Where Do Thoughts Really Come From? | Unveiled

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Where Do Thoughts Really Come From?</h4>

If thinking is akin to a mental workout, then thoughts are like reps, and humans can do a lot of them. A regular human can think about four to eight thoughts per minute. That adds up to several thousand thoughts every day. Whether we’re conscious about it or not, we are constantly thinking.

So, this is Unveiled and today we’re answering the extraordinary question: where do thoughts really come from?

Thoughts can come to us in various flavors. They can be spontaneous, or deliberate. They can also be provoked by associations we connect with specific objects or experiences. We don’t usually actively think about our thoughts. They just pop into our heads as though from nowhere. We’re able to articulate them to others using words and actions but it’s rare that we’re genuinely aware of how (or why) we think as we do. Physically, we can trace our thoughts back to our brain. There is an explanation to be found, to some degree, as they (and our behavior) are a result of physical and chemical processes in our body. According to some interpretations, this means that all individuals are ultimately defined by their brains. But, and if that is the case, then how does something immaterial like a thought arise from something material like the brain? What exactly is happening?

Many great thinkers have contemplated this question. In the 17th century, the French philosopher Rene Descartes wrestled with the nature of the mind. Descartes considered it to be a separate, nonphysical substance apart from the brain. His take on the mind-body interaction is aptly named Cartesian Dualism. In his perspective, the mind directs the brain, interacting via the pineal gland. When a person dies, their mind continues to survive. Decartes’ view proved to be immensely influential. 

However, things changed in the 18th century when medical science began to uncover the role of the brain in how we think. Further technological advances demonstrated a physical basis for the origin of our thoughts. Modern neuroscience describes the brain as primarily composed of neurons. Neurons are cells that communicate by generating electrical impulses. The human brain is composed of approximately 86 billion neurons. Our brains are wired like electrical circuits. Neurons release chemicals called neurotransmitters that generate electrical signals in neighboring neurons. These signals then travel along thousands of neurons, generating thoughts. Our individual personality is then linked to our neutral patterns. When a sequence of neurons fires, it reinforces that pattern. That’s why any one person tends to react in a similar way in a similar situation - to some degree, we’re predictable. Memory can also be identified with a physical process, viewed from the outside as molecular changes in neuronal connections. A change in the firing pattern would mean new thoughts, and new behavior.  

Our mind, consisting of all our thoughts, is a functional product of our brain.

This physical theory remains a dominant player to this day, but it also has detractors. A purely physicalist view reduces our existence, identity, and personality down solely to events in our brains. Critics argue that this undermines our understanding of ‘free will’, and fails to explain subjective, conscious experience - which philosophers call ‘qualia’. Through neuroimaging, we can watch neural activity and write down what the brain does when it tastes an apple, for example. But does that really capture what it’s like to taste an apple - the experience we have when we do so? For some, electrical signals and neuronal patterns can’t completely account for the full human condition.

This then opens the door to other ideas on the origin of thoughts and the mind-brain relationship. There are some particularly notable theories. 

One is called property dualism - a theory articulated and popularized by the Australian philosopher David Chalmers. It holds that only one substance exists - the physical kind - but that the architecture of the brain generates mental properties that supervene on the physical brain. One version of this is emergent materialism - the idea that novel properties can ‘emerge’ from certain complex structures. In this view, the mind is more than just the physical processes of the brain, but still bound to it. In the words of Dr. Dan Siegel, professor of psychiatry at UCLA School of Medicine, the mind is “an emergent self-organizing process, both embodied and relational, that regulates energy and information flow within and among us.”

Another theory is substance dualism, which again is what Rene Descartes advocated for. The idea has a long tradition in philosophy, taking us all the way back to the shores of ancient Greece. While Plato wasn’t a substance dualist in the way we understand the term, he did see the world in physical and nonphysical terms. He wondered about our ability to know and understand things that don’t exist in the physical realm - for example, perfect geometrical shapes. He argued that there must be a higher world, a world of Ideas or Forms. According to him, physical objects are just imperfect approximations, rather than the real, perfect things. 

It’s a short step from this idea to substance dualism - a popular concept for thousands of years. It was used by Christian thinkers to distinguish between the body and the soul, and explain how the soul can survive the death of the body. Advocates for dualism have differed on the relationship between the soul and the body. The German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz argued for an unusual solution, stating that the physical world of our body and the nonphysical world of our thoughts only appear to interact. In reality, they are synchronous and just run parallel to another. How? Well, according to Leibniz, the answer was simply: God. 

Lastly, however, there is the theory of idealism. Like physicalism, this is a version of monism, but instead of postulating that only physical entities exist, it asserts that only mental entities do! This idea is also often traced back to Plato’s dualism, but found popular expression in the work of Bishop George Berkeley in the 18th century, and endures today as ‘panpsychism’ - the view that consciousness is fundamental to reality. 

All of this brings us back to where we started. Where do our thoughts come from? It’s a difficult question and a definitive answer remains elusive. On one side of the divide, we find the dualists, who believe the mind and brain are separate. Either they are separate substances, or the mind is a special property that emerges from physical processes in the brain. On the other hand, we find the physicalists, who believe that the mind is the brain. Thoughts are just electrochemical processes - nothing more and nothing less. And then there are the idealists, who think that everything is mind! Into which camp do you fall? Dualist, physicalist or idealist, or somewhere in between? Let us know in the comments!

Ultimately, in setting out to answer such a massive question, you can easily open a Pandora’s box filled with more questions and, well, thoughts about thoughts. It’s possible that, with our current research and knowledge, we just can’t know the answer for sure. It could be that it can’t be relegated to a single concept - and our daily experiences are just too complex to be constrained to one simple idea. On the other hand, many believe that we will one day have such a firm grasp of human consciousness that we’ll be able to reproduce it at will. Here we move into the realms of digital mind uploads and artificial intelligence. Mind uploads could well prove to be our best bet toward achieving immortality; by storing our thoughts onto a server, when the brain is no more. With AI, the true nature of thinking is set to become a key ethical issue. Because, if thoughts ever can be controlled and made… then does anybody own them? How should we then view AI thinking machines? And what happens if artificial thought generation ever outperforms the natural, neural pathways inside our physical heads?

Thoughts are certainly something to think about. But, equally, can you question yourself too much? For now, this is solid, biological, neurological science meets ethereal, unknowable philosophy. “Where do thoughts come from?” is a thought you probably don’t often consider… and yet it’s crucial to every other thought you’ve ever had and ever will have. Because, without whatever it is that provides us with thoughts, we’d all be lifeless, uniformed and unoriginal blobs of nothing much at all.