How many thoughts do you have per day?
The New York Times reported that Alex Rodriguez’ “performance coach” is working with Alex to reduce the number of thoughts he has per day. Most people, he says, have 2-3,000 (that works out to about three per minute, in case you were wondering), whereas highly trained professional athletes get rid of negative and useless thoughts, reducing their total daily thought count down to 1,200 or so. And they hold each thought longer.
I’m sure Dogen would agree that this seems very logical so far, but I still have two questions. First, how do the athletes reduce their thought count? And second, exactly how do you define a “thought”?
March 24th, 2005 at 4:57 pm
I occassionally think about my thoughtlessness.
October 25th, 2006 at 10:41 am
Taken in context, if an athlete (or anyone performing) has a thought in their strategy it often acts as an extra step that slows them down enough to lose.
IE: A fighter will see an opening in an opponent and, without thinking, throw a punch. It’s two steps that happen so quickly it appears to be one and the fighter may not even know that he saw the opening. Where as if that same fighter sees the opening in his opponent and has a thought, I should punch now, he may miss the opportunity to be effective with the punch and may even get punched because he was caught thinking instead of doing. So to sum it up you need to have a see and do rather than a see and think and do.
January 19th, 2008 at 7:02 am
think a person driving a car in rush hours, how many thought he may be entertaining per minute ? we need to stretch our thought to get an indicaive answer.
September 3rd, 2008 at 10:40 am
[…] LOOK at how I am thinking - am I moving toward or away from what is good. It is believed we have between 2,000 - 3,000 thoughts per day. http://www.numenware.com/article/268 […]