Thread: It's good to think - but not too much, scientists say

People who think more about whether they are right have more cells in an area of the brain known as the frontal lobes.

BBC News - It's good to think - but not too much, scientists say

Cool story,

It makes sense because when you are cogitating the memory controller part of the brain is retrieving a lot of information for you to build your percepts from. When that memory controller is retrieving memory it is not encoding memory as effectively. And certain types of thinking can generate physiological responses that are maladaptive and can cause bad health...

"Stress" (which is defined as a requirement to adapt to a new context from the norm... so missing your bus and having to catch a different one than normal is a stressor as is moving to a new town, breaking up, going on a first date, etc.) creates the same memory activity I described earlier, and can actually overload the system and damage it. Patients with PTSD/ASD and other stress/anxiety disorders can actually show substantial neuronal loss to the memory controlling component of the brain. Further, the prolonged fight or flight response (a system adapted to working for short periods for most of mankind's history; pre-agrarian humans existed much, much longer than we have post agrarian) is bad for health directly because when you are in fight or flight mode the body is putting a lot more energy than normal into blood volume, respiration, motor control and muscle movement and much less than normal into things like reproduction, digestion and immune system function.

So it appears some people think so much that they burn out the same systems and get stuck in a physiological stress response loop.

Don't think about it too much...