Consciousness Researchers Are Tripping: Michael Pollan’s journey into the mind (Kit Wilson, May 26, 2026, Commonweal)
Hurlburt claims that, in fifty years of experience sampling, his most important finding is simply how little we’re actually aware of the details of our inner experiences. Pollan supplements this with an elegant passage on William James’s magnificent lecture “The Stream of Thought,” in which James attempts to draw attention to the strange, swirling, constantly half-forming and half-dissolving nature of our conscious experiences: the both-there-and-not sensation of trying to remember a forgotten name; the protolinguistic feeling of intending to say something before you do; the “auras,” “halos,” “accentuations,” “associations,” “suffusions,” “feelings of tendency,” “premonitions,” and “psychic overtones” that accompany all our more code-like, sentence-friendly, and determinate thoughts. Pollan writes:
To read James’s heroic attempt to limn the stream of consciousness in all its nuance, strangeness, and paradox is to realize how much violence is done to the experience in the name of consciousness science…. How could we ever accept the idea that consciousness is reducible to information, to computable bits or pixels? How could the concept of information ever capture or convey something like the aura or halo of a thought, or its familiarity, or the “fringe of unarticulated affinities” linking two thoughts, or the afterglow of a thought and its coloring of a thought to come?
Indeed. All of this is reinforced by Kalina Christoff Hadjiilieva, a Bulgarian-born psychologist who specializes in “spontaneous thought”: mind-wandering, daydreaming, creative thinking, and the mysterious thoughts that seem to come to us from nowhere. As she points out, almost all consciousness science is focused only on our most explicitly conscious thoughts. But these are rare, discrete moments extracted from a vast, nebulous background—like tiny raindrops condensing inside a huge amorphous cloud of vapor. This background, Christoff Hadjiilieva estimates, accounts for something like half of what the mind is doing at any one moment. This highlights the absurdity of trying to produce thinking machines by focusing only on surface material like language and perception.
Everything then culminates in a kind of psychedelic punchline. Pollan meets Christof Koch, an American cognitive scientist and one of the true giants in the world of consciousness research, most famous for espousing integrated information theory—which posits, rather abstrusely, that consciousness arises in any physical system sufficiently interconnected and recursive. Back in 1998, Koch famously bet the philosopher David Chalmers that scientists would find neural correlates of consciousness within twenty-five years. In 2023, Koch graciously conceded, and gave Chalmers, the man who coined the phrase “the hard problem of consciousness,” his promised case of Madeira.
In the years since, Koch has become increasingly suspicious of purely physical accounts of consciousness, his skepticism reinforced by recent experiments with psychedelics. Pollan quotes from a conversation with Koch after his return from an ayahuasca retreat in Brazil: “It was extraordinary…. I accessed this universal mind…. It was what Aldous Huxley described in The Doors of Perception. There was no self. There was Mind at Large.”
Koch is not the only scientist Pollan talks with who admits to a drug-induced revelation. A little earlier, the neuroscientist Kingson Man describes his experiences with a psychedelic called 5-MeO-DMT:
I disappeared, fell out of time, and then came back with the realization that everything in the world is love. I know, ridiculous! As a scientist, there’s no reasoning about it. But I understood for the first time that everything is connected by the same substance, and that substance is love…. And I realized there’s more going on in consciousness than I can hope to build with my dinky little machine. A robot can act like it’s in love, but it’s still a puppet being pulled by strings.
Of course, there’s something funny about these drug-induced breakthroughs, and it should all be taken with a hefty pinch of salt. Nonetheless, I found it striking that what these trips offer scientists—setting aside the wilder flights of fancy—are often simple reminders of something that was always there. In an email to Pollan, Koch likens his experience to a famous philosophical thought experiment in which someone who is colorblind is able to see color for the first time. A reductionist explanation involving photons and receptors wouldn’t be enough. “Wouldn’t you go around for the rest of your life with the certainty that you had experienced something utterly real that demanded an explanation? So it is with me and my mystical experience.”
Even Kingson Man’s more stereotypically hippie-style revelation could be seen as a reminder of something we forget only because it’s ever-present: love really is real, and irreducible to any physical mechanism. This is particularly easy to forget when you’re professionally trained to filter out the familiar—but remarkable and mysterious—experiences we have every second of our waking lives, and to think only in terms of the theoretical grids we place on top of them.
It’s all just footnotes to Hume