The saga of human life is peppered with lots of activities and most have received critical focus. Thinking belongs to the corral that has been the object of well, a lot of thought. Advice on thinking is doled out frequently- ‘nothing is good or bad, thinking makes it so’ or ‘your thinking defines your life’ or, the generation gap favourite, ‘don’t overthink’! Anyone sitting silent can be labelled a ‘philosopher’ and a person who talks much can be advised to ‘think before you open your mouth’.
Neuroscience informs us that on an average, a person could have as many as 50,000 thoughts a day or even 10,000 sustained internal conversations. These numbers may seem high but even the biggest sceptics have not been able to disprove the identity of the human as homo sapiens or, ‘wise man’, as says the Latin original. There are innumerable texts on the evolution and history of thinking which hold that thought has given birth to almost everything that defines human civilization, for instance, culture, language and memory.
When a person who thinks a lot is called a philosopher, it could mean anything and imply anything too! Sometimes it could even be a derogatory name for a person who thinks much but acts a lot less. Louisa May Alcott writes, “My definition of a philosopher is of a man up in a balloon, with his family and friends holding the ropes which confine him to earth and trying to haul him down.” The mind has been credited with wonderful things but has also been accused of strange stuff. Young ones are often admonished, ‘Don’t walk around with your head up in the clouds!’
Descartes’ famous words ‘Cogito ergo sum’, ‘I think therefore I am’ pretty much sum up the role of thought in the creation of our being, way back in the Seventeenth century, without the support of cognitive science. This would imply that our thoughts influence the persona we carry around. Rumination brings to mind the image of a cow chewing the cud and this image holds many lessons. If this constant though process keeps churning negative ideas, it can be detrimental to well-being but if the ideas are creative and life-affirming in nature, it can work wonders. Metacognition or thinking about one’s own thinking can help in this direction.
Research studies on the mind have proved that even during sleep, the Default Mode Network including the Interactive Neural Networks is not switched off, it keeps spinning in the background of our shut eyes, maintaining and repairing itself while continuing the thought process. This fact underscores the importance of managing our thoughts and harnessing them towards happy and holistic living. Many a time, turmoil in the daily routine can spill over as disturbance in sleep patterns. At bedtime, visualising the closing of disturbing issues just as a folder in a computer is shut down has helped many disturbed minds. Research has provided evidence that meditation is also a way of shutting down emotional turmoil that leads to damaging thoughts.
The role of philosophy in human life has been acknowledged and accepted by professionals down the ages. Ayn Rand, author and philosopher writes, “I am often asked whether I am primarily a novelist or a philosopher. The answer is: both. In a certain sense, every novelist is a philosopher, because one cannot present a picture of human existence without a philosophical framework, … In order to define, explain and present my concept of man, I had to become a philosopher in the specific meaning of the term.”
Can a cognitive miser be happy?