The View From Within

In “The View from Within,” Pollan shifts from feeling to consider thought. He was surprised that the researchers he spoke to thus far have said little about thought, the primary content of consciousness. Most prevailing theories of consciousness work from the assumption that what enters conscious awareness is generally important and necessary for survival. These theories therefore do not account for “the banalities, the trivialities, and all the seemingly arbitrary” bits that do not contribute to survival yet occupy so much of one’s awareness.

Pollan now suspects that most consciousness researchers promise more explanation than they can provide. They claim to explain subjective experience but ultimately only deliver descriptions of how sensory perception moves from our sense organs and into conscious awareness. He traces this limitation to Francis Crick, Christof Koch, and the early days of consciousness research, which focused on visual perception for the simple reason that it was the easiest sense to access. However, such research oversimplifies the phenomenon of consciousness in the effort to understand it. Reducing consciousness to information processing has been useful to a point but leads to dead-ends.

To escape this dead-end, Pollan looks to phenomenologists, who remind science that an objective, third-person perspective is impossible because humans cannot step outside the very consciousness they are trying to study. Phenomenologists, therefore, do not try. Instead, they examine consciousness from inside. One of the pioneers of this approach was American psychologist and philosopher William James.

What Is a Thought?

The next section, “What Is a Thought?” continues this discussion. In his famous 1890 lecture, titled “The Stream of Thought,” James rejects theory and instead attempts, through comprehensive detail, to record the experience of thought. James uses the metaphor of a stream or river. He posits that thoughts “unfold as continuously as moving water” that are “‘colored’ by the preceding one and by its various contexts’” (130). By this definition, every thought or mental act is singular. James also states that thoughts come before words or images. Often, they are vague sensations long before the intellect attaches words to them.

Though James’s descriptions seem convincing, from a scientific point of view they are limited to introspection with a sample size of one subject (himself). Additionally, the intention of recording thoughts and the act of observing them automatically alter those thoughts. Pollan wonders if there might be a way to investigate these thoughts without observer impact. This question leads him to psychologist Russel Hurlburt.

Sampling My Inner Experience

In “Sampling My Inner Experience,” Pollan participates in a study to explore this question. Hurlburt, like James, eschews theory in favor of description. As a graduate student, he began studying thought by randomly sampling thoughts from subjects. His subjects pause throughout the day and record whatever thought occurred in the second prior. To do this, he designed a special beeper in 1973 (years before the first commercial beeper), that emits sound directly into the ear.

The study requires Pollan to stop when the beeper sounds and jot down in a small notebook the thought that occurred just before. Pollan finds this task difficult. He cannot always decide how much of a thought occurred in that moment or how much occurred as he thinks about writing it down. He wonders how much his vague awareness of his environment is part of the thought or adjacent to it.

Each day, Pollan and Hurlburt meet over video to discuss. In every session, Hurlburt’s primary goal is to cut “away at the distortions […] that inevitably color” Pollan’s self-reporting (145). He questions Pollan’s descriptions and whether his thoughts arrive in the form of words, images, or vague impressions. Over time, Pollan feels that thinking about Hurlburt’s interpretive questions influence not only how he records his thoughts but what he is thinking about to begin with.

They eventually disagree on fundamental ideas about how thoughts function. Hurlburt insists that each recorded thought is isolated. He wants a sampling of only single thoughts at a single moment in time. However, Pollan often resorts to describing an amalgamation of a thought and the context that surrounds it. Hurlburt insists that he is contextualizing thoughts after the fact, but Pollan feels certain that the entire context was present in the thought itself as it occurred. This aligns with James’ concept of thoughts ‘colored’ by their contexts, but Hurlburt still insists that they can, with precision, differentiate “the directly apprehended experience from the context” (145).

Pollan steps back to examine the conclusions Hurlburt has drawn from his study. Findings indicate that fewer than a quarter of people experience inner speech, the form of thought many had believed to be the most common. Some experience thought primarily as images. Others do not even perceive images but rather only sensations or impressions. Still others, Hurlburt claims, do not have much of an inner experience at all, and instead “live in a world of pure perception and more or less automatic decision-making unruffled by thoughts” (148). To Pollan’s surprise, Hurlburt categorizes him on this far end of the spectrum. For Hurlburt, Pollan’s inability to distinguish context from specific thoughts suggests that he is adding information after the fact and “backfilling moments empty of actual inner experience” (148).

The Wandering Mind

The next section, “The Wandering Mind,” turns to the unconscious. While some are beginning to study conscious thought, Pollan discovers that almost nobody is discussing the unconscious. The one exception is Kalina Christoff Hadjiilieva, a Bulgarian psychologist who studies “spontaneous thought—mind-wandering, daydreaming, creative thinking, mental flow, and those mysterious thoughts that come to use out of the blue” (151-2), and hopes to understand the phenomenological experience that happens just beyond conscious thought.

She uses fMRI scanners to identify neural correlates to different modes of thought and has found that the mind generally moves freely between structured thought and wandering thought. She has noted brain activity nearly four seconds before the subject indicates being consciously aware of the thought, suggesting that the thought is generated elsewhere (the unconscious) before moving into conscious awareness.

When asked why mental wandering has received so little scientific attention, Hadjiilieva suggests that a Western bias toward productivity is to blame. For instance, Daniel Gilbert claims that people are happier when their minds are occupied with specific tasks rather than wandering. But Hadjiilieva calls this propaganda. She suggests that mental wandering is important for developing interiority and a sense of self though it does not actively produce work. Western culture privileges work and productivity, therefore mental wandering (and its research) is discouraged as it does not benefit the capitalist system.

An Ordinary Mind on an Ordinary Day

In the final section, “An Ordinary Mind on an Ordinary Day,” Hadjiilieva suggests that artists and novelists have developed a greater understanding of stream of consciousness than any scientist, leading Pollan to reconsider his background in literature. He looks to James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, both famous for their modernist novels in the stream of consciousness style, which he calls “case studies” (161) in spontaneous thought. Such writers attempt to represent the “rhythms and movements, the logic (and illogic) of its transitions and associations, the fragmented quality of inward-turned thought” (162).

Crucially, Joyce and Woolf did not originate the stream of consciousness form. Early examples appear in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and the work of English philosopher George Henry Lewes in his 1859 book, The Physiology of Common Life. However, such Victorian-era examples primarily depicted moments of rambling stream of consciousness as “symptomatic of madness” (165). Pollan notes that stream of consciousness came to represent honest thought rather than mental incapacity sometime between the Victorian era and the 1920s.

As Pollan considers the role of stream of consciousness novels to depict thought, he turns to a contemporary author, Lucy Ellman, whose 2019 novel Ducks, Newburyport “consists of a single sentence unfurling over more than one thousand pages, chronicling the inner experiences” (167) of a woman during the first Trump administration. Ellman argues that it is impossible to reproduce all consciousness in words because a lot of thought happens without words or images. When Pollan asks about the benefits of the stream of consciousness, she speculates that such mental wandering “remind[s] us we’re still here. It’s a reflection of the life force. If we’re thinking, we’re alive” (174).