Michael Pollan

I had a lot of trouble pinning down.

You know, most of us think we think in words, but in fact, many of us don't.

Some of us think in images.

Some of us think in completely un-symbolized thought.

And some of us don't think that much at all.

So that's been kind of the big takeaway from his lesson.

I had a lot of trouble with him and we argued a lot because the idea that you could slice off a moment

in the stream of consciousness, which is William James' great phrase, that it would be discrete and separate from everything else, was never true.

Every thought I had was influenced by another thought that I'd already had or was anticipating the next thought I'd had.

And while I was thinking, there was all the sensory information that was coming in.

It was just, it put me in touch with the fact that

We really don't know what's going on in our heads, and it's a lot more complex than we think.

So it was useful in that sense.

Herbert finally concluded that I didn't have a lot of inner experience, which I was offended at.

But I just had so many thoughts I could not pin down for him.

But I think there were other reasons for it.

I think I wasn't accepting some of his premises about what thinking is.

Yeah.

So I got very interested in the contents of consciousness, not just the mechanisms of generating consciousness.

And one of the scientists I made my way toward is a Romanian-Canadian scientist named Kalina Christophe Hadjilevia.