Do Women Have More Background Noise?

It’s question hour this week

The spate of questions continues unabated and I consider myself privileged indeed. The very intention of Open Mind is to stimulate your latent thought processes. May I, however, request my readers to make their questions very specific. It is difficult to respond to questions like: Tell me more about meditation or Please elaborate on reducing negative thoughts. Several readers are also sharing very personal problems and seeking solutions that are better addressed by a practising counselor.

Meanwhile, I trust some of the questions and answers below will be of wider interest.

Anuj Malhotra: 
In today’s fast paced life, we tend to do a lot of multi-tasking or parallel processing. Does this affect our mind in any way? I, for one, find it really difficult to concentrate on a subject when I have multiple priorities on my mind.

Ankur Gupta: 
Your question is the one uppermost in the minds of most committed professionals. Our brain has an unlimited capacity for parallel, divergent, convergent, random multi-processing or multi-tasking. The trick lies, first in awareness, and then in giving each task enough practice to make it a near-automatic reflex.

Let me explain with a simple example: Remember the time you learnt to first drive a car? The tremendous confusion you felt juggling between the accelerator, brake and clutch, the circular movement of your hand and the coordination with your feet? How you were so tense even though you knew your instructor had a parallel set of controls? Then you slowly learnt to coordinate, control and drive, but your body language still showed some tension. Now, it all comes automatically and you can drive, listen to music and watch the world go by simultaneously.

Dr Chandra Sekar: 
Is there a difference in the number of thoughts men and women have? And do men use their thinking more efficiently ? It seems to me (and probably to other men) women complain about the same thing repeatedly when you know there is no solution! In other words, do women have more background noise in their minds than men?

Ankur Gupta: 
May I take the simple way out and refer you to Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus by John Gray, offering many suggestions for improving husband-wife relationships by understanding the communication style and emotional needs of the opposite gender. Or perhaps you and your spouse could initiate a study in this context using fMRI or brain mapping.
But I could tell you an uneducated or rural individual would have fewer thoughts than his educated or urban counterpart.

Rashmi Marwah: 
How do I improve the retrieval power of the mind? I am a law student and while I understand everything I read, I”m just not able to connect different sections that I study. Sometimes I read the important points two or three times but I am not able to recollect them during the exam.
Ankur Gupta: You have a very interesting question that will be of interest to practically all our readers. I shall dedicate a full column to this.

Finally, Satish Modh 
observes that our intellect dissipates its energy through thoughts. As long as we are alive, every incident, movement and activity of the sense organs is going to trigger a train of thoughts. Therefore the purpose of concentration is to focus on one thought and the purpose of meditation is to dump the body, mind and intellect all together.

Ankur Gupta: 
Satish, you’ve hit the core of Mind Management. Allowing ourselves to choose in the first place and then exercise those choices is a fun life-game that we must all be comfortable with.

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Thought for the Week

“The mind is its own place, and in itself,
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”
John Milton (1608-1674), Paradise Lost
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First published in Gray Matter - The Hindustan Times