thoughts and memories

There are 86,400 seconds in a 24-hour day.

The human mind produces over 70,000 thoughts on an average day.

That means we have a different thought every 1.2 seconds.

A thought is usually referred to as any mental or intellectual activity involving an individual's subjective consciousness, and as one who is often accused of thinking too much I found these statistics to be quite a relief.  Obviously, I am not the only one.

What are we thinking about, so often? Most of us are thinking about what has happened, because when you think about it, it is only those with gifts of clairvoyance that can think beyond what is happening with any accuracy.

So could it be argued that every conscious thought we have is a memory? Are we just repeating ourselves here? Are any of these thoughts we are having every 1.2 seconds original, never thought by us before?

In 2008, for the first time, scientists at UCLA and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel recorded individual brain cells in the act of calling up a memory, thus revealing where in the brain a specific memory is stored and how the brain is able to recreate it.

Running test on 13 patients, Dr Itzhak Fried, (a UCLA professor of neurosurgery) placed electrodes on their brains to record neuron activity while they watched video clips featuring world famous landmarks and familiar faces such as Homer Simpson and Tom Cruise.  According to an online article in Science, “As the patients watched, the researchers recorded the activity of many neurons in the hippocampus and a nearby region known the entorhinal cortex that responded strongly to individual clips.

A few minutes later, after performing an intervening task, the patients were asked to recall whatever clips came to mind. The researchers found that the same neurons that had responded earlier to a specific clip fired strongly a second or two before the subject reported recalling that clip. These neurons did not fire, however, when other clips were recalled. Ultimately, it was possible for the researchers to know which clip a patient was recalling before the patient announced it.”

Do we create memories, or do they create us?

Dr Fried concluded later in the article, "Reliving past experience in our memory is the resurrection of neuronal activity from the past"

However, according to Steven Rose in his book The Making of Memory, “During a human lifetime every molecule of our body is replaced many times over, cells die and are replaced, the connections between them are made and broken thousands, perhaps millions of times. Yet despite this great flux which constitutes our biological existence, memories remain.”

No computer could endure such utter overhauls, and still function without a glitch. Memories/thoughts, in other words, are like the ghosts in our machine.

Freud believed memory was a psychic function created by the ego, arguing that the ego was the organized part of our personality structure, that sifted out what was real or made sense of the reality around it. 

He stated that the ego acts according to a reality principle, seeking to fulfill the dark ID-ridden pleasure principle that we are all born with, while being confined by the super ego structures of social morality (among other things).

If this is true, what is the ego using as its basis for reality, or what is realistic? If you woke up tomorrow with someone else’s memories, would you still feel like you? Would your ego still desire the same for you? It’s an interesting thing to think about.

What makes you, you, other than the things you think about?

French philosopher Rene Descartes thought that the only proof people had of their own existence was their thought process. But is there no more proof of my existence other than my own thinking on it?

There is a beautiful Japanese word Mushin (trans without mind), which is said to be a mental state into which highly trained martial artists can enter, that is not fixed or occupied by thought or emotion, and thus open to everything.

The legendary Zen master Takuan Sōhō said:

The mind must always be in the state of 'flowing,' for when it stops anywhere that means the flow is interrupted and it is this interruption that is injurious to the well-being of the mind. In the case of the swordsman, it means death. When the swordsman stands against his opponent, he is not to think of the opponent, or of himself, or of his enemy's sword movements. He just stands there with his sword, which, forgetful of all technique, is ready only to follow the dictates of the subconscious. The man has effaced himself as the wielder of the sword. When he strikes, it is not the man but the sword in the hand of the man's subconscious that strikes.”

This kind of mindfulness takes years of meditation and practice, and sadly, this is why most of us in the west do not indulge. We’ve got places to be, people to do, and everything else in between to think about…we’re too busy being lazy in our pre-determined neurological pathways to ever conceive of a new way to exist without thought.

Thinking is a hard habit to break, especially as we are all so habitually adept at it. But as the old saying goes:

“Watch your thoughts, for they become words. 


Watch your words, for they become actions. 


Watch your actions, for they become habits. 


Watch your habits, for they become character. 


Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.”