Pleasures of the flesh often pop up unprompted in our thoughts (Image: Harry Gruyaert/Magnum Photos)
No one knows where the “men think about sex every 7 seconds” rumour comes from, but it’s almost certainly untrue. In 2012, of Ohio State University in Columbus armed three groups of students with clickers and asked them to click whenever they thought about either sex, food or sleep.
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The result: men thought about sex 19 times a day, while women did around 10 times. Food thoughts numbered 18 for men and 14 for women, and sleep 10 for men and 9 for women ().
So if those numbers square with your tallies, consider yourself normal (at least benchmarked to students in Ohio). Pleasurable things such as dominate our common spontaneous thoughts, according to another study by the University of Cologne – again of students, this time in Germany.
Darker topics are more problematic. Unless directly confronted by death – a close encounter with a truck or a suspicious lump – most of us almost never think of it. “Terror management theory”, developed in the 1980s, even suggests fear of death’s inevitability explains our obsession with immediate and pleasurable concerns.
Not everyone is convinced that existential angst underlies quite so much of the human experience. But we do know that around 15 per cent of people have “death anxiety”, a morbid obsession that is almost certainly a “non-optimal state of affairs”, says psychologist , who co-developed terror management theory. Some research suggests such as obsessive compulsive disorder and many phobias including agoraphobia.
But in general, it seems humanity is united in its humdrum obsessions. of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, has sampled individual trains of thought since the 1970s (see “Five modes of thought“). “I find very few big thoughts in the sampling studies I do,” he says. “I have sampled with some scientists and I don’t find very many big thoughts there either.”
Read more: “Is your mind normal? 7 reasons it probably is”
This article appeared in print under the headline “Are my obsessions normal?”
