Ezra Klein

Can you describe that study?

Sure.

So this scientist, Kalina Kristof Hadjilevia, psychologist, her field is spontaneous thought, which is, I hadn't thought about that as a field.

And that includes things like daydreams and mind wandering and creative thinking and flow.

And to try to understand this, she's very interested in the question of how things get from our unconscious into our conscious awareness.

Because we know there's a lot going on below the threshold of awareness.

So she works with trained meditators, people who have like 10,000 hours experience meditating, puts them in an fMRI, gives them a button to press as soon as the thought intrudes.

Because even if you're an experienced meditator, it's going to happen.

She says it happens every 10 seconds for everybody.

She said the great lesson of meditation is the mind cannot be controlled.

It's very freeing to people trying.

What was interesting about this is that when people press the button, she would look back at when something popped out, when there was activity in the hippocampus, which is the source of memories and other stuff as well.

But she was watching that as a source of a thought.

And it took four seconds for

between the fMRI showing activity in the hippocampus and the person being aware of that thought.

So what is happening?

Four seconds in the brain time is like an eon.

What is happening for a thought to transit from the unconscious to the conscious?

And why does it take so long?

And she doesn't know.