30 Apr 7 Interesting Facts About The Mind

A lot of us begin the practice of meditation to calm down our nerves or to prevent the daily effects of stress. But once we begin to explore what meditation really does to our minds, it ignites curiosity in the way we think and how we think. The perception of the mind, and its capability to think a 1000 things in a minute( especially at night, for a lot of us), is truly a testament to how much awareness meditation brings!

And there is still to explore and discover. So, let’s kick it off with these amazing mindfulness facts about the mind:

Number 1: Attempts to understand the mind go back at least to the ancient Greeks. Plato, for example, believed that the mind acquired knowledge through virtue, independently of sense experience. Descartes and Leibniz also believed the mind gained knowledge through thinking and reasoning—or, in other words, rationalism.

Number 2: The term “mind” is from the Old English gemynd, or “memory,” and the Proto-Indo-European verbal root *men-, meaning “to think, remember.” The use of “mind” to refer to all mental faculties, thought, feelings, memory, and volition developed gradually over the 14th and 15th centuries.

Number 3: Buddha described the mind as being filled with drunken monkeys who jumped, screeched, and chatted endlessly. Fear, according to Buddha, was an especially loud monkey. Buddha taught meditation as a way to tame the “drunken monkeys” in the mind.

Number 4: The NSF estimates that a human brain produces as many as 12,000 to 50,000 thoughts per day, depending on how deep a thinker a person is. Most of the so-called random daily thoughts are about our social environment and ourselves.

Number 5: In contrast to rationalists, empiricists, such as Aristotle, John Locke, and David Hume, believe that the mind gains knowledge from experience.

Number 6: A single descriptive word can manipulate how the mind remembers an event. For example, in a 1974 experiment, 45 people watched the film of a car accident. Different groups of people were asked how fast the cars were going using different trigger words, such as “hit,” “smashed,” “collided,” bumped,” and “contacted.” The group whose question included the word “smashed” estimated the cars were going 10 mph faster than the group whose word was “contacted.” A week later, when participants were asked about broken glass, those who were asked more forceful trigger words reported that there was broken glass even though there was none.

Number 7: When the mind recalls a memory, it’s not the original memory. In fact, the act of remembering is an act of creative re-imagination. The put-together memory doesn’t just have a few holes; it also has some entirely new bits pasted in.