No Thought, Best Thought, and Science Agrees

All that thinking, mental wrestling and teeth gnashing is pointless?
Zen teaches wu-nien/no-thought, this does not mean do not think, but rather, understand the futility of thinking. When you see thinking as a habit of the mind, attachment to the thought disappears, and with it all the anxiety. Thoughts are allowed to come and go, but you have no desire to grasp, analyze or judge them. Zen* practice cultivates a calm mind, and with this comes stronger intuition and 'knowing'.
And now science is offering some support to this concept....


Wall Street Journal
Get Out of Your Own Way
Studies Show the Value of Not Overthinking a Decision Fishing in the stream of consciousness, researchers now can detect our intentions and predict our choices before we are aware of them ourselves.
The brain, they have found, appears to make up its mind 10 seconds before we become conscious of a decision -- an eternity at the speed of thought.

Their findings challenge conventional notions of choice. "We think our decisions are conscious," said neuroscientist John-Dylan Haynes at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, who is pioneering this research. "But these data show that consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg. This doesn't rule out free will, but it does make it implausible." In ways we are only beginning to understand, the synapses and neurons in the human nervous system work in concert to perceive the world around them, to learn from their perceptions, to remember important experiences, to plan ahead, and to decide and act on incomplete information. In a rudimentary way, they predetermine our choices....

Is your freedom of choice an illusion? Your brain knows what you're going to do 10 seconds before you are aware of it, neuroscientist John-Dylan Haynes and his colleagues reported recently in Nature Neuroscience. Last year In the journal Current Biology, the scientists reported they could use brain wave patterns to identify your intentions before you revealed them. Their work builds on a landmark 1983 paper in the journal Brain by the late Benjamin Libet and his colleagues at the University of California in San Francisco, who found out that the brain initiates free choices about a third of a second before we are aware of them.

Together, these findings support the importance of the unconscious in shaping decisions. Psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis and his co-workers at the University of Amsterdam reported in the journal Science that it is not always best to deliberate too much before making a choice. Nobel laureate Francis Crick -- co-discoverer of the structure of DNA -- tackled the implications of such cognitive science in his 1993 book The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul. With co-author Giulio Tononi, Nobel laureate Gerald Edleman explores his biology-based theory of consciousness in A Universe Of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination...more from
Wall Street Journal

"The idea that conscious deliberation before making a decision is always good is simply one of those illusions consciousness creates for us," Dr. Dijksterhuis

Wall Street Journal
Science Journal
Robert Lee Hotz
June 27, 2008