We're starting to build up a good understanding about what specific brain regions like responding to (e.g. fMRI, intracranial electrodes), and what happens when these regions are damaged. Recent research is focusing on connections between brain regions, and how they communicate via networks (this is systems neuroscience, or cognitive neuroscience). The best answer we have to the question depends upon what kinds of thoughts you're talking about.
If you're talking about imagining things you've seen, then we know the occipital and temporal lobes will respond in remarkably content specific ways (i.e. if you're thinking about the face of someone you know, then face-selective neurons will respond to both the thought of someones face and the percept of seeing their face). If you're talking about semantics (meanings), then we know that anterior temporal regions seem to be one important region for semantics and more abstract associations between items.
If you're interested in this, then my advice would be to read up on how the brain works. It's a really active field and there are a ton more things that we don't know than that we do know.
I'm really looking forward to reading others posts on this question. If we take a brain expand it to the size of a building, what will we see? We will see fat, protein, and water, which translates to dendrites, axons, and synapses. No where do we see a thought, idea, motivation, or desire as far as I know. There has been some thought, about a part of the brain that deals with the "association of ideas". That is, a spot where all our ideas collaborate and integrate, organize and even creatively join. This area of the brain hasn't been found, as of yet either.
Another obstacle we have is the three faces of information. There is the face of electrobiological impulses going through an organism, much like electricity goes through a machine. Then there is coding that goes through the brain much like software. This is as far as we've gotten. We are able to roughly decode parrt of our visual system, and use technology to encode responses to work for artificial limbs. However, third, there is information as "meaning" and semantics that we haven't been able too crack at all, if it is possible. I'm not a cognitive neuroscientist, so I'm interested to see other specialists contribute here. My views may be a bit antiquated due to my own narrow studies.
In about half the population many thoughts of a sexual nature are generated from parts of the body some distance below the brain.
Wow, this is truly a challenging question! The answer probably lies ahead in the future with the advances in neuroscience. The right answer is also probably eligible to a Nobel Prize.
@Leonardo. It is very interesting and exciting to think how electrical activity in brain generates thoughts. If we understand this, creating 'thinking machines' will be reality.
Obama recently announced the Brain Activity Map Project, aiming to map every single neuron activity in a living human brain. According to Wikipedia, such mapping would produce 300,000 petabytes of data every year. Wow!...
http://download.cell.com/neuron/pdf/PIIS0896627312005181.pdf?intermediate=true
I don't understand anything of neuroscience. But, to me, the great challenge in neurosciences is to fill in the gap between mental activity to detectable brain activity. For example:
Imagination - our attention focus perpassing many ideas, concepts and facts - linked to a brain activity pattern w;
Intention/desire - our attention focus brought in to a specific idea/concept/fact and attached to this factor, running around it, in an attempt do gather the greatest possible number of details of this "interesting" idea/concept/fact - linked to a brain activity pattern x;
Meaning - our emotions brought in (optional step) to "power up" a determined fact found by our attention focus and chosen by our intention, enriching this idea/concept/fact with more or less meaning. The stronger the meaning, the greater "imprinting" of such idea/concept/fact in memory record - linked to a brain activity y;
Execution - brain activity itself commanding neural circuits responsible for activation of "body hardware" that executes real action - mostly muscles - linked to a brain activity z.
Neuroscience researchers would then link all these factors and their interconnections in the deterministic brain mechanisms leading to mental activity itself and also to body action.
A really daunting task worth not only one, but many Nobel Prizes...
http://download.cell.com/neuron/pdf/PIIS0896627312005181.pdf?intermediate=true
Well, the short answer is no one has any idea.
The long answer is a question of trying to establish a foundation for ideas like "thoughts", "consciousness", and "free will." These are terms that predate neuroscience and may lead the researcher astray in its investigation. It's quite possible, and I think even likely that "thoughts" are not a unified event in the brain. You do not simply have the thought "I'm hungry" and have the hunger thought neuron fire.
It is likely a complex relationship, with understanding ideas such as "what are thoughts?" at the end of the journey, not the beginning.
We're starting to build up a good understanding about what specific brain regions like responding to (e.g. fMRI, intracranial electrodes), and what happens when these regions are damaged. Recent research is focusing on connections between brain regions, and how they communicate via networks (this is systems neuroscience, or cognitive neuroscience). The best answer we have to the question depends upon what kinds of thoughts you're talking about.
If you're talking about imagining things you've seen, then we know the occipital and temporal lobes will respond in remarkably content specific ways (i.e. if you're thinking about the face of someone you know, then face-selective neurons will respond to both the thought of someones face and the percept of seeing their face). If you're talking about semantics (meanings), then we know that anterior temporal regions seem to be one important region for semantics and more abstract associations between items.
If you're interested in this, then my advice would be to read up on how the brain works. It's a really active field and there are a ton more things that we don't know than that we do know.
Neuron signal induce the synthesis of combination of chemicals, that is leads to...
(i) What is implied by the question
(a) "Thought" is a single entity. (b) There is a physical underpinning (underlying process) for thought.
(ii) What might underpinning be?
Considering (i)(a), it seems to me that what we call thought has several different meanings, ranging from the clear language-based thought beloved of novelists (and which I am using to write this), to more subtle perceptual happening that relate to continuous incoming percepts - whether the Bach I am listening to on the radio, or the dishwasher in the more distant background. Considering (i)(b), Science demands that effects have causes, so we demand that there be a mechanism that results in our percept of thought (whichever of the possibilities above, or other, it might be).
And as to what that underlying mechanism might be? There's many possibilities, ranging from spiking neurons, to ionic flows, to chemical movements to .... The really interesting question, however, is how these flows, or changes come to turn into what we perceive as thoughts!
After academician Pavlov has demonstrated the fundamental elements of brain activity, it became clear what are the real building stones of an intellect for any highest organisms: dog, elephant, dolphin, monkey etc. It is a great pity that I am not familiar with modern state of mechanisms of brain activity. It is obviously an extremely important knowledge for the whole humanity, because of expected highlights for teaching new generations.
what completly interesting comments serie!
In resume, what I found was that we of all are thinking about energy and matter patterns.
In my research I have learned that almost (maybe 95%) of thought building approaches are similar in the above fact (matter + energy patterns), Nevertheles, I think that is something almost obvious derivated from the current brain available knowledge, but, a little or almost nothing we know about the process of thought.
Jerry A. Fodor in this book "The Language of Thought (LOT)" say that in the mind there must exists a kind of language in which our thoughts are described.
In other side, Pinker in his book "How the mind Works" talks about patters recognizing, and more recently Stephen Wolfran in his NKS book talks about simple programs working in interaction.
Based on this last approaches my suggestion is that thoughts are something what can be called "EMERGING DYNAMIC".
What I mean is that our brain works in one particular way that we are trying to study the thoughts using thoughts. That is why we can't enter to the real realm of thought nature yet. We really know that brain in a connexionist architecture contains the machine and procedures that produce thoughts, but a thought is an outcome and no the original material of the thought.
In a rough way, i would explain this saying that is like what happen when engineers build a car. They have set sensors in specific parts to find fails. That work well when the parts are proved in isolation, but when all is together, and you use the car´s scanner, it would send you error messages related with sensors that are working well, but messages say that they are not working. This is because -in a simple talking way- the "emerging dynamic", this is to say, the result of put all together is something different and unreconizable for specific sensors because is beyond of the simple dynamic isolated parts.
What I suggest, to find the answer is to identify the simple parts and see what its the "emerging" dynamic, and then study this last because maybe there are the thoughts coded.
I would like to follow up John Voris example with TV set. Imagine you have microscope (but in fact any modern brain visualization system like MRI, PET etc.) and you would look into TV set. You would discover incredible details about the organization of the chipsets and much more. But how could you possible find out this way for example about the actor working for TV hundreds km away? It is not possible because by looking inside TV you can not discover that. This is similar situation with the neuroscience today. By looking into the structure and function of the brain we hope to discover how thoughts are generated. So far we have honestly no evidence that neurons/glias generate thoughts. I am not saying that brain is getting thoughts from somewhere else. But if yes we would not know because we are looking just inside brain.
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