I love the blog by the Neurocritic.

In one of the most recent blogs, a new film called Listening is reviewed and well as the concept of how many thoughts we have a day.

I too have always wondered where the 70,000 number comes from.

Here’s what the Neuroocritic has to say on this:

“Well, popular lore says we have 70,000 thoughts per day, which comes out to only 0.8101851851851852 thoughts per second. But this is also absurd, since we haven’t yet defined what a “thought” even is. Interesting factoid: the Laboratory of Neuroimaging (LONI) at UCLA has taken credit for this number. But they did offer some caveats:

*This is still an open question (how many thoughts does the average human brain processes in 1 day). LONI faculty have done some very preliminary studies using undergraduate student volunteers and have estimated that one may expect around 60-70K thoughts per day. These results are not peer-reviewed/published. There is no generally accepted definition of what “thought” is or how it is created. In our study, we had assumed that a “thought” is a sporadic single-idea cognitive concept resulting from the act of thinking, or produced by spontaneous systems-level cognitive brain activations.

theoracleofdelphi-ga had some interesting thoughts on the matter:

So there’s the heart of the problem: No one really knows what the biological basis for a ‘thought’ is, so we can’t compute how fast a brain can produce them. Once you figure out the biological basis for a thought (and return from the Nobel ceremony) you can ask the question again and expect a reasonable scientific answer.

In the mean time, you could probably get a bunch of psychologists to argue about the definition of a thought for a while, and get a varying set of answers that depend highly on the definitions.”

Interesting!!! Can’t wait to see the movie.

Love the easy way these brain facts are presented.

10 things you didn’t know about your brain