Which things influence or determine the "quality" of a thought?

[Human Mint]

@Carl-Richard Do you mean particular things like a drug or things like that? Or more general situations?

A good family will determine a better quality of thoughts.

[Willie]

The quality of information intake has a large effect on thought output. Garbage in, garbage out. 

[Davino]

For me a key factor is the distinction between unconscious thoughts thinking themselves and consciously thinking thoughts.

All high quality stream of thoughts are generated by conscious will. Something like this: imagine a crystalline empty, spacious, awake mind. That's it state.

Now this mind gets consciously in movement to cognise some aspect of reality, you are aware of all the jumps the mind does, like a heart beat. Each thought is unique by itself, it may be original or not but it's not influenced by the background tapestry and structure of itself but is working freely, unconditioned and on the fly. Of course it can access its background reservoir and so it does but this is a conscious choice and not unconscious bias or systematic pattern-thinking but again an autonomous and sovereign mind working.

This is a key factor, which I define as necessary but maybe not sufficient for high quality thoughts.

Other key factors are intelligence, experience, fearlessness, open-mindedness, unbiased, interconnected, holistic and mature.

 

 

[NewKidOnTheBlock]

It's not so clear to me what even a thought is. What is thinking? How can you really define or determine a quality of something you can't even describe? The so called visual thoughts or visualizations I can grasp, but the rest of them is something purely abstract. It seems to me that most of our actions don't really require any kind of thinking, and the only time you need to really think is when you are working on solving a problem. Other than that, you are using your memory and the ability to recall, but you are not consciously generating original thoughts.

I would say that the quality of a thought is determined by it's proximity to actuality and it's complexity, ability to cover nuances. Maybe it'd even be possible to mathematically quantify these 2 variables in a simple graph with X and Y axis, somehow