Where Do Your Ideas Come From? A Mind‑Bending Journey into the Origin of Thought
Introduction: A Thought Over Coffee in Hastings
Picture this: you’re sipping coffee at a Hastings café, gazing at the Mississippi River, when a brilliant idea pops into your head. It feels like it came out of nowhere. But where do our ideas actually come from? Are our thoughts truly our own ingenious creations, or are we just remixing the world around us in our heads? It’s a question that has puzzled everyone from philosophers in Parisian cafés to neuroscientists in high-tech labs. And in our age of artificial intelligence and internet memes, the question only gets more intriguing – and a bit humorous. (After all, if you suddenly dream up a scheme to win the Hastings Rivertown Days talent contest by yodeling, was that really your idea or a bizarre mash-up of YouTube videos your brain saw last week?)
In this deep dive, we’ll explore the origin of human thought – where ideas arise, how the brain cooks them up, and what it all means in the era of AI and “Prompt Theory.” We’ll journey from old-school philosophy (Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am”) to cutting-edge cognitive science, from cultural memes to neural networks. By the end, you might question the very fabric of your cognition – and hopefully laugh along the way. Buckle up, Hastings; this thought experiment is about to get wild (and maybe a little life-changing).
From Descartes to Dennett: Philosophers Ponder the Mind
Humans have been wondering about thoughts for millennia. The 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes famously proclaimed “Cogito, ergo sum” (“I think, therefore I am”) – suggesting that the very act of thinking proves our existence. But Descartes went further in asking where thoughts come from. He proposed that some ideas are innate (built into us, “imprinted on the mind by God”), some are adventitious (coming from outside, via our senses), and some are factitious or fabricated (made up by our imagination) iep.utm.edu, iep.utm.edu. For example, your idea of justice might be innate (a natural lightbulb courtesy of the universe or a higher power), your idea of coffee comes adventitiously (through sense experience of actually tasting that dark roast at Hastings’ local cafe), and your idea of a unicorn riding a bicycle is fabricated (thanks to your mind’s ability to mash things together).
Not everyone in Descartes’ era agreed that we have any built-in ideas. Along came John Locke, who argued the mind is born as a tabula rasa – a blank slate. “Let us suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas,” Locke wrote, insisting that all knowledge and thoughts come from experience writing on that blank page sparknotes.com. In other words, if you suddenly think up a new recipe for tater tot hotdish (a Minnesota classic), Locke would say it’s because you’ve encountered those ingredients and meals before, not because the recipe was hiding innately in your soul.
The Scottish philosopher David Hume took the “all ideas come from experience” notion and ran with it – possibly after having a wee dram of Scotch. Hume argued that even our wildest imaginings are just remixing bits of stuff we’ve sensed or felt. The mind’s “creative power… amounts to no more than the faculty of compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing the materials afforded us by the senses and experience,” he wrote davidhume.org. If you imagine a golden mountain, it’s because you know gold and you know mountains, and your mind simply glued the two together. In short, Hume asserted “all the materials of thinking are derived either from our outward or inward sentiment” – our external senses or internal feelings – and that even the idea of God or anything else can be traced back to prior impressions we’ve collected davidhume.org, davidhume.org. No part of your mind, he claimed, is truly creating ex nihilo (out of nothing); it’s more like a crafty Pinterest board of everything you’ve ever experienced, cut up and recombined.
This philosophical debate – do ideas come from within or without? – raged on for centuries. Immanuel Kant later tried to have it both ways, suggesting our minds have innate ways of structuring experience (like space, time, cause and effect), but that the content of our thoughts still comes from the world via our senses. Meanwhile, others mused that perhaps divine inspiration or a mystical muse gives us thoughts (a comforting idea when you get a brilliant insight – you can thank your guardian angel, perhaps).
Fast-forward to the 20th and 21st centuries, and thinkers like Daniel Dennett have brought the question of thought’s origin into the realm of science. Dennett, a philosopher of mind and cognitive science legend (and who only recently passed away in 2024 at the age of 82 nautil.us), argued that there’s no magic at play – no ghost in the machine. He noted that minds, like bodies, are products of evolution, built by millions of years of natural selection nautil.us. In his view, we are astonishingly complex machines, and our thoughts emerge from electrochemical processes in the brain. To explain consciousness and thought, Dennett insisted we must use scientific method with “no miracles allowed” nautil.us. The very fact that lumps of biological tissue (brains) can produce subjective ideas about the world is the great puzzle, but one that must have a natural explanation. (If Descartes thought the secret was the soul interacting with the brain, Dennett cheekily retorted that it’s more likely just neurons interacting with neurotransmitters – not as romantic, but more realistic.)
Dennett also embraced an idea that connects nicely to our modern meme-filled world: the notion of ideas as infectious agents. He picked up on biologist Richard Dawkins’ concept of the meme. Dawkins coined the term “meme” in 1976 to describe a unit of cultural transmission – basically an idea or behavior that spreads from person to person, analogous to how genes spread biologically en.wikipedia.org. (No, “meme” wasn’t originally defined as “funny cat picture on the internet,” though that’s how we use it now – more on that later.) Dennett observed that culture evolves in a Darwinian way: ideas replicate, mutate, compete, and either thrive or fade out. Much as no single person invents a language (languages evolve over generations), many of our thoughts might not be truly our own inventions either – they’re memes we caught from others and recombined. In fact, cultural evolution can mimic biological evolution: competing ideas get copied at different rates, get refined over time, and importantly “have no deliberate, fore-sighted authors” nautil.us. Think about it – no one sat down to deliberately design the English language or to plan the evolution of, say, rock music. These things emerged from many people’s incremental contributions, a collage of minds. Your stray thought while driving down Highway 61 might similarly be the echo of countless influences – your parents’ advice, a book you read, a TikTok video you watched – all stewing in your mental crockpot.
Philosophers from Descartes to Dennett set the stage for thinking about thinking. Some saw the human mind as a kind of magical originator of ideas (whether divinely endowed or innately structured), while others saw it as a sponge soaking up the world and wringing out new combinations. So, are your ideas more like divine sparks, or more like crafty remixes of greatest hits? To find out, let’s peep under the hood of the brain itself – with the help of science.
The Neural Orchestra: How Brains Spawn Thoughts
So how does a clump of neurons inside your skull produce a thought like “I should double-check the weather before the Twins game” or “Eureka! I’ve got it!”? Modern neuroscience and cognitive science have been chipping away at this question, and while a complete answer remains as elusive as a Minnesota mosquito in January, we’ve learned a ton about the machinery of thought.
First off, your brain is a massive network – about 100 billion neurons interconnected by trillions of synapses (the tiny gaps where neurons chemically talk to each other) engineering.mit.edu. Each neuron is basically an electrical cell that can fire signals, and even a simple thought or perception corresponds to millions of neurons firing in synchrony. “Somehow… that’s producing thought,” as one MIT neuroscientist put it dryly engineering.mit.edu. The sheer complexity has often humbled scientists. Tracing a single thought from beginning to end in the brain, some say, is like asking “where does a forest begin?” – there’s no clear single starting tree engineering.mit.edu. Instead, a thought emerges from coordinated activity across brain regions, a bit like an orchestra with no single conductor but lots of sectional leaders.
One classic way to think of it: the brain takes in inputs (through perception), processes them, and produces outputs (like actions or speech). Neuroscientists at UC Berkeley actually managed to track the path of a thought through the brain during a simple task aau.edu. They asked people to repeat a word they saw or heard. First, the visual or auditory cortex lit up (depending on whether the word was seen or heard) – that’s the brain perceiving the input. Next, the prefrontal cortex (right behind your forehead) kicked in to interpret the word’s meaning and decide what to do. Finally, the motor cortex lit up to move the tongue and lips to speak the word aloud aau.eduaau.edu. The whole sequence took only a split-second. For more complex tasks (say, generating an antonym of a word rather than just repeating it), the prefrontal cortex had to work a bit longer and even call in help from other areas like memory centers, before handing off to the motor cortex aau.edu. In these scenarios, brain scans showed something intriguing: the motor areas (preparing to speak) started getting active even before the prefrontal cortex had fully decided on the answer, as if the brain was itching to respond immediately aau.edu. As one researcher quipped, this “might explain why people sometimes say things before they think” aau.edu – our brain’s response systems are revving at the starting line while our decision-making centers are still chewing on the problem. (Ever blurt out a “dang, it’s cold!” before realizing it’s only 50°F and you’ve just gotten too used to summer? Blame your eager motor cortex.)
While we can follow a thought’s journey for simple cases, the origin of spontaneous, self-generated thoughts is trickier. You’ve likely experienced your mind wandering – one minute you’re folding laundry, the next you’re thinking about why Lynx basketball tickets are so expensive, with no obvious trigger. Where did that thought come from? Researchers point to something called the default mode network – a set of brain regions that light up when we’re not focused on the outside world, essentially when our mind is idle or daydreaming. The brain never really “turns off”; even at rest, it’s churning through memories, feelings, and unresolved questions, generating thoughts on its own. This can lead to creative insights (“Shower thoughts,” anyone?) or, less pleasantly, anxious ruminations at 3 AM. In a real sense, some thoughts bubble up from within the brain’s own dynamics, not directly from outside stimuli – a bit like a well springing up water that’s filtered through underground channels of your mind.
One leading theory in neuroscience today portrays the brain as a prediction machine. Our brains don’t just passively wait for inputs; they actively guess what’s coming and prepare for it. Loads of evidence now suggests that perception and thought involve the brain generating predictions and then checking the actual input to see if it was right quantamagazine.org. If you’ve ever heard your phone ding only to realize it didn’t – that was your brain predicting a sound and momentarily hallucinating it. This predictive ability makes the brain super-efficient. As Quanta Magazine explains, the brain isn’t assembling information like a puzzle piece by piece; instead, it’s constantly using prior knowledge to infer what’s likely, filling in gaps quantamagazine.org. In fact, neuroscientists are “pivoting to a view of the brain as a ‘prediction machine’” that tries to conserve energy by pre-computing what it expects quantamagazine.org. What does this have to do with the origin of thoughts? Well, some of our thoughts might actually be the brain’s predictive guesses bubbling up. For example, walking down a dark street, you might think of a possible shadow or threat – your brain is basically auto-completing the situation based on past experience. In daily life, our internal monologue could partly be our brain rehearsing possible scenarios, prepping us for what to do next. In that sense, a thought might start as the brain’s proactive simulation of the world: a little test pattern of neurons firing to anticipate something, which then we experience as an idea or a memory resurfacing. It’s a bit spooky – are we thinking, or is our brain thinking for us?
This leads to an even more startling notion: perhaps before you even know what you’re going to do or think, your brain has already begun doing or thinking it. In the 1980s, neuroscientist Benjamin Libet conducted a famous experiment measuring people’s brain activity while they made a simple choice (like pressing a button) and noted when they felt the conscious intention to do so. He found that the brain showed a “readiness potential” – a signature of preparation to act – hundreds of milliseconds before the person consciously decided to move theatlantic.com. In Libet’s words, “the brain evidently ‘decides’ to initiate the act” before the person is even aware of having made a decision theatlantic.com, theatlantic.com. To many, this was a WTF moment: wait, my brain started the thought or action before “I” chose it? Does that mean my feeling of conscious control is playing catch-up to my unconscious neurons? Some have taken this as evidence that free will is an illusion – that our thoughts and decisions are generated by unconscious neural processes and our awareness just narrates them after the fact theatlantic.com. (Others dispute that interpretation, but it certainly makes you rub your temples in existential angst for a minute.) At the very least, Libet’s work and follow-ups suggest that the origin of a thought can be sub-conscious. The seed of an idea might be planted in the brain’s electrochemical activity before it blossoms into your conscious mind. As folks today might joke: by the time you think “I just got a great idea!”, your brain’s been working on it behind the scenes like an overzealous stage crew, and you – the conscious mind – are the last one to get the memo.
Are We Original, or Just Remix DJs? (Memes and Memory)
Let’s step back from neurons and look at a bigger picture: culture and memory. When you have a thought, how much of it is truly new, and how much is borrowed from everything you’ve seen before? It’s often said there’s “nothing new under the sun,” and that may be truer than we like to admit. Even Mark Twain humorously claimed, “There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope.” In his folksy way, Twain was channeling Hume’s empiricist spirit and anticipating what scientists today call memetics – the study of how ideas spread and mutate.
The term meme (rhymes with “dream”) was introduced by Richard Dawkins in the 1970s, long before LOLcats and viral TikToks. Dawkins defined a meme as a unit of culture – an idea, a tune, a catchphrase, a fashion – that replicates and evolves, subject to the forces of variation and selection en.wikipedia.org. Think of popular melodies or proverbs that get passed down through generations. They change a bit with each retelling (variation), and only the catchiest or most useful ones survive (selection). In Dawkins’ conception, our minds are the hosts for these memes. When you learn a catchy song, it “infects” your brain, and when you whistle it and someone else hears, you pass on the infection. This is cultural evolution at work.
Here’s the mind-bending part: what if many of your thoughts are really memes talking? This isn’t to say you don’t have any original thoughts, but consider how much of what’s in your head came from someone else. The language you’re using to think right now – English – you didn’t invent that. The earworm jingle that pops into your head when you’re trying to concentrate – put there by an ad on TV. The idea that popping a Tylenol might help your headache – taught by your parents or a friend. Our brains are soaked in culture from birth; we download memes by the truckload (figuratively) as we grow up. By the time we’re adults, our heads are a rich database of examples, patterns, stories, facts, and frameworks absorbed from school, family, books, the Star Tribune, Reddit threads, you name it.
This isn’t a bad thing – it’s actually what makes human progress possible. We inherit knowledge rather than having to reinvent the wheel every generation. But it does mean that truly original ideas are as rare (and as precious) as perfect diamonds. Most creativity, as many psychologists and artists will tell you, is more like innovation – recombining existing things – rather than pure invention from scratch. Remember Hume’s golden mountain? The imaginary creature a child comes up with is usually a mashup of known animals. Likewise, a novelist’s “new” plot is often just Romeo and Juliet relocated to zombies in space (hey, we all know the trope). Even breakthrough inventions tend to have multiple inventors working independently, because the pieces were already lying around in the culture. (E.g. the telephone – Alexander Bell and Elisha Gray filed patents the same day; calculus – Newton and Leibniz developed it on opposite sides of Europe around the same time. When it’s meme o’clock, certain ideas want to be thought, and will find a mind to think them.)
If this sounds a bit depressing – like “oh great, I’m just regurgitating old memes and have no original spark” – take heart. It’s just one perspective, and of course new combinations can be incredibly meaningful and novel to us. Plus, the fact that ideas are recycled means you can consciously remix things to create “new” ideas. Your brain is essentially a remix DJ in the nightclub of life, sampling old tunes to make new music. And some DJs are more talented than others at mixing surprising tracks! The key is exposure to lots of diverse ideas (to have more material to combine) and the freedom to play with them in original ways. So if you want more creative thoughts, feed your brain a rich diet of memes – read widely, talk to different people, travel if you can – and then give yourself some quiet time (remember that default mode network!) to let the mental kaleidoscope tumble those pieces into a fresh pattern.
What about memory? Memory is the storehouse of those ingredients. Neuroscience shows that every time we recall something, we reconstruct it, which is a fancy way of saying we might change it a little. Memories aren’t perfect movie replays; they’re more like storytelling. This means even our cherished memories are part original experience, part ongoing remix (and sometimes part sheer fiction, as any eyewitness testimony researcher will lament). Our thoughts based on those memories are therefore once-removed from reality already. Have you ever had a heated discussion and later “remembered” your zinger comeback… only to realize you never actually said it, you just thought about it later so vividly it became a memory? That’s a thought literally becoming a “false” memory. The boundaries between what we originate and what we absorb can get very fuzzy in the tangled web of neurons.
To bring it closer to home: think of the Hastings community. We share a lot of the same memes – not just the internet kind, but local ideas and values. A notion like “Minnesota nice” is a meme; so is the tradition that the Hastings Spiral Bridge was an engineering marvel (and the collective regret that it was demolished). When a new idea spreads in town – say, a movement to start a community garden or a catchy theme for the next county fair – it often catches on because it resonates with existing shared understandings (memes) here in Hastings. We’re all remixing the communal songbook of our culture. And hey, maybe one of our local memes will be the seed of a big idea that spreads far beyond Hastings someday!
Before our heads explode with the revelation that we’re meme machines, let’s inject a bit of humor: originality is not dead. Humans are capable of surprise. We do have random neurons and unique life experiences. Like snowflakes, no two brains are exactly alike in the connections and weights they’ve formed. So when you remix the same cultural ingredients in a one-of-a-kind brain, you can get a novel outcome. That’s why we keep getting new songs, new inventions, new jokes. As one BBC article paraphrased Twain, even if ideas are the “same old pieces of colored glass… in use through all the ages,” those pieces can form new, curious combinationsbbc.co.uk. The light bulb moment is still real – it’s just that your brain’s light bulb usually screws into a socket built by society.
Minds and Machines: When AI Imitates the Human Thought Process
Now, strap in for the futuristic twist: what happens when we build machines that (seem to) think? In Hastings, you might have played with an AI chatbot or used voice recognition on your phone. These AI systems, especially the trendy GPT models and image generators, operate on a principle not unlike the human brain in some respects: they’re trained on oodles of data (the AI equivalent of life experience) and they generate outputs by recombining patterns from that training. An AI doesn’t have thoughts and ideas the way we do – there’s no conscious muse in your smartphone – but the illusion of original thought can certainly be there. When ChatGPT pens a decent haiku about the Mississippi, it’s not because it sat by the river feeling inspired; it’s remixing countless lines of poetry it “read” during training. Sounds familiar, right? It’s basically a meme machine with silicon chips.
This parallel has led some thinkers to ask: are our brains just prediction machines (like AI) that auto-complete reality based on training (life) data? And if so, how do we remain different from AI? After all, an AI can write an article about the origin of human thought (maybe it’s doing it right now… gulp). Does that mean understanding human thought reduces to just input-output patterns? Philosophers like Dennett have provocatively suggested that consciousness itself might be a kind of user illusion – a narrative our brain tells to make sense of its activities. AI doesn’t (yet) have that self-narrative; it doesn’t know what it’s doing. But if one day it did, would it then have “thoughts” like us? These questions sound like sci-fi, but they’re being taken seriously by scientists and philosophers in 2025.
Speaking of sci-fi, a recent viral video explored something called Prompt Theory – and it’s too perfect not to mention. The scenario: highly realistic AI-generated characters suddenly question the nature of their reality. They suspect they might just be responding to prompts – lines of code – rather than living freely. In this short film (created by science communicator Hashem Al-Ghaili using Google’s cutting-edge image model), the AI characters ridicule the very concept of “prompt theory”… all while unknowingly following a script that was, you guessed it, written by a prompt linkedin.com. It’s “a simulation questioning its own simulation” linkedin.com. One character scoffs, “You want to convince me that this perfect creation behind me is the result of ones and zeros, a binary code and nothing more? ... We just can’t have nice things. You still believe we’re made of prompts?” linkedin.com. The joke, of course, is on them (and on us): they are made of prompts, and their every thought is pre-scripted by an AI prompter.
Prompt Theory – the idea that perhaps we are all living in a grand prompt-response scenario – is a tongue-in-cheek riff on the old Simulation Hypothesis (the notion that maybe our reality is a computer simulation). It’s essentially saying: what if words (or code) are generating reality? For AI characters, that’s literally true. For us humans, it’s an invitation to wonder: are our thoughts just responses to environmental prompts? When you walk past the aroma of baked bread and suddenly think “I should buy a donut,” that thought was clearly prompted by sensory input. But what about abstract thoughts like “I need to be a better person”? Were those prompted by some combination of life events, moral teachings, and introspection (all inputs)? Or did they spring ex nihilo from a soul?
There’s a comedic yet profound comparison to be made: Humans are the OG prompt-based generative models. The environment (parents, teachers, society, Nature itself) feeds us prompts from the day we’re born: “This is hot!”, “Do that homework.”, “Love your neighbor.”, “YOLO.” We absorb these and eventually we output behaviors and yes, thoughts. Unlike AIs, we have an inner qualitative experience (at least I experience my thoughts… I think?), and we can set our own goals. But one could argue that a lot of our thinking is reactive – responses to stimuli – rather than some free-floating act of will. That said, we do appear to have the ability to reflect on our prompts. A human can recognize “I only want a donut because I smelled bread… maybe I won’t be controlled by that impulse.” Try getting an AI to resist a direct prompt – it generally won’t, unless its programming (another meta-prompt) tells it to refuse certain requests.
The interplay of AI and human thought leads to some eye-opening (and funny) scenarios. For instance, sometimes I find myself phrasing my own thoughts as if I were prompting an AI: “Okay brain, give me some creative ideas for dinner.” Who’s prompting whom? In the future, as AI gets more integrated in our lives, we might offload some thinking to machines. But that might just free up our human brains to wander and come up with wilder ideas (or to emulate AI and think, “hey, maybe I’M just in someone’s computer” – a late-night dorm debate classic).
One more twist: AI has also forced us to confront what originality means. When a program can churn out a painting in Van Gogh’s style or write a passable novel synopsis, we start asking, “What’s special about human creativity?” The answer may lie in intentionality and experience. An AI doesn’t care or mean anything by its output; it has no lived experience. We do. Our thoughts are tied to feelings, to stakes (e.g., I think about my future because it matters to me, whereas an AI doesn’t have a “future” to worry about). So even if, under the hood, both we and AI are just remixing patterns, our remix is infused with personal meaning. That’s something even the fanciest algorithm can’t replicate yet.
The Big Picture: Why Knowing the Source of Thought Matters (and How It Can Change Your Life)
Okay, deep breath. We’ve toured centuries of philosophy, dipped into brain science, and even tangoed with AI avatars having identity crises. Let’s bring it home – both to Hastings and to you, dear reader. Why does it matter where thoughts come from? Shouldn’t we just get on with thinking and not overthink it? Possibly. But understanding how ideas arise can be, well, mind-bendingly enlightening. It can change how you see yourself and others:
Cultivate Humility and Openness: Realizing that many of your ideas are influenced by external memes and stimuli can be humbling. That strongly-held opinion you have might trace back to your favorite podcaster, or that “original” idea might be something you read years ago and forgot. This insight encourages intellectual humility – being open to the possibility you’re echoing rather than inventing. And it fosters empathy: if someone else in Hastings holds a very different belief, it might be because they’ve been exposed to different “prompts” or memes. You can ask, “What journey did their thoughts take?” instead of immediately judging.
Empower Your Creativity: Paradoxically, knowing that creativity is largely remix can boost your creative confidence. If there’s no magical genius lightning required, you can actively seek new combinations. As one strategy, steal like an artist (as Austin Kleon famously said) – meaning, gather ideas from everywhere and mix them. The next innovative project for our Hastings community (be it a new festival idea or a solution to improve the local parks) might come from connecting dots between things already here. You could be the one to see the pattern. Innovation, whether in business, art, or community life, often sparks when memes from different domains collide in a single mind. So go ahead: be a collector of ideas, a connector of concepts. Your brain was built for this!
Define Your Identity: The age-old question “Who am I?” is tangled up with our thoughts. If “you” are the thinker of your thoughts, but those thoughts come from a swirl of brain activity, cultural influence, and external input… what does that make you? Some philosophers (Hume included) suggested the self is just a bundle of perceptions – basically, we’re the running stream of thoughts and feelings, rather than a captain at the helm. Others argue there is an executive self, a CEO of the mind, that can shape which thoughts to pursue. Wherever the truth lies, examining the origin of your thoughts can give you a healthier relationship with your own mind. For instance, in meditation practices (like mindfulness), one learns to watch thoughts arise and pass without getting too attached, recognizing them as products of mind, not necessarily “you” or “reality.” This can be liberating. The next time you find your brain serving up a negative or unhelpful thought (“I can’t do this” or “I’m not creative”), you might stop and think: Where is this thought coming from? Is it a voice from a critical teacher long ago? Is it a fear of failure prompted by a past event? Seeing it that way, you can consciously decide whether to credit that thought or gently let it go. You become, in a sense, the curator of your meme collection, not just the memes themselves.
Community Growth: Here in Hastings, an awareness of how ideas propagate can strengthen the community. When someone has a great idea – say, a new initiative for our schools or a novel small business concept – sharing it can prompt others to build on it. Our thoughts don’t have to stay isolated. By discussing and collaborating, we effectively mate our memes to create offspring ideas. (It’s like idea dating – speed networking for notions – who knows what will pair up and produce a genius baby?) Hastings has always valued community spirit, and in the information age we can harness that by deliberately fostering environments where thoughts mix: local forums, workshops, maybe a “meme meetup” where folks exchange inspirations. Understanding memetics, we realize that an idea spread is an idea strengthened – the more minds it touches, the more refined and powerful it can become, evolving as it goesnautil.us.
Finally, confronting the nature of thought is, quite frankly, exhilarating. It’s the closest we get to touching the magic of consciousness. Whether you lean toward “thoughts are divine sparks” or “thoughts are electrochemical tricks,” just asking the question can expand your mind. You begin to notice the little miracles: that spark when a new connection forms, or the subtle way a conversation with a neighbor plants a seed in your head that blooms days later. Life can start to feel like a grand conversation – your brain, other brains, the environment, maybe even the cosmos, all exchanging prompts and replies.
As a humorous wrap-up: If you’re feeling a bit shaken about what’s really yours (Is my love of Minnesota wild rice soup an authentic preference or just because everyone around me loves it? Did I choose my college major or was it my upbringing’s meme?), don’t panic. You are still here, as the unique pattern at the intersection of all these influences. Think of yourself as a jazz improviser: you didn’t write the tune, but your riff on it has never been heard before. That’s something to celebrate.
So, the next time you find yourself deep in thought – maybe strolling along the Hastings Riverwalk or lying under the stars at Lake Rebecca Park – take a moment to marvel at what’s happening. Neurons are firing, memories are mixing, memes are whispering, and perhaps even the universe is nudging you (if you’re poetically inclined). From Descartes’ musings in a stove-heated room in 1641, to a neural network in your skull, to an AI’s digital pseudo-brain, the origin of thought remains one of the greatest adventures we can ponder. And the fact that we can ponder our own pondering… well, that’s an original thought worth savoring.
In the end, whether our ideas are gifted, gathered, or generated, each new thought is an opportunity. It’s an opportunity to understand ourselves more deeply, to connect with others (since, hey, they have thoughts too!), and to maybe, just maybe, come up with something brilliant that changes our lives or our community. After all, every innovation or act of genius in history began as a mere thought in someone’s mind. Who knows what the citizens of Hastings might think up next – armed with a deeper understanding of where those thoughts spring from? It could be something that makes history… or at least a really good joke at the next town gathering.
So keep thinking, Hastings, and stay curious. The origin of your next big idea might be more entwined with the world (and the people and tech in it) than you realized – but it’s you who gets to decide what to do with that idea when it arrives. 🧠💡
Sources:
Harvard Gazette – Brain’s method for combining concepts into new thoughts news.harvard.edu
David Hume – An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), on ideas as copies of impressions davidhume.org
John Locke – Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), tabula rasa quote sparknotes.com
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy – Descartes’ classification of ideas (innate, adventitious, fabricated) iep.utm.eduiep.utm.edu
Nautilus Magazine – Insights from Daniel Dennett on minds as evolved machines nautil.usnautil.us
Nautilus Magazine – Dennett on cultural evolution and memes (no fore-sighted authors of evolving ideas) nautil.us
BBC Bitesize – Mark Twain’s view on no completely original ideas bbc.co.uk
Quanta Magazine – Brain as a “prediction machine” in perception and cognition quantamagazine.org
AAU Research (UC Berkeley) – Study tracking a thought through the brain’s regions aau.eduaau.edu
The Atlantic – Discussion of Libet’s experiment showing brain activity before conscious intention theatlantic.comtheatlantic.com
LinkedIn Post – Prompt Theory viral AI short film description (Hashem Al-Ghaili’s creation) linkedin.com
