Thinking About Thoughts
I Can Hear Myself Thinking
"Thinking: The talking of the soul with itself."
— Plato
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Hello AWMS subscriber :
Having used this blog for some time to announce the release of our podcast stream, ebook and paperback, and various public events, I'm now expanding to include short essays on personal development topics. And so today, I'm posting a few words about metacognition — thinking about thinking.
As a writer, speaker, hypnotherapist and meditation teacher, I've often struggled to explain the distinctions between conscious, deliberate thinking and the passive, unconscious jabber that flows into awareness when we are not engaged in directed activity.
Scientists distinguish between task-related and task-unrelated thoughts (TUTs). Any appearance of thinking that has been diverted from one's current situation — like a daydream — qualifies as a TUT.
Yet TUTs are more than mere distractions. Unconscious thoughts intrude on our conscious awareness whenever we disengage from deliberate cognition. Most people refer to these intrusive influences as "thinking," even though they are passive opinions — impulsive thought-streams of worry, doubt, and negativity stimulated by the survival-based amygdala (reflexive fight-or-flight center) in the primal limbic brain.
Personally, I often use intentional vs unintentional, purposeful vs spontaneous, oractive vs passive to describe this duality. I've also compared task-oriented thinking to carefully driving a car, and task-unrelated thinking to an out-of-control car zig-zagging wildly with an unconscious driver behind the wheel.
Meditators commonly use the Chinese allegory that refers to unconscious mental chatter as monkey mind and deliberate, task-oriented thought as will-horse. The ultimate purpose of most meditation exercises is to detach from our trains of thought and feelings and rise to an elevated perspective of self as the awareness of our mental processes, allowing us to choose whether to accept or reject our intrusive thoughts.
— Michael
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