Michael Pollan

And he was basically showing that feelings and emotions should be admitted into the decision-making process.

And he proved that people who couldn't experience emotion or feelings made worse decisions than people who could, and that there was a kind of a gut check.

You know, we have all these words for the gut and thought, and there's some kind of, buried deep in the language is this understanding that our gut has something important to tell us about a decision.

And so he kind of rehabilitated feelings and emotions in the whole science of the brain.

But basically, we've been drumming feelings and emotion out of our understanding of the brain for hundreds of years.

And, you know, I don't know why.

I mean, it just, you know, this idea of the pinnacle of human consciousness is the cortex or the kinds of people who do this research are just really out of touch with their bodies.

Yeah.

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

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...