Mindfulness entails concentrated awareness of one’s thoughts, actions or motivations.

Mindfulness involves continually bringing one’s awareness back into the present moment.

By residing more frequently in the present, one begins to see that the mind is continually chattering away with commentary and judgment. By noticing what the mind is offering up, one gains the ability to observe their thoughts and to see them for what they are without fear or judgment.

–  What is Mindfulness?  http://thinkmindfully.com/

Talk about being judgmental! “Chattering” is a word that oozes with judgment. Here are the first two definitions from Dictionary.com: 1) “to talk rapidly in a foolish or purposeless way; jabber;” and 2) “to utter a succession of quick, inarticulate, speechlike sounds, as monkeys or certain birds.” When you describe someone as “chattering”, you are devaluing them and their speech.

Is the mind actually “continually chattering away with commentary and judgment”? Content-analysis of thought-streams have repeatedly found that goal-directed planning, rehearsing and problem-solving are the most common type of content in “task-unrelated thought”, see, e.g., Baird et al 2011 or Morin et al 2011.  Quoting the latter:

“The most often self-reported inner speech function was self-regulation, which includes planning to engage in specific tasks, self motivating speech, time management, and planning when to do things. Also frequently mentioned was self-talk used to solve problems and make decisions, as well as inner speech used as a mnemonic aid.” Morin et al, p. 1717

We are told to observe these “chattering” thoughts and “see them for what they are”. What they “are’ is already being suggested. “Observing” sounds like a neutral activity, but it’s not. One cannot observe without bias – what to focus on,  what to look for, what aspects to highlight, how to frame,  what components make up the bounded object – bias is inevitable even without  blatant suggestions on how to interpret whatever is being observed.

This characterization of thoughts as chattering nonsense is typical of the religious project: stress how pathetic life is without commitment to the One True Path. You can’t get people all excited about the possibility of future awaking without contrasting it with current sleep. And you can’t get people to stay on the path without frequent reminders of the suffering and darkness that would befall them should they lose their way.

Achieving religious transformation can take a lifetime (or more) of time and effort. Few people would persevere on this quest if they considered regular life okay or pretty good except for sometimes. Approach motivation may be enough to get you started on the religious path but after the initial thrill is gone, avoidance motivation keeps you there.

References:

Alain Morin, Bob Uttl, Breanne Hamper Self-reported frequency, content, and functions of inner speech. Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences 30 (2011) 1714 – 1718.

Benjamin Baird , Jonathan Smallwood, and Jonathan W. Schooler (2011) Back to the future: Autobiographical planning and the functionality

I’m revisiting Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Full Catastrophe Living because it illustrates so many key themes in the mindfulness movement and serves as a perfect springboard for exploration of these themes. Let’s quote away!*

Much of humankind lives in “the blanket of unawareness” (7626) … functioning “on automatic pilot so much of the time that it might well be said that we are more asleep than awake, even when we are awake.” (8047)

Being “unaware” is not innocuous – it can be very dangerous:

 “So the value of cultivating mindfulness is not just a matter of getting more out of sunsets.…our tendency toward unawareness may also be lethal, either rapidly or slowly” (1046)

Wow – that’s scary! Once again, a picture is created of how bad off we are without mindfulness. And we don’t even know how unaware we are.

In Full Catastrophe Living, Kabat-Zinn paints a picture of a world in which people are dissatisfied, fragmented and driven, “totally unaware of the tyranny” of their own thoughts (1053). In such a world, people run on automatic pilot, so tense and stressed out that they “may even lose hope of ever feeling relaxed again” (1080)

Here is the theme of the endemic pain and suffering in our everyday lives, in which minor and transitory negative feelings become something deep and debilitating: an example of the pathologizing of negative emotions, exaggerating the ills of the “nonmindful” life to make the mindful life so much more appealing.

Allusions to the dire conditions of modern humanity conjure up images of catastrophe around the corner. So part of convincing people how wonderful mindfulness is requires that they realize how awful their lives are without mindfulness. It’s similar to some religious proselytizers trying to convince potential converts that their lives are horrible and worthless, their souls damned, and the only hope of salvation is conversion to the one true Religion.

* All page references are for Kindle pages

Reference:

Jon Kabat-Zinn (2013) Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness, Kindle Version, Revised Edition; Bantam Books, New York

In mindfulness discourse, the central problem is suffering. Life is full of unavoidable suffering: we can’t hold onto happiness, everything changes, nothing lasts, everybody dies, pain in inevitable, we are endlessly seeking and desiring without lasting satisfaction; an inner emptiness haunts our every moment. It goes on and on.

But wait: it gets worse! Piled on top of the suffering that is our existential lot as humans, there is the bonus suffering of modern life: all those toxins, all that stress, all that…television, source of:

“… staggering amounts of information, images, and sounds, much of it frenetic, violent, cruel, and anxiety-producing, and all of it artificial and two-dimensional, not related to actual experiences…” – Jon Kabat-Zinn (2013) p. 9204).

Is life really that awful?

Reference:

Jon Kabat-Zinn (2013) Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness, Kindle Version, Revised Edition; Bantam Books, New York

The threshold of conscious experience is about 200 milliseconds, or one fifth of a second.   This is enough time to pronounce a syllable.

But a syllable is not a unit of meaning. A meaningful thought can take several syllables. If the “psychological present” is 3 seconds long, the longest thought that is articulated subvocally “as it unfolds” is 15 syllables (assuming no pauses between syllables). Otherwise, the thought is being remembered. Can we remember thoughts while continuing to think them?

(Here is an example of exactly 15 syllables.)

The added complication is that “meaning” is not cut-and-dried – meaning emerges and is transformed in time. A “meaningful” thought – that is, a thought that “says something” – doesn’t have a clear beginning and end, because what it “says” – its meaning – keeps changing in time.

In other words, thoughts are not countable units.

What is a thought? That’s a problem. For the purpose of this post, I’m going to define a thought as a unit of meaning that includes enough context to be something its agent can discriminate: this not that. A thought means something specific to the thinker; it “brings to mind” both a specific object and a world, without having to articulate every last thing.

Oh, yeah, like that’s clear. But it’s a beginning.

Ok, let’s say a thought requires some linguistic element, if only to be in a form that can be sustained in working memory long enough for its content to be worked on – say, extended, contemplated, beheld, dismissed, or observed (or, at least immediately recalled, ala echoic or really on top-of-it working memory).

A syllable is about one-third second. A thought could be a syllable – e.g., “Wow” – but I warrant that’s an exception to the rule.

The problem with sentences is that we rarely know what they mean without knowing what came before and what came after. Not to mention all the background information. Plus all the non-sentence-like stuff going on. Bigger worlds and smaller worlds. All are being spoken to. Or “thought” to.

So, what is a thought and how would you count thoughts?

Let’s pretend a thought is a cognitive object that can be beheld within the “psychological present”, which per Daniel Kahneman is about 3 seconds. But 1…2….3 is hardly enough to contain most of our thoughts.

A wordless deep breath may contain a thought.

“It’s estimated that the average human has 60,000 thoughts a day. This is not surprising. What is disconcerting is that 90% of the thoughts you have today are the ones you had yesterday.” The Basics of Quantum Healing by Deepak Chopra, M.D.

“Our brains produce as many as 50,000 thoughts per day (National Science Foundation). Ninety-five percent of these thoughts are repeated daily and reflect the mindset or beliefs we hold that lead to those 50,000 thoughts.” Thoughts by Steven K. Cload/Mind Sets
“Experts estimate that the mind thinks between 60,000 – 80,000 thoughts a day. That’s an average of 2500 – 3,300 thoughts per hour. That’s incredible. Other experts estimate a smaller number, of 50,000 thoughts per day, which means about 2100 thoughts per hour.” How Many Thoughts Does Your Mind Think in One Hour? by Remez Sasson
“In 2005, the National Science Foundation published an article regarding research about human thoughts per day. The average person has about 12,000 to 60,000 thoughts per day. Of those, 80% are negative and 95% are exactly the same repetitive thoughts as the day before.”  80 % of Thoughts Are Negative…95 % are repetitive by Faith Hope & Psychology

 “The popular 50,000 thoughts per day claim, is apparently based on research performed by the National Science Foundation. Except that the research doesn’t exist. (The NSF are a funding organisation and don’t do research themselves.) Put simply, we don’t know how many thoughts we have per day.” How many thoughts does the ‘average’ person have per day? by Dr Stu
Ok, now that that’s settled, and before I get into the thorny problem of how to even count “thoughts”, please attend to the signs of pseudoscience in the above quotes:  “It’s estimated…” “Experts estimate…” and all those references to the National Science Foundation. In none of these articles were there specific references or links to academic papers. Rather, the authors use markers of scientific authority to present their claims as “facts”.

Rule of Thumb: when you see the word “experts” in a piece, 9 out of 10 times it’s a bunch of hogwash. Or so experts say….

Coming up: Are thought countable?

“No words are oftener on our lips than thinking and thought. So profuse and varied, indeed, is our use of these words that it is not easy to define just what we mean by them.”  – John Dewey, How We Think, p. 1

A hundred years after John Dewey wrote these lines, we haven’t come all that closer to an understanding of what thoughts actually are, as is made clear in the title of a recent Psychology Today blog: “What thoughts are remains mysterious from a neuroscientific point of view”.Good ol’ Wikipedia does provide several possible definitions, including:

A single product of thinking or a single idea (“My first thought was ‘no.’”)

The product of mental activity (“Mathematics is a large body of thought.”)

The act or process of thinking (“I was frazzled from too much thought.”)

The capacity to think, reason, imagine, etcetera (“All her thought was applied to her work.”)

The consideration of or reflection on an idea (“The thought of death terrifies me.”)

Recollection or contemplation (“I thought about my childhood.”)

Half-formed or imperfect intention (“I had some thought of going.”)

Anticipation or expectation (“She had no thought of seeing him again.”)

Consideration, attention, care, or regard (“He took no thought of his appearance” and “I did it without thinking.”)

Judgment, opinion, or belief (“According to his thought, honesty is the best policy.”)

The state of being conscious of something (“It made me think of my grandmother.”)

Tending to believe in something, especially with less than full confidence (“I think that it will rain, but I am not sure.”)

So a thought can be a process, the outcome of a process, capacity, inchoate intention, opinion, state of beholding, state of awareness, tentative belief, or an act of contemplation. Is there a common theme to these definitions? Other than the most general, banal, and unhelpful – like thoughts are cognitive processes and their products. Do thoughts actually exist?

Reference:

Dewey, John “What is thought?” Chapter 1 in How we think. Lexington, Mass: D.C. Heath, (1910): 1-13. Accessed on 3/9/14: https://www.brocku.ca/MeadProject/Dewey/Dewey_1910a/Dewey_1910_a.html

A thought is not an inert object. A thought is a living thing: it is both propelled and goal-directed. Thoughts bring into being the unanticipated. Thoughts activate neural connections and open up worlds. Reducing thoughts to objects takes the life out of them – stops them in their tracks, unable to continue on their path, spread activation, and open up worlds.

Sometimes we want them to stop – but that is a matter of the particular case, not a general rule.

Linguistic conventions keep tripping me up when I write about thoughts and thinking. It sounds like there is a little homunculus in the head listening to thoughts, encouraging them to proceed, or directing them to more worthwhile topics. Often if you try to do anything to or with thoughts, the thinking process will  stall. Just like with “choking” in sports: if you pay the wrong kind of attention to an action, you will disrupt its fluid unfolding.

Some behaviors are best performed on autopilot; scrutinizing them stops their flow. Behaviors require attentional resources, but this doesn’t mean the behavior itself should be the main object of attention. To focus on a behavior is to withdraw attentional resources that are best directed elsewhere – as required for the behavior to be successfully performed.  Baseball pitchers need to be aware of where they want the ball to go, which is impossible if they are focusing on the micro-movements of their throwing arm. The attentional field of speakers includes the facial expressions and movements of their listeners.

Focus on the thought and close off access to the well of inspiration that continually feeds into the thought. Focus on the thought and stop the thought. But the water will resume flowing soon enough.

Some thoughts and thought-streams lead to slightly lower mood – so what? A slightly lower mood isn’t the end of the world. If a line of thought leads to identification of problems, unresolved issues or as yet unrealized goals, fine – that realization may not make you jump for joy, but it’s still good to know. Going from an 8 to a 6 on the happiness scale isn’t a tragedy. Occasionally dipping down to 3 or 4 on the happiness scale doesn’t portend general unhappiness.