Neural Networks Are Like Competitive Sprinters

Many thoughts can be classified as spontaneous or involuntary. They spring to mind; they don’t feel deliberate. Some may be ideas or intuitions relevant to a current situation, intrusive thoughts linked to preoccupations, or “free associations” while the mind wanders. Some are re...

Emotions play a key role in many types of spontaneous thoughts. For example, intrusive thoughts are forced upon us by emotions so that we focus on high-priority information like threats, frustrations or opportunities. Anxiety often produces int...

The amygdala hub also activates the brain’s amplifiers in the brain stem that feed neuromodulators like adrenaline and serotonin to the grey matter. These systems juice up the level of neural activity and steer it toward the theme that is consistent with the emotion.

Where do spontaneous thoughts come from? An obvious source is environmental stimulation: the ideas evoked by what we see and hear. However, spontaneous thoughts often appear when the environment is relatively stable, like when walking a familiar path or sitting on a bus.

Even during uneventful daily activities, weak emotions or microemotions such as worries, desires, irritation, stress, surprise or interest are involved in orienting many of our thoughts.

Microemotions are brief and often unconscious. They mainly trigger mic...

In essence, spontaneous thoughts are largely motivated thoughts: every minute, feelings nudge our attention, our inner voice and our mental theatre in a specific direction.

Better control of stress levels, emotions and daily experiences may improve the quality

The fleeting images and phrases in our minds make up a good portion of our lives. By some estimates based on brain state transitions in neuroimaging data, we may have 4 to 8 thoughts per minute. Even accounting for some periods of fatigue or apathy and many periods spent perceiving sensor...

While negative emotions make us focus on high priority content, positive emotions appear to facilitate more remote or unusual associations which increase memorization and creativity. During euphoria — intense happiness or pleasure that may be out of proportion to its causes — int...

Micro-fears often trigger what-if thoughts and worries that maintain anxiety through a positive feedback loop; this in turn can be a source of insomnia. Microemotions of guilt or pride trigger moral intuitions of anticipa...

Microemotions influence our thoughts in a variety of ways. They distract our attention from its present object, they sensitize perceptual systems to notice things related to their dominant theme and they facilitate the retrieval of memories relevant to that theme.

...

Emotions can activate spontaneous thoughts through several brain circuits centred on a hub called the amygdala. That hub has access to our urges and desires activated in the low parts of our frontal lobe. It can interpret the emotional significance of perceptions or retrieved mem...