Readers reply: what are thoughts? Where do they come from – and where do they go?

What are thoughts? Where do they come from, and where do they go when they disappear? Are they “filed” somewhere, a bit like memories, where we can find them again, or once a thought has gone is that it?
Sue Christian, Oswestry

Please email new questions to nq@theguardian.com

Readers reply

Thoughts are comments that haven’t been posted yet. romantotale17

All you are is sense perception and memory. Memory is inexorably tied into language and thought. But you remember very little of what you take in though your senses. So thoughts are probably fleeting, unexpressed memories. IanRod65

Thoughts are manipulations with signs, unconventional attitudes for solving difficult and abstract problems. Thoughts are plans or considerations of possibilities when dealing with our environment, and questions that attach meaning to our lives. They come from strenuous effort and painful work to those who are allowed by time. Especially a philosopher may see hope for a better world in their proper articulations, since our thoughts shape us. Due to them it is possible to raise our reason from a dust into which it again and again falls. Jindřich Suchý, Heidelberg

I have wondered about this subject for years and have even discussed it with various doctors. The prevailing myth is that the brain manufactures consciousness like a machine and when the machine breaks consciousness stops. However, if we remove part of the brain we do not impact consciousness, only at times causing problems controlling the parts of the body. I’ve come to the conclusion that thoughts/consciousness are part of a field of energy that accompanies the body and controls it through the brain. This field can and may be part of a greater field, you may call it human consciousness, like a gestalt. You may envision an energy being reaching down like a hand into the material world with each “finger” inserted into a human/animal body for control. When the body breaks down and dies, the consciousness retreats to the main field of consciousness. Our religions are the result of a subconscious understanding of this system. Physical forms are tools for the actual being of consciousness to interact with the physical universe. WillShirley

Thoughts are microscopic brain socks. They get lost all the time, sometimes for ever, but often turn up for no apparent reason in a place you never expected to find them. idontcareanymore

My thinking on this is as follows: if we couldn’t describe our thoughts to one another, then we would have made very little progress throughout human history. Our thoughts have often been described to others, more rapidly since the invention of printing, then movable type, then the internet.

Actually, the process for me just there was:

1. I think that is incorrect

2. I will try to say why

3. Explication of thought and reasoning (or rationalisation) editing while typing (several thoughts involved)

4. Realisation that I was checking and editing the rationalisation as I typed another thought, which prompted more thoughts

Perhaps not a perfect description of a thought, or of thought, but certainly a description. Nos 1 and 2 could as well have been described as impulses rather than “thoughts” as they didn’t represent and weren’t preceded by any sort of reasoning. But perhaps they were quasi-instinctive thoughts derived from decades of conditioning of my thinking, ie they represent the sort of thing that I think once I have actually applied thought to the question. ScruffyMongrel

Thoughts, perceptions, feelings, sensations, are patterns of brain activation. Memories are shortcuts to those patterns. Beyond that, no one knows, and those who say they do are lying.

It’s easy to disrupt brain function that controls physical movement or sensation for example. It’s more or less known what part of the brain controls what bodily function, and even some more complex ones such as language. One can even induce a transcendent religious experience by stimulating a particular brain region (I’ve read this was discovered accidentally during brain surgery of a nun, since patients are often kept awake and can tell doctors what they feel).

It’s not so easy to disrupt long-term memory or consciousness, because they are not localised but distributed (and no one knows the how or why of that either). Only something systemic or pretty severe can do it. uraniaargus

My experience of my thoughts is that they are semi-automatic spiritual adventures in language. My thoughts seem to form dark wordy patterns in my mind, but I can also apply them to a problem, using language, at will. No one here has suggested that they may be spiritual impulses – everyone accepts these days that they come from the brain. But thought etymologically is a nebulous concept meaning “to appear to oneself”, so they may be connected to issues of identity and for this we could turn to Jacques Lacan and his “mirror stage” of infancy, though I would prefer to stay normal. Descartes thought they were the very essence of soul and self. But since after 500,000 years no one has yet defined what a soul is, I’m not sure we will ever know. Peterhigg999

“Thought is action in rehearsal” – Freud. But don’t just talk about words, many of us sometimes think in pictures, and in video clips, too. Animal expert Temple Grandin is a great user of highly detailed mental “videos” in her thoughts, although she may be an extreme example. trying2Breasonable

If your thought is a mental process becoming conscious, possibly it is passing through pyramidal cells of your neocortex. How to relate that to the actual content of the thought, and how it is represented in a neuron, or neural circuit, or group of neurons, the system of representation seems unknown, but my guess is that it invokes the neural mechanics of each sense, and the vocal apparatus. If you remember a thought that is committed to long-term memory, perhaps it is Stuart Hameroff’s pattern of entangled hexamer dipoles on microtubules. But apart from the mere biology of it, your thoughts, collectively, really are you. The ones that stick seem to define a personality that persists through a dynamic chaos of sensual inputs. If this is true, there’s a paradox lurking inside, as Philip Larkin memorably wrote:

Turbomotive

Thoughts are mental events, and they reflect every aspect of experiencing. Among these mental events are every sensation and fragment of memory that may be evoked. There is a hidden character of thought which is known as associability, which seems to be an abstract function of the brain in which thoughts resonate.

Three aspects of association are known:

1. What happens together gets wired together such that at any moment all experience we have physically and mentally in all unblocked senses including memory – meaning that all of any moment’s experience – can be interlinked into new memories. This is a continuous background function of the structure and state of the brain.

2. Similar features resonating in mind evoke memories with the same pattern.

3. Repetition of any combination of experience makes the linkage stronger between those fragments of thought in mind, and they become reflexive or default perceptions, or reactions.

This means that what happened together is linked, and what is similar to what happened before becomes perceived using the current and previous context(s). Also what is practised becomes more strongly unified into reusable thought objects and physical skills. Perception, or similarity-based linkage is the kernel of thinking, but it is 100% dependent upon experiencing and previous experience (memory). All of the things we learn, including movement and language, art and poetry, are thought at every stage. JeraldW

Memories are neurophysiological facts whether consciously recalled or not. It is clear that it is the human mind that is conscious of experiencing the world and thinking about it. The whole brain thinks but to experience this thinking a functioning association cortex located in the frontal lobes has to be working. Experiences are real and leave real traces in the central nervous system. These are memories and when we experience recalling them they have the tone of dilute experiences. Thoughts are the reassembly of parts of memorised experiences in the association cortex.

None of the foregoing necessitates or implies consciousness. A sophisticated machine could be doing as much. It is only because we know as an empirical fact that we are conscious that there is anything real to be explained. Suppose, like the square root of minus one, that consciousness was real but imaginary? Real only and because there is mind involved, where mind and the actual qualia of conscious experience are held to be non physical but able to interact closely with the neurophysiology of the brain.

This philosophical doctrine of interactionism was promulgated in 1975 by Karl Popper and John Eccles in The Self and Its Brain. If this philosophical approach is anywhere close to the truth then your conscious thoughts are nonphysical and to the extent that the subconscious mind manipulates symbols and affects the content of dreams that must be partially nonphysical as well. A disturbing thought, perhaps, but a necessary one. aegian

Thoughts are your own voice/narrative in your head, vocalising and making sense of what is going on around you. From the mundane thinking about what to have for breakfast to coping with a death in the family, or making decisions about new jobs, moving house, thoughts distil memories, past experience and consideration of possible outcomes to crystallise things in your own mind. Sometimes, thoughts can literally be me playing out scenarios in my head and taking things to logical/illogical conclusions without physically doing anything.

Thought process central is somewhere in the brain, but triggers for them are all over the body. It’s only a matter of time before scientists discover exactly where and how to manipulate them, which they can already do with dreams. andre789

I’ve always liked the idea espoused in a short story I once read (and which I’ve subsequently forgotten, so if anybody recognises it I’d be grateful for reminding me) that thoughts – or rather, ideas – are actually alien beings, and are colonising us, as well as replicating themselves, by using us to disseminate them via communication with each other. I seem to recall too that it wasn’t done with malign purpose, more like the way DNA gets us to pass it along through chains of interaction. Phew. That was a bit off the wall for so early in the morning. I need a nice lie down now (he thought). musicforpleasure

Thoughts are more than one kind of mental activity. The dialogue, or monologue, is one thing, and they are, I suppose, a part of how the brain works. It’s an ability to reflect and interpret that has the peculiar feature that it convinces us that it’s very important and does great things for us even though it rarely, if ever, comes up with anything we don’t already know. We humans seem to be endlessly fascinated by the voice or voices in out heads. We think we are fantastic and not quite like anything else in nature because of the inner chatter. It think none of the chatter is stored. It’s fluff.

Then you have deliberate mental drive accompanied by an explanatory voice. Intentional reasoning, driven by an urge to make sense and figure things out. This comes to some extent from outside stimuli, but possibly also from inherent stuff. This kind of thinking does not need to be verbal but will often, in the long run, be reduced to words, staying around as questions and answers and “maxims” that can linger in the mind for what seems to be for ever. I think they form part of the structure of the mind by being revolving points, and are obviously stored, even if they mutate and the original version is forgotten.

If you’re interested in studying your own thinking, you might want to pay attention to the phase of waking up, focusing and remembering the way the first thoughts of the day get going. HolgerDan

Thoughts are like pixels of light,
Tiny dots that can’t be held.
Be mindful of the colour and tone,
Their motive and intensity.
They combine to create the landscape of your experience.
Henley