Where Do Thoughts Come From?

Three Point Essay #24 | Strange Stories, Creativity, and Meditation

Oct 27, 2022

Here’s a three-pointer to open your mind.

Kobe Bryant wore number #24. I know he’s getting shots up right now. Ball is life even when you’re dead.

Some Strange Stories

I remember having a panic attack in the pre-school bathroom. We were learning about outer space, and my mind was struggling to comprehend it. It still does. But I was 5 years old, so it was sort of fucked up.

Around that same time, I asked my dad for a picture of God. He printed me out The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo. While it’s beautiful art, I was still confused.

“Dad, you must’ve not understood, I want a real picture of God, this is just a painting.”

When I realized I wasn’t getting a yearbook headshot of God himself, or how no one could explain what came before the big bang (God?) my head was spinning. But never was it spinning so hard as when I considered the strangest mystery of them all: how am I even thinking in the first place?

Conscious Thought

What is thought? It baffles description because it includes everything through which it might be defined. It is the most immediate fact that we know, and the last mystery of our being.
—Will Durant

It’s 2022, and I still haven’t figured out how we have thoughts. But I’ve heard some theories. Some (extremely) simplified explanations of a few:

God or a higher power blessed humans with consciousness at a special point in time
Consciousness gradually arose in humans through evolution; it emerges when there are a certain amount of neurons in the brain firing and connecting (how is this different from a divine miracle?)
Some people don’t have conscious thought (only theory known to be 100% true)

Regardless of any of these ideas, no one can deny that it’s strange how thoughts just…pop into your head. Almost like they are coming from somewhere else.

Lex Fridman talks about this on his podcast. He wonders if our minds are like an antenna receiving inputs, instead of the generators of ideas themselves. This makes sense if you consider the process of creating stuff. Creativity is a process no one understands, it just happens.

Creativity & Meditation

The mysteriousness of creativity and the mind becomes obvious when you meditate. When you close your eyes, sit there paying attention to your breath, and feel all the sensations of the present moment.

If you non-judgmentally watch the contents of your mind, you realize how out of control it is. And how random memories, the next project to work on, or insane ideas about what you should do that night flow in and out of your consciousness.

Again, how or why does this process take place? No one knows.

The human brain is fascinating—a little three pound ball of electric pink goo, that figured out how to create nuclear weapons and complex AI—but still can’t figure out how it itself works.

And 1 — Observing the Mind

Sam Harris is a writer, philosopher, and neuroscientist who studies the human brain and mind.

He believes that thinking, without being aware that you’re thinking, is what causes the majority of psychological pain for people. In other words, identifying with all your thoughts, instead of simply watching them.

There’s an idea that enlightenment is the space between your thoughts. Where you know that you aren’t you’re thoughts, you’re the observer of them.

Through becoming more meditative, you can get into that space. You’ll become a witness to your own mind, instead of trapped in it.