Penny For Your Thoughts
By: Nancy Whitaker
The old saying Penny for your thoughts originated in some English text by John Haewood.
When these texts were written, a penny was actually a considerable amount of money in England. Adjusted for inflation, it would amount to about 1.6 pounds in English currency or $2.50 USD, today. (Wow) great value for a penny.
To me I have always thought a penny was worth one cent. Today’s old saying about Pennie’s remains the same value and we still ask “A penny for your thoughts?”
Some smart person got thinking about the income factor and how much we could make if we did indeed get a penny for each of our thoughts.
As of 2022 it remains unknown exactly how many thoughts we have each day or what even a “thought” is. So The University of Southern California’s Laboratory of Neuro Imaging conducted some experiments with student test subjects and monitoring.
They found that the average person has about 48.6 thoughts per minute. (Again, these studies are not totally accurate and only serve as a rough estimate.)
I have never taken time to count how many thoughts I have in a minute, but some days I don’t seem to think about anything.
The Californian students decided to use the number 49 as to how many thoughts we have per minute.
Here we go: here’s the math: That’s 2,916 thoughts per hour, 69,984 per day, and 25,544,160 per year. Wow our thoughts sure add up. And this count estimated can be good thoughts or bad thoughts.
Now, let’s assume that every time you have a thought, you get a penny. Since we want to convert our thoughts to money we’ll count each one of our thoughts. We’ll also assume our brains thinks at a constant rate of 49 thoughts per minute throughout the day and night. Does anyone think at night?
If you got a penny for 49 thoughts each minute for a year your annual salary would be $255,500.
A $255,500 yearly salary would place you in the top 4 % wage earners in the United States which to me makes me rich, but you’d still be a far cry from that 1% percent that makes up the wealthy people. So why do we say “Penny for your Thoughts?”
A Penny for Your Thoughts is when you ask someone who is deep in thought what they are thinking about. Therefore you might say “I’ll give you a Penny for Your Thoughts. “
Sometimes thoughts are shared and sometimes we just like to think privately.
Are you a thinker? Do you think you have 49 thoughts a minute? Does the salary sound good if you did get paid for thinking? Let me know and “I’ll Give you a Penny for your thoughts”. Hmmm. Well maybe…
