Is Thinking a Voluntary or Involuntary Action?

The control of your arm is extremely limited if it is between the doors, and the control of your mind is not completely free from others' minds.

Thinking is involuntary. Thinking ABOUT thinking is voluntary. Stupid people just don't think about what they're thinking..... I think.

An inspiration, a sudden intuition, is not under your conscious control.

If someone told you to think about your mom, for instance, would you control those thoughts, or would the fact that you have stimulus (the person telling you to think, and the word mom) cause involuntary action?

Inspiration...

The borrowing of a word that described breathing -- which is both voluntary and involuntary -- might be telling...

But the mind is a whole other can of beans. This is where the thoughts come from in the first place. If the lungs regulated their own breathing then it would be the same.

Just my way of saying, "both."

I know, and I was just trying to say that it's hard to relate the two.

And thanks for telling me that inspiration also means to inhale, never knew that...

Yes, you can control your thoughts. You can choose to think about a problem, compose an essay on a particular topic, design a house, or just about anything else on which you want to focus your attention. You can repress things that are painful.

Some thoughts seem to come unbidden, perhaps the result of stimuli that trigger subconscious neural processes.

The subconscious decides what to repress not the conscious.


When you were going through puberty, did you chose to think about sex?

The conscious can also decide to repress thoughts.



Of course I did. And I still do, even after 28 years of marriage. :wink: Girls are probably not as obsessed by hormone-induced thoughts as boys, but I can assure you that we enjoy thinking about sex just as much. Why else would people choose to buy pornography and explicit "romance" novels?

You cannnot control dreams. If your mind is affected by dreams, your mind is partially determined by uncontrolable portion of your psychology, at least.

Can a dreamt character choose what to think? I think not.

Some people claim that during lucid dreaming they are in control of their dreams. Although I don't usually remember dreams, I am sometimes aware that I am dreaming and those dreams are usually based on recent events/thoughts. My guess is that the neurons that have recently fired retain a potential charge, and in the absence of other stimuli those neurons are randomly activated to form dream images.

When I'm dreaming in the morning and drifting in and out of sleep, I can use the waking moments to influence the direction my dream will take when I fall back asleep, but -- so far as I know -- I haven't been able to control them on a real-time basis.

This is a lot of work...I don't want to think about it.....

I think that it is both. You are always doing involuntary thinking wherever you go no matter what you do. You just aren't aware of it. Your mind is in constant thought throughout your life. Maybe and exception is when you are asleep. For example you go to the fridge to get something to drink. you have two choices a Pepsi or a mountain dew. You don't voluntarily think about what you are going to choose. Your brain involuntarily chooses based on "you."(very hard to explain). Voluntary thinking is when you initiate your brain to think about something (also very hard to try to explain). Such as religion or ethics..ect. Going back to the sleep thing though. I have while I dreamed, thought about my dream while in sleep. Can we get our minds to think consciously while unconscious? I don't know. Maybe I was just dreaming that I was thinking about my dream??

I agree with Aressler. There are at least two levels of thought. Some is controlled and some isn't.

I agree with this as well.