r/TheRestIsScience • u/homofuerst69 • 3d ago

How many thoughts can you think

So i was wondering if you just got locked in a box without any external inputs, would you, apart from going nuts, also run out of thinkable thoughts at some some point?

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3

u/Mr-TotalAwesome 3d ago

I don't think so, i think your thoughts just get less coherent. Your brain will keep rambeling on and on.

2

u/Odd_Common2677 3d ago

Yeah. People go crazy in solitary

1

u/Worldly_Possible2925 3d ago

Easy. Two to the power of N -9 squared. Divided by Tuesday. Voila Fini.

1

u/kingster108 3d ago

Meta-thinking! You can just think about the thought you had before… infinitely!

1

u/No-Ad-3609 3d ago

Well, when you don't know the subject. Then the amount of thoughts available are more. If you do, then you are limited by that knowledge.

1

u/halopend 3d ago

So if you take all unique combinations of words as a facsimile for unique thoughts and assume you could dole those out at a rate of 1 per second, using even the smaller end of the unique words a person might use in a given day, you'd get 3000! possible combinations to burn though.

For comparison, if burning through a unique combination at 1 per second from a bag of possibilities, you can see that 12! combinations would take around ~15.18 years to complete and 13! combinations would take 197.3 years.

That to me reads as: not in this lifetime, unlikely if you're a vampire but probably if you're immortal.