How are human thoughts different to human felings?

Thoughts are processed in the brain, and may or may not cause a physiological reaction. I don’t have a physiological process (outside of typing) for expressing my reply to your question.

Feelings are expressed (felt) as the result of physical reactions in the body, either through muscle contractions or hormonal responses. These reactions can cause change in heart rate, blood pressure, and metabolism.

Can we flip the question about?

Are thoughts the same as feelings? @zenvelo gives some ideas above.

I think he’s right, in general, although I’m not convinced that all feelings lead to physiological changes.

My view is that thoughts must be different from feelings, because I can have a thought about the blue Phillips head screwdriver in my toolbox, and how it would tighten the doorhandle. But I don’t break into a sweat out of eagerness to use it.

Thoughts are not feelings, just like feelings are not facts.
Thoughts are mind stories generated by the brain but can enhance/create feelings such as fear, anxiety or a sense of euphoria thinking about things pleasant or unpleasant. People that struggle with anxiety issues are physiologically responding to fearful thoughts they create in their mind and the body responds on a feeling level to the minds contrivance.

A feeling is what your brain does when certain chemicals react with it. The feeling may or may not have anything to do with the true nature of reality.
A thought is an attempt, successful or not, to accurately match your conceptual conciousness to external events.

But feelings are fact, @Coloma, for the person who is feeling something. A person may be afraid in a situation where there is nothing to be afraid of, but that doesn’t change the fact that that person is afraid.

@Dutchess_III Yes, true, doesn’t change the feeling but as far as the fact of something it often does. If someone has an irrational fear of spiders the mind will create a terrified feeling but the fact remains that the spider on the wall is not a true threat.

Just an observation but the Chinese use the same word, xin, to describe both thought and feeling.

No wonder they are screwing up their own economy

LOL @Josie

Now that would be a neat question to ask in Fluther. How is China screwing its own economy?

Feelings are centered in older (evolutionarily speaking) brain processes. They are conscious only in that we are aware of the bodily sensations they provoke, but the underlying processes are not subject to our conscious control.

Thoughts are centered in the newer parts of our cerebral equipment. While we like to think that we first think about the world and then decide how we feel about it based on our thinking, many studies have demonstrated that the role of thinking is mostly to craft a narrative that justifies our feelings. In other words, we tend to feel first, then think up a way to make sense of those feelings. There is speculation that we evolved the ability to think mostly in order to build strong arguments for why our feelings should win out over those of others.

Scientifically speaking I do not think It can be fully quantified. IMO feelings are emotion driven, feelings comes from thought. I think about opening the door, what is associated with that, is if I am carrying something I might drop trying to get through the door, is there someone on the other side coming my way, where does the door go to, etc. that doesn’t make me angry, sad or anything. If I show up to a meeting, event, etc. and someone says ”It is good you made it on time”, if I am accustomed to being late, how I process the manner in which they said it (thought), I can get angry or annoyed (feelings). If it was an event where there was so much seating then they close the doors, I might feel relieved of glad, because I could take it that they were just about the close the doors so it was good I made it when I did. Thoughts and feelings are as different as emotion and logic.

Kinda like the age old question of what came first, the chicken or the egg.
There is a saying that our thoughts create feelings. I think, that aside from actual physical feelings of pain, that thought proceeds feeling and creates the correspondent emotional reaction. There is also a saying that feelings are not facts, which seems to support that thought is more factual and feeling more irrational.
Then, we have personality and temperament study with people either being more thought inclined vs. more feeling inclined.
The brains predominant mode of relating/viewing the world based on either logic and reason or emotion.

Most women are feelers and most men are thinkers, hence, some of the gender differences, however, while less common, there are plenty of thinking women and feeling type males as well.
As a thinking type women here an intuitive thinker ( NT ) I often have a difficult time with the sensing feeling types ( SF’s ) as they tend to use emotional reasoning over logic.
While these particular modes of relating/processing our environments do not mean that thinkers do not or cannot feel nor that feelers do not or cannot think but, quite frankly, I find that feeling comes easier to thinkers than logic does to feelers. lol
An interesting question might be how much evolution plays into these differences?

Why have more males evolved as thinkers and more women evolved as feelers, yet, there are those within each gender that have the predominant opposite functions.
How does this serve mankind on the whole?

I think feelings are primal and unfiltered. And thoughts are feelings that have been processed through language. But language is relatively new and pretty limited.