Michael Pollan

This is not profound stuff.

And then he interrogates you about them to try to make sense of it and help you become a better student of what's going on in your own mind.

Because it turns out very often we don't know what we're thinking.

At least I didn't know what I was thinking.

And he would say, now, did you speak that?

Or did you hear that spoken?

I was like, I have no idea.

Was it in language or was it an image?

And I said, well, there was sort of an image.

It was kind of very unspecific, kind of an emoji of a role, not a real role.

And he'd take you through it.

And it was an incredibly challenging process.

It's something less than a fully formed thought.

This word thought implies a kind of, you know, roundedness to the thing that just doesn't exist.

And many of our thoughts are these wisps of mentation, you know.

Yeah, and then also many people think in totally unsymbolized thoughts, which I don't really understand what those would be if they're not words and not images.

But his finding after 50 years of this is that we think in very different ways.

Yeah, I didn't know how to take this.

I mean, we all think we have a lively inner life, but absence of one, it never occurred to me.

I just assumed I had a little more going on than he thought I had.