We all know that thoughts are powerful; they help us solve problems, inform important decisions, guide us to act, make sense of the world and provide new ideas and possibilities. Collectively, thoughts helped us land on the moon, invent the Internet and control much of the world around us. Less positively, collective thinking has also led to conflict, discrimination, and the destruction of the environment.
Given that thoughts are so important, what are they and how did humans develop the capacity to think in the first place? The challenge of answering the first question is that the brain is the most complex phenomenon known to humankind. Although there’s been significant progress in the brain sciences, we know much more about the visible universe than what goes on inside our own heads. The subject is complex, as thoughts appear in the typical adult brain which has around 100 billion neurons across 100 trillion synaptic connections. By comparison, there are an estimated 100 billion stars in our local galaxy, the Milky Way.
According to Wikipedia, although there are many theories, there’s no generally accepted view on what a thought is, or how it’s created. The same goes for how symbolic thinking evolved, with little agreement among scientists and academics. A symbol is something that represents something else. For instance, an outline of a deer for the actual animal, or a heart shape representing love. A symbol takes the mind to an abstract level, away from the objective, here and now of reality. The most recent research by archaeologists in Africa studying early hominid engravings estimates that symbolic thinking evolved at some point between 70,000 and 164,000 years ago, which means that our species, Homo sapiens, may have already had the ability to think when it appeared. As far as we know, although mammals can access memory and experience emotions, they cannot think symbolically, so live in the moment. Anyone with a pet dog knows that they can associate spoken sounds with activities or objects, which is most probably how early language developed. Interestingly, the development of secular mindfulness is often about letting go of unintentional thinking about the past and future and coming back to the body and senses; as if we’ve drifted too far into the abstract world in our minds and need to recover some balance. We can say that thoughts are mental events that have content and meaning. We can also see that thoughts arise, play out and dissolve. So, although some may be about us and our situation, they are not who we are.
Like many powerful things, thoughts can be positive as well as negative. It’s useful to make the distinction between intentional thought; the thinking on purpose that we do every day when planning, analysing, or problem-solving, and unintentional automatic thoughts when our minds wander. Unintentional automatic thoughts can be separated into positive, neutral, and negative. Positive mind-wandering can be useful for solving complex problems and inspiring creativity and is used by many successful scientists, engineers, artists, writers, and musicians. The neutral branch is where automatic thoughts are neither positive nor negative, but also includes semi-conscious daydreaming, reverie, and fantasies. The negative mind wandering is about repetitive worry and rumination, self-criticism, judgement, and the narrative of low self-worth. Practising mindfulness helps build awareness of these automatic thoughts and allows us to discern between automatic thoughts that are useful, expanding, and nurturing and those that are not useful, limiting and depleting.
You may have come across the simple three-brain model of brain evolution: this starts with the brain stem, or reptilian brain, which provides all the vital functions to keep us alive, followed by the mammalian or emotional brain, and on top of this is the neocortex, our thinking brain. Humans have all three stacked on top of one another. Luckily for us, part of our brain is nearly always connected in the moment, even though our attention may be somewhere else. While we drive down a motorway, off in thought, other parts keep us safe on the road.
Protected by our skull, our brain knows nothing about the world, apart from what it perceives through the senses. As it develops, our brain builds an internal model of the world, which changes and adapts over a lifetime. Equivalent to “you are what you eat”, our mind becomes what we feed it, which is what we pay attention to, whether this is daytime TV, trashy social media, inspiring conversations, or a good book.
Recent research has found many linkages between thinking and physiology. One of the best-known is the power of placebos in medicine. When people are given painkillers without any trace of the drug, their brains release endorphins, which reduce pain. Given how the neocortex is connected to the lower parts of the brain and body by the autonomic nervous system, it’s no surprise that our state of mind can affect our heart rate, breathing, and immune system. So, our state of mind can make us physically Ill, as well as healthy and full of vitality.
Now that psychology and neuroscience have a better understanding of the mind and brain, we realize that we often over-identify with and lack awareness of our thoughts, which allows our powerful mind to become our master rather than our servant. Practising mindfulness helps us change this relationship and better use our minds. We can become more aware of thoughts, know that they are not who we are, and foster useful, expanding, and nurturing thoughts, which leads to a healthier and happier life.
Suggested Weekly practice
- Becoming aware of dominant habitual patterns of thought that no longer serve you.
- Encouraging expansive, positive, and nurturing thoughts and paying less attention to limiting, negative, depleting thoughts
- Knowing that you are not your thoughts; being able to discriminate between reality and how your mind interprets the world
Guidance
Find somewhere undisturbed and sit in a comfortable, dignified and upright posture, where you can remain alert and aware.
There are two guided practices for this session. You can close your eyes, or lower your gaze while the meditations play.
- Play the settling practice, then read through the session content, which you can print off if that helps
- Then play the second audio to explore awareness of thoughts.
