brain scans. Though the researchers don’t detect the content of our thoughts, their method allows them to count each one, and they say we have about 6,200 thoughts per day. The researchers refer to them as “thought worms.”

“We had our breakthrough by giving up on trying to understand what a person is thinking about, and instead focusing on when they have moved on. Our methods help us detect when a person is thinking something new, without regard to what the new thought is.”

Thoughts think themselves

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For those of us who subscribe to the theory there is no self — that me “I” thought is just a persistent illusion — a frequent question is where do thoughts come from if there is no “me” to think them?

They come from the subconscious whose name happens to be Jeff. Jeff sits in the refrigerator that is your consciousness. He has one of those horseshoe magnets he uses to arrange tiny word magnets on the outside of the refrigerator. Jeff is working backward and in the dark (trust me on that point) so the ideas he strings together are often random and arbitrary. He can sense when there is an awareness on the other side of the door and this makes him uncomfortable so he slows down the magnet work. When he feels the awareness depart he gets busy again.

Experience Self vs. Memory Self (Daniel Kahneman)

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  • Being happy “in” you life, vs. being happy “about” your life
  • We don’t choose between experiences, we choose between memories of experiences
  • We don’t think of the future as experience, we think of the future as anticipated memories
  • Why do we give so much weight to memories, relative to the weight we give experiences?
  • We do not attend to the same things when we think about life and when we actually live.