Michael Pollan

But part of the reason he came to that conclusion is I argued with him a lot.

I found the whole idea of separating thoughts into these discrete chunks absolutely impossible.

When I was on that bakery waiting in line, there was the smell of baked goods and cheese.

They sell cheese at this place.

There was the image of this woman in front of me who had this very loud plaid skirt on that was kind of hideous.

There was, you know, my awareness of the other people there.

Did I recognize anybody?

I often bump into people I know here.

My thoughts were so inter-infected by one another, one thought coloring the next, and he just kept drilling down until I absolutely would separate all that.

But I had read a lot of William James at this point.

He's got this amazing essay on the stream of consciousness.

And he's an incredibly acute observer of the nuance and subtlety of our thoughts.

And he talks about things like the unarticulated affinity between two thoughts or how one thought colors the next and then the other.

And that it is a stream and you can't pull anything out of the stream without completely disturbing it.

Let's talk about William James because he always ends up

So William James is the father of psychology in America.

He is now regarded more as a philosopher, and that's because psychology is so empirical now.

He was really, I don't know if he used this word, but he acted like, wrote like a phenomenologist, which is to say about the lived experience of thought.

I first got acquainted with him when I was working on How to Change Your Mind, because he'd written the varieties of religious experience, and there's a fantastic chapter there on mystical experience.

And he experimented with drugs himself to look at these kind of outer reaches of consciousness.