Thinking About Thinking

Do you ever get a song stuck in your head that just keeps playing over and over and over again?  When you realize what is happening you do things to try and get it out of your head such as focusing on another song and that one gets stuck in your head and eventually morphs back into the original song?  I wonder why that happens?

How many times are you asked, "What are you thinking about so hard?" only to respond, "Oh, nothing," when the reality is you had a thousand random thoughts bouncing around in your mind, but you really weren't focused on anything in particular?  Maybe you aren't that way and really were focused on something specific but, didn't want to admit what it was to the questioner.

What is it that causes our mind to do such things?  Why is it that our mind needs to be active when we are awake?  We can't actually think about nothing -- it is an impossibility; if you think about "nothing" you are actually thinking about something and that something is "nothing."  Yeah, I know, I'm a little weird at times.

Sometimes I have a hard time reading because my mind keeps drifting off, thinking about things other than the book in my hand.  It frustrates me, especially when I want to read the book in order to "escape" thinking about work, or whatever it might be, for awhile.  When that happens, I can sometimes turn on the television and listen to it while I read and it mostly eliminates the problem.  Yes, my attention is divided, but I can at least get rid of the "work think" for a time, but that's a different problem than having my mind adrift with a song, or random thoughts.  I envy those people who at least claim to be able to focus 100% of their thoughts on a problem.  I tend to chase the covey rather than a single bird.

I must admit that I have zero training in the area of the brain or, of psychology.  I don't necessarily equate the two things like some might do.  The brain and how it works has always intrigued me however, and I am inclined to be an observer -- it's part of my personality -- the way I'm wired.  I sometimes find myself thinking about thinking -- would that be meta-thinking?

I suspect what is happening when we become fixated on something like a song, or our thoughts drift randomly in a daydream, that our subconscious mind is completely focused on something else.  Somewhere below our level of awareness, our brain is wrestling with a problem and the "aware" part of us is left to "automatic" mode, or to "neutral" mode -- it is disengaged until some external stimulus releases a hormone that snaps it back to attention.

When you think about it, that's pretty amazing.  I cannot grasp how anyone could believe such a thing could be the result of natural selection from random mutations through eons of evolution.  Some would say that's because I don't have the mental capacity to do so.  To them I would ask that they explain it to me on terms that I can understand -- if they can't, they don't understand it either.  If you truly know your subject you can teach it to others on a level they can grasp.