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Inside voice, what can our own thoughts reveal about the nature of consciousness?

Written and read by Michael Pollan. What was I thinking?

This is not as easy or straightforward a question as I would have thought.

As soon as you try to record and categorize the contents of your consciousness, the sense

impressions, feelings, words, images, daydreams, mind wanderings, ruminations, deliberations,

observations, opinions, intuitions, and occasional insights, you encounter far more questions

than answers and more than a few surprises.

I'd always assumed that my stream of consciousness consisted mainly of an interior monologue,

maybe sometimes a dialogue, but was surely composed of words.

I'm a writer, after all.

But it turns out that a lot of my so-called thoughts,

a flattering term for these gossamer traces of mentation, are pre-verbal, often showing up as images,

sensations, or concepts,

with words trailing behind as a kind of afterthought,

belated attempts to translate these elusive wisps of meaning

into something more substantial and shareable.

I discovered this because I've been going around with a beeper wired to an earpiece that sends a

sudden sharp note into my left ear at random times of the day. This is my cue to recall and jot down whatever was going on in my head

immediately before I registered the beep. The idea is to capture a snapshot of the contents of

...