Hold that thought - what's your take on this?

It’s really very simple, the little guys working inside our heads file away all the “keepers” in terms of thoughts/memories, ready to recall them at a moments notice…or maybe that’s just me ;-}

Frankly, I had just taken it for granted as one of the marvels of the brain before now.

What about the thought that you know you have, but you can’t quite put your finger on at a certain moment. You have to let it sneak up into your consciousness before you can grab it.

I used to imagine there was a “flip-flop” in my brain that I could set or reset (a more modern metaphor would be “flag”) – somehow I could reliably remember something I consciously put in “the back of my mind.” Unfortunately the reliability of this mechanism is declining as the decades roll by, so I sometimes use physical means like notes & alarms, relying mostly on my smart phone. I used to have a Casio wristwatch with a small reminder icon you could set or clear. You can still tie a string around your finger lol. But nothing beats old-fashioned remembering!

Take a look at books by Douglas Hofstadter like Godel, Escher, Bach and I Am a Strange Loop for intriguing discussions of various cognitive and computational models of consciousness and the illusion of “self” that somehow emerges from our brains.

I’m confused!

Great question, @fremen_warrior.
Why do you think that only one of those channels of thought is “you”?

Exactly, how can your consciousness choose what to think if it hasn’t thought of it yet?

I often feel those thoughts are there and they’ll come at me soon and I don’t want to think them but of course by then it’s too late, they’ve been thunk.

I often think of the consciousness as a cursor, much like in a word processor. Only, I imagine there are multiple cursors working at the same time. Each cursor is a conscious point. I would estimate there’s maybe 11–15 of these in any given consciousness. Maybe 20 if you’re exceptionally alert. Essentially you can have these cursors in various places of thought, which creates the scope of your your conscious focus.

If you try to push yourself too hard, one of your cursors will lose track of whatever you were focusing on and the next thing you know you’re in a car accident or you’ve missed your destination or you’ve forgotten someone’s name or you’ve forgotten what it was you were saying mid-sentence.

I consider consciousness (the cursors) a very physical thing, like walking down the street. You can only see what you can see from that perspective and if you move along the road a little, you can see more but of course from the new vantage point you obscure what was possible to focus on from the previous.

So, like traveling up a road, you can begin to make out what is coming up ahead, but you can’t see the full picture til you get to the optimal vantage point. You can pause, and observe your destination from afar and then, when you’re ready, you can approach it for a close up to uncover more details. I imagine that the brain’s cursors operate in similar fashion.

One difference, I would suggest, is that the brain kinda keeps moving with every passing moment of time. It’s a very organic multi-dimensional kind of travel where you can somewhat hold a destination-thought in a paused state BUT even the moments that go by without really focusing on the thought can alter the end result of the thought.

hmm.. imagine.. a Dali like world where everything around you is organic and quickly altering and changing. Even your destinations change. Imagine New York city in front of you, 10 miles to go. With each mile closer, an entire decade of time passes visibly in the City ahead of you in fast-forward. It continues to shift and change until you finally get to it. Even then it continues to shift, but at a more comprehensive pace. That’s kind of how I imagine it all happening.

It makes it easy to see why humanity invented an eternal, separate soul, doesn’t it? It certainly feels like I’m this little homunculus sitting in a control room like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, watching the view-screen before me and deciding what controls to push, what messages to store for later retrieval.

Sadly, when I try to access that retrieval system, all too often when I say “Computer.” no generic feminine voice answers saying, “Working.” So I gather I’m not really an immortal soul able to wander my brain at will. My sense of “I’ness” appears to just be an emergent property of that brain. And if I have a thought worth holding, I pop open my text editor and add it to the list, or if I’m away from all Internet access, I write it in a little black notebook I keep in my backpack. Crude, but they actually do allow me to “Hold that thought.”

Interesting question to ponder. I’ve got a problem with ‘holding that thought’. For me, it’s like everything that’s going on in my head seems to happen all at once. Combine that with a chaotic outer environment, and I’m likely to have a panic attack from overloaded circuits.

Normally, I’ll be thinking of six or more things simultaneously, trying to put special emphasis on things I’ll need to remember later, and they often slip away by the time I need them again. Sometimes I can get in a zone and concentrate on only one thing, getting all the others to hang out in the background, but mostly it’s a constant cacophony in my head. When I do get in that zone, I often find my body has continued on without my conscious awareness…like, I’ll be driving along, thinking intently about something, and suddenly find I’m nearly home, with no memory of how I got there. That’s always a little scary!

I’ve heard people say, “you think too much,” but thinking about thinking? Jeez…I wish I had the time to ponder such things.

Simple…

YOU
are NOT
your thoughts.

You know what thought is.
A more “thought provoking” question now, is…

…WHO are YOU?

I believe that while one slumbers into dreamland, that our minds rest and our thoughts search unconsciously for those questions and answers that we feel at a deeper level and because we are so busy living our daily lives, that it is stored in our subconscious until we have time to sort through them ( at sleep level).
Mediatation enables that too ,by gently getting one to that realaxed level while still in the waking state too.
Calming the mind of its busy thoughts assists the person to concentrate on
meaningful life answers for each of us.