According to a study, researchers have discovered that we have over 6,000 individual thoughts running through our minds on any given day. From random musings to deep reflections, our brains are constantly buzzing with ideas, questions, and plans.

Sometimes, these numerous thoughts may turn into quirky, one-of-a-kind sentences that have probably never been spoken or written before. You know, those random phrases that pop into your head—the ones you didn't even think twice before saying out loud.

But here’s the thing—when you share those thoughts with someone else, they might pause and think, "Wait, that was an intriguing sentence!" It’s in those moments that we’re reminded just how wonderfully unpredictable language can be.

And that's exactly what the subreddit "Brand New Sentence" celebrates. With over 1.4 million members, this online community is dedicated to finding and sharing sentences that are a testament to the boundless creativity of human expression.

It’s easy for us to get lost in the maze of our own thoughts—after all, we juggle around 6,000 of them daily. But here’s the thing: Dr. Jordan Poppenk and his student, Julie Tseng, from Queen’s University in Canada, have developed a method that can pinpoint where one thought concludes and another begins.

In a paper published in 2020 in the journal “Nature Communications," the researchers unveiled a method for isolating specific moments when a person is deeply engaged with a single idea, coining the term “thought worm” to describe this phenomenon.

Imagine you’re at work, and the deadline for an important project is coming soon. Suddenly, amidst all the pressure, you find yourself intensely focused on a solution for a problem that has been bugging you for days. In that moment, everything else fades away, and you’re wholly absorbed in the “thought worm” of that one idea.

Dr. Poppenk, who is the Canada Research Chair in cognitive neuroscience, explains, “What we call thought worms are adjacent points in a simplified representation of activity patterns in the brain. The brain occupies a different point in this 'state space’ at every moment. When a person moves onto a new thought, they create a new thought worm that we can detect with our methods.”

Imagine you’re daydreaming about a beach vacation. At one moment, you might be thinking about the sand; this represents one thought worm. And then, when you start thinking about the sound of waves crashing, you transition to a new point, forming a new thought worm.

Dr. Poppenk further adds, “Our methods help us detect when a person is thinking something new, without regard to what the new thought is. You could say that we’ve skipped over vocabulary in an effort to understand the punctuation of the language of the mind.”

This idea highlights how, at times, we don’t overthink our words and instead let our thoughts flow freely. When we stop filtering our expressions, we might end up saying some unique sentences that might have never been heard before. And sometimes it’s just coincidence or a playful twist of language that leads us to these gems.

Such unique sentences not only capture the person’s feelings but also showcase the playful nature of language. Which of these posts did you find the most interesting? Did any of them inspire a moment of creativity in your thoughts?