The beginning of the digital world started with a simple concept – ability to break down an analog signal to digital form. A wave can be encoded into digital form (with 1s and 0s) at one end and can be decoded at the other end to get back the original wave form. Understanding this simple technique opened up our minds for innovations in the field of science and technology.
Our thought process is like a wave form. Just like a wave form can be broken down to digital data, the thought process can be broken down into individual thoughts. It is scientifically proved by tracking brain activity using sensors and other devices, that at any given point of time there is only a single thought that occupies our mind. Just like we need the series of digitized bits (i.e. 101010) to recreate the wave form, we need the series of related individual thoughts to construct a meaningful thought or idea. Our individual thoughts manifest themselves in our speeches, our writings and in our day to day activities. The evolution of human race hinges on the fact that we can think unlike so many other species. Medical advances has helped us understand the function of brain but still we are far from understanding how the thoughts originate, how they progress and how we can control them. Just like our understanding of the digital world opened up our mind for new inventions and discoveries, our understanding of human thought process will open up the possibility of improving, controlling and handling what we think and how we think, which in turn will change the future of human race.
We all aim to have a happy life. Worry and tension prevents us from having a good life. We often experience that we worry about matters that are beyond our control and our sphere of influence; worry can cause sleepless nights and unexplained headaches, but still we are not able to control the thoughts that causes the worry. Our worries are mostly due to those individual pessimistic thoughts of things going bad in our life, thoughts about losing things that we possess or thoughts about not able to get things that we aim for. All in all, thoughts that are destructive to our happy life. If only we have the power of digitizing these thoughts, power to replace the bad thoughts with good ones (just like they do error correction in the digital world), we probably can control how we think and hence how we lead our life. If only we can program our mind with an algorithm to replace a single or group of bad thoughts with good ones (something like using a regex pattern match filter), we can shape our life with out thoughts. It will be a world where our ambition will govern our thoughts and vice versa. We can think, plan and control what we are going to think in future; improve this process continuously till we get what we want and continue to aspire for more and think towards it. Maybe this will bring us close to a robot – an ability to control our actions with our thoughts. Well, if such a thing becomes a possibility, we will also require the advancement of security technology wherein only one can program his or her own thoughts and not others. There would be a need to prevent others doing selective thinking for us. There would be a strong need to protect our Right to Think!
Medically controlling our thoughts seems like Science Fiction. Don’t know if science can take us that far in near future. For now, we can only try manually to control our individual thoughts. Manually replace any bad thought that catches our attention in our thought continum with a good one. Remove the cause of worry by removing the thought that is the root cause for that. Slowly but surely, developing the ability to control our thoughts will definitely give us the ability to live a happy life!
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