Re: What is a thought ?

Your question is very good. Many scientist and thinkers of the human mind have tried to understand this question. Every year there are new ideas that people propose to try to understand thoughts.

You are correct to state the idea of chemical reactions is behind a thought. These chemical reactions take place between neurons in the brain but also within neurons (within the cell) to cause the cell to alter its function.

Now many activities of neurons or even single a neuron (a neuron is a single cell of the nervous system) can be measured in many different ways. For example, the electrical activities of neurons in the brain can be measured. This can be done by an EEG (electroencephalogram which takes electrical measurements of brain activity) as you probably have seen in on TV with a person having wire leads taped on to the head in all different locations. Also there are now imaging techniques where one can have their head in a special machine that can measure which parts of the brain are active. So thoughts can be measured with these approaches but what the exact thought is about is hard to understand. Say you are in one of those machines that measures brain activity and you think of solving a math problem in your head with out talking. The activity in your brain will be associated with processing math. The area of the brain to solve a math problem is also used when you think of a music to a song if your were trying to create the song in your head. So the activity is there in the brain but exactly if you were trying to solve the math problem 2+2 or 4+4 can't be determined and problem. Also it might be hard to tell the difference if you were trying to think of the melody to simple song like "Old McDonald had a farm."

So maybe the best answer at this time in our understanding of how the brain works is that a thought is a series of coordinated activities among neurons in such a way to produce a pattern that be understood in our ability to associate it as a understandable pattern. I often wonder what limits out thoughts. Is it our knowledge of a subject? Take for example a dog trying to think of how a car works. Maybe it is too hard to even think about it for a dog- beyond its ability. Are we that way in trying to understand the end of the Universe? It is so complex that maybe we are like that dog trying to think of something we can't understand because our knowledge is limited.

Well maybe in your lifetime new techniques to probe the brains function will be possible and such questions like yours will be able to be answered in a straightforward manner. But for now I think there is not a clear answer.

All the best,
Robin