2026-02-20
31 分钟This is The Guardian.
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 consciousness at a specific moment in time by dipping a ladle into the onrushing stream.
Sounds simple.
But what the ladle scoops up is harder to describe than you might expect.
Yes, these are my own thoughts, and who should know more about them than me, their thinker?
Yet, I'm finding that what we know about our own thinking is considerably less than we think.
The Beeper exercise is part of a psychology experiment I volunteer to take part in.
Descriptive Experience Sampling, or DES, is a research method developed by Russell T.
Hurlburt, a psychologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
He has been using it for 50 years, which is to say his entire career.
To give you some perspective, Beepers didn't exist 50 years ago.