Thenuri Thesara
What If Your Thoughts Aren’t Yours?
Imagine you’re in the middle of a high-stakes job interview, trying your best to project confidence, poise, and the general aura of “I am a competent adult”, when suddenly, out of nowhere, your brain slides in a random craving for pickles. Not just a mild thought, but an urgent, full-sensory pickle yearning, the kind you can taste in the back of your throat. And now, while your interviewer is asking about your five-year plan, you’re thinking about the satisfying crunch of a dill spear.
It begs the question: who, exactly, ordered that thought? Because it certainly wasn’t on your carefully curated agenda.
Sometimes our minds feel less like neat libraries of logical reasoning and more like noisy airports with intrusive announcements echoing through the loudspeakers. You’re just trying to board Gate C for “functioning adult responsibilities” when, suddenly, a disembodied voice shouts: “Remember that embarrassing thing you said in eighth grade?!” Or worse: “What if, right now, you stood up and recited a Shakespeare monologue in pirate voice?”
This is where things get interesting. What if many of the thoughts we think of as “ours” aren’t entirely homegrown? What if they’re more like squatters who moved in without asking permission, setting up hammocks in the corners of your prefrontal cortex?
The Brain as a Borrowed Soundtrack
Think of your mind as less of an original composer and more of one of those Spotify algorithms that cobbles together a playlist based on what you’ve been exposed to. You binge a true-crime podcast and suddenly your inner monologue has the pacing of a grim narrator describing a body discovery. Spend the weekend watching baking shows? Now you can’t make toast without Paul Hollywood’s disembodied voice evaluating the “crumb structure.”
Psychologists might call this social conditioning or subconscious priming. Essentially, our thoughts are heavily influenced by what we consume, whether that’s culture, media, or the collective sigh of humanity doomscrolling on Twitter at 2 A.M. Like a sponge, your brain absorbs droplets of whatever is sloshing around you, be it songs, accents, catchphrases, then squeezes them back out when you least expect it.
The Gym Teacher in Your Head
We’ve all had the experience of realizing that our internal narrator sounds suspiciously familiar. For some, it’s a parent scolding them whenever they forget to floss. For others, it’s that one gym teacher who barked “Push harder!” during sit-ups, a voice that still echoes as you try to drag yourself through, say, a particularly stubborn Monday morning. These echoes are not accidental. They’re what developmental psychologists would call “internalized voices,” the way we unconsciously adopt the tone and rules of authority figures during our formative years.
It’s actually pretty handy for survival. Civilization wouldn’t function if every time we saw a red light we thought, “Huh, maybe this is the day I treat it like a personal suggestion.” Instead, somewhere deep inside, a chorus of societal voices tells us to stop. The catch, of course, is that these voices don’t retire when the job is done. They linger, like nosy neighbors giving unsolicited advice on how you mow your lawn.
Thought or Borrowed Property?
If our ideas are so steeped in external influence, do we have any truly original thoughts? Or are we all just remix artists, spinning mixtapes from the cultural vinyl handed down by parents, friends, Netflix series, and random Reddit threads?
Enter the concept of cognitive bias. These are the brain’s shortcuts, handy in a world where we don’t have time to question whether every rustling bush hides a sabretooth tiger. But biases also mean our “decisions” come pre-filtered. Confirmation bias, for instance, has us seeking evidence that validates what we already believe. Availability bias has us overestimating risks based on whatever dramatic story the news shoved in our frontal cortex yesterday. In other words, many of our thoughts come partially pre-packaged, like grocery store sushi: convenient, but not exactly cultivated by our own hands.
So, when you’re utterly convinced that your opinion on pineapple pizza is a hill worth dying on, pause for a second. Did you invent that opinion, or did you inherit it from a particularly persuasive roommate in 2014?
When Your Thoughts Really Aren’t Yours
Now, let’s turn the dial a little stranger. There’s an actual clinical term in psychiatry called “thought insertion,” where someone perceives that their thoughts are being placed in their mind by an outside source. This phenomenon pops up in conditions like schizophrenia. While it sounds delightfully sci-fi, it’s less about alien telepathy and more about how fragile our sense of ownership over thought can be.
Even without a psychiatric diagnosis, we’ve all caught ourselves wondering if a particularly odd mental image, even something as absurd as visualizing your boss wearing a tutu made of linguine, really “belongs” to us. The brain’s spontaneity machine just clanks out these oddities, and we cover for it afterward with creative explanations.
The unsettling truth is that we experience ourselves as authors of our thoughts largely after the fact. We think, then we take credit, much like a CEO slapping their name on the cover of a report someone else wrote.
Crowd-Sourced Consciousness
Culture, too, is a big co-author. Spend long enough in a certain group and you start parroting its slang, mannerisms, even values. Sit in enough meetings, and suddenly you’re describing everything as “synergistic” despite never having consented to that word’s inclusion in your vocabulary. Our identities aren’t hermetically sealed; they’re porous, shaped by the company we keep and the memes we repeat.
Language itself is an example. The very grammar of our thinking is borrowed. You dream in sentences other people taught you. You feel profound things, sure, but try expressing those feelings without pre-owned words, and you’ll realize that even raw emotion comes wrapped in someone else’s packaging.
In a way, our consciousness is like Wikipedia. We all contribute, we all borrow, and yes, there are occasional factual errors. The article about you is a lifelong edit-in-progress, footnoted endlessly with citations from childhood friends, ex-lovers, political figures, and TikTok influencers.
The Comfort of Shared Madness
But before you despair that you’re some patchwork puppet of everyone you’ve ever met, let’s highlight the good news: if your thoughts aren’t entirely yours, then your oddities aren’t solely your responsibility either. That intrusive pickle craving during your job interview? That’s not failure of character, but the weird arc of human cognition colliding with something you saw on a commercial when you were seven.
Shared thought patterns are why humor works. A stranger can tell a joke that resonates because their thought tapped into a collective experience. It’s why cultural references carry weight. When everyone knows the same movie quote, it feels like belonging. The hive mind, in small doses, can be wonderfully cozy.
So, What Do We Do with This?
If our minds are more of a group project than a solo thesis, maybe the best move isn’t to rage about invasion but to cultivate awareness. Notice which thoughts feel like yours and which sound suspiciously like reruns. Pay attention to what you consume, because every podcast, rant, or horoscope is auditioning for a role in your inner monologue.
And try to cultivate a bit of humor about it. When your brain inserts an unhelpful thought, imagine it in the voice of your gym teacher again. Let it shout, “Push harder!” while you sip coffee and casually ignore it. Sometimes disowning a thought is as simple as acknowledging it might not actually be yours to begin with.
The Dinner Party in Your Head
Ultimately, your mind isn’t a fortress but a dinner party. Guests wander in, bringing stories, biases, inside jokes, and unsolicited recipes. Some are delightful; others you wish would leave before dessert. The trick is managing the seating chart. You don’t get to control who knocks on the door of your consciousness, but you do get to decide who sits closest to you, whose voices echo loudest, and which guests you politely escort out while smiling through gritted teeth.
So next time you’re ambushed by a bizarre craving or an inexplicable intrusive thought, remember; perhaps it’s just one of your many mental dinner guests passing through. You don’t have to identify with every odd idea. You can laugh at them, observe them, and occasionally send them home with leftover pie.
