“A new study from psychologists at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario Canada reports observations of the transition from one thought to another in fMRI brain scans. Though the researchers don’t detect the content of our thoughts, their method allows them to count each one, and they say we have about 6,200 thoughts per day. The researchers refer to them as “thought worms.”

“We had our breakthrough by giving up on trying to understand what a person is thinking about, and instead focusing on when they have moved on. Our methods help us detect when a person is thinking something new, without regard to what the new thought is.”