This is one topic that first came to me while reading, I had never thought about it. As humans our brain powers our entire body, giving it instructions and directions on what to do at a speed so amazing that we do not even know what is going on. Think of it like your phone with large memory and the best high-speed internet on earth; you press your phone and it quickly responds; no lag, no loading, no booting. I once read an example about dropping a cup on a table. To paraphrase, the writer said, our brain calculates the distance between us and that table, it does so in a way that that cup does not fall on the floor but sits perfectly on that table.
We are sometimes used to something that we ignore or forget that it's there so we focus on other things around us. Just think of it, for all the time you are awake, your brain is constantly on go, with each thought, movement, and task, reminding your body of how to walk, breathe, sit, blink, etc.
Now that you have this at the back of your mind, your brain is constantly feeding your body information on autopilot, reacting at the speed of time to keep you functioning and surviving based on habit and patterns, so you have free time to ponder and assess other problems. We all have been at a point or situation when something or someone comes at us, and we respond in thoughts or actions. We are most times vindicated or happy with ourselves when the move was the right one, observers may even comment about how quickly we handled the situation, and then we barely think deeply about it except smile. Even when our response is wrong, you see that at times in thinking about the issue, we tend to rationalize or give ourselves a reason for why we did what we took that particular course of action. The tricky thing is this sometimes gives us the idea of thinking before acting.
Thinking is defined as directing one's mind toward someone or something, actively using your mind to form connected ideas.
When you think about issues, you find most times that there is a pause or hesitation. When you have to think about something really fast, there is still a pause, though not as long, especially when the thought is not something entirely new. Though some can argue that when the response has become a habit, it can be at the speed of life, the same way your brain constantly tells your body how to move and the like.
So what do you think, do you think before you act or the other way round?