Episode Details

Shortly after my father died, I remember saying to my eldest daughter: where do thoughts go? What happens to them?

My father was a writer, so many of the thoughts he had he wrote down and preserved in some way. But what happened to all the ones he didn’t record over the course of his life? Is that it - they are just gone?

Studies suggest a typical person has 7,000 thoughts a day. Others put that number ten times higher at 70-80,000. That seems a lot to me. (Some people, from what I can see, don’t even reach double figures).

80,000 thoughts/day would work out at close to one thought per second. It depends how you define what a thought is, I guess. Many thoughts are repetitive: we have the same thought over, often because we forget we have had it.

But whether 7,000 or 70,000, we have a lot of thoughts. So …

Of those many thoughts you have each day, how many do you actually recognise or acknowledge? A tiny percentage. 

Of those thoughts you do recognise, how many do you then articulate or speak aloud in some way? Again a tiny percentage. We are at a tiny percentage of a tiny percentage.

Of those thoughts that you articulate, how many do you actually record - perhaps write down? Of those you record, how many do you act on and and turn into something? An even tinier percentage.

So, of all the thoughts we have, a tiny percentage of a tiny percentage of a tiny percentage get recorded, and an even tinier percentage actually become something. 

Now let’s extrapolate that over a life. A typical lifespan is 27,000 days. That makes 189 million or 1.89 billion thoughts over the course of your life (depending on whether you are a 7,000 or 70,000/day person). 

Now let’s extrapolate this across human history - all the thoughts that every human being has had ever. 117 billion lives have been lived, google tells me. 117 billion multiplied by 189 million or 1.89 billion is a lot of thoughts.  What happened to them all? Where did they go? Where are they now? Is there some ethereal warehouse up the street where they are all stored?

If those thoughts are now gone - unrecorded, unacted upon - what, then, was the point of having them?

Recording my thoughts has always been something that’s obsessed me rather. Even as a child, I used to keep a diary and try to record as many of the things that I thought (the interesting ones, at least) as possible, especially as I worried I might never have that thought again. I’ve got piles of notebooks, not to mention the notes and voice files in my phone and on my computer. But I never go back through them and I doubt anyone else ever will, so I may as well have not bothered. Those thoughts are going to disappear, even though I wrote them down and attempted to preserve them. What was the point of having them?

Park that thought for a moment, while I ask you a question. 

Why Christianity and Judaism succeeded where other religions failed

Of the plethora of religions that existed around the Middle East three or four thousand years ago, why did Judaism survive, but none of the others? 

Is it because the Jews are God’s chosen people (as my Jewish friends constantly like to remind me every time I bring this question up)?

Or is it because the Jews wrote theirs down?

Other religions were passed on orally. Even better: the Jews inscribed their Ten Commandments in stone.

Why did Christianity supersede all the pagan religions of Northern Europe during the Dark Ages? The Northmen were the superior force militarily, surely their pagan religions should have conquered too. With the likes of Odin, Thor and Loki, or the druidic religions of the Celts, many of those pagan religions were much cooler than Christianity. Why did Christianity conquer?

Because the bible was written down. Pagan religions and traditions were passed on orally. It’s a much less reliable way of transferring thought.

So you can see