An Ordinary Mind on an Ordinary Day

# An Ordinary Mind on an Ordinary Day Source: [https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/ordinary-mind-ordinary-day](https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/ordinary-mind-ordinary-day) ## [Roundtable](https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable) What novelists can teach neuroscientists about consciousness\. Monday, June 29, 2026 **A**sk about the unconscious and most neuroscientists will acknowledge its existence, grudgingly, before going on to explain that consciousness is hard enough to study as it is, without complicating the matter by bringing in something as elusive and ill\-defined as unconsciousness\. Kalina Christoff Hadjiilieva, a Bulgarian\-born psychologist at the University of British Columbia, is a notable exception, a self\-described misfit in the field\. “There is something inherently poetic in consciousness that’s evading scientists right now,” Christoff Hadjiilieva told me during one of our conversations\. “Most scientists don’t value the free movement of the mind, because they don’t believe anything good can come of it\. They want every effort of the mind to be rewarded, preferably with a publication\.” She recently coedited*The Oxford Handbook of Spontaneous Thought*, an anthology that includes an illuminating essay on the history of spontaneous thought\. It describes the routines of several highly accomplished historical figures—including[Darwin](https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/contributors/darwin), Beethoven, Dali, and[Chandler](https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/contributors/chandler)—who achieved great success despite working a relatively short day \(four to five hours\) followed by lots of long walks, afternoon naps, loads of unstructured time, and long vacations\. It is often not until we leave our desks to wander, whether in mind or body or both, that inspiration strikes\. We moderns tend to attribute the thoughts that arrive unbidden, from “out of the blue,” to somewhere within us, like the unconscious, but in the past, people believed they came from outside us—inspirations from the Muses or the gods\. Yet even now, these spontaneous insights or intuitions possess an aura and an authority that ideas delivered by reasoning seldom command\. We imbue them with a residue of magic, perhaps because their origin remains something of a mystery\. A devoted novel\-reader since her teens, Christoff Hadjiilieva suspects that artists—who “live their thoughts”—may know more about the stream of consciousness than her fellow scientists do\. “Catching one’s thoughts as they arise is a lot more difficult than it sounds,” she said\. “I suspect that fiction writers develop the ability to watch their own thoughts arising in the course of writing\.” **A**s an English major in college, I had read \(or at least been assigned\) a handful of stream\-of\-consciousness novels, and I began to wonder what they might have to teach me now\. At the time, I found reading novelists like[James Joyce](https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/contributors/joyce)and[Virginia Woolf](https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/contributors/woolf)difficult and, to be honest, boring\. Not much ever happened\. Strolling a few short blocks through Dublin or London could take fifty pages, most of them consisting of fragments of interior monologue, sometimes impossible to piece together\. But now, as a student of the stream, I look to these works for wonderful case studies: Spontaneous Thought 101\. Here’s how Woolf spelled out her ambition for the English novel in a 1925 essay in*The Common Reader*: > Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day\. The mind receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel\. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall…they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday…Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness\. Of course, Woolf and Joyce and the other modernists did not “discover” consciousness; novelists have been writing about it since at least the birth of the novel\. It’s pretty much what novels do—take us into the minds of characters to satisfy our deep human curiosity to find out what, but also how, other people think\. We probably know more about Emma Bovary’s thinking than we do any person in our world, perhaps even ourselves\. Third\-person omniscient narrators can penetrate the consciousness of characters quite deeply \(think of those created by[Gustave Flaubert](https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/contributors/flaubert),[Jane Austen](https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/contributors/austen), or[Leo Tolstoy](https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/contributors/tolstoy)\), and first\-person narrators can directly share the contents of a fictional mind, rendering it more or less transparent\. What distinguishes the stream of consciousness is its attempt to depict not only the contents of a character’s mind but its phenomenology as well: the rhythms and movements, the logic \(and illogic\) of its transitions and associations, the fragmented quality of inward\-turned thought\. We are to imagine that the author has left the room, leaving us alone with the mind of the character, to which we have complete access\. The satisfactions of reading a stream of consciousness verge on the prurient, though the experience can also be disorienting and claustrophobic\. Here’s a passage from*Ulysses*that is all of these things at once\. Leopold Bloom is at the funeral service for Paddy Dignam, in the “Hades” chapter\. He pauses by the coffin, gazing at the corpse as the priest intones: > *Non intres in judicium cum servo tuo, Domine\.* Makes them feel more important to be prayed over in Latin\. Requiem mass\. Crape weepers\. Blackedged notepaper\. Your name on the altarlist\. Chilly place this\. Want to feed well, sitting in there all the morning in the gloom kicking his heels waiting for the next please\. Eyes of a toad too\. What swells him up that way? Molly gets swelled after cabbage\. Air of the place maybe\. Looks full up of bad gas\. Must be an infernal lot of bad gas round the place\. Butchers for instance: they get like raw beef\-steaks\. Who was telling me? Mervyn Brown\. Down in the vaults of saint Werburgh’s lovely old organ hundred and fifty they have to bore a hole in the coffins sometimes to let out the bad gas and burn it\. Out it rushes: blue\. One whiff of that and you’re a goner\. Writers attempting to represent the stream of consciousness aim to catch thoughts on the fly, before they have coalesced into complete sentences that can be shared—sentences being how we dress our thoughts to take them out into the world\. Seeking to return us to an earlier stage in the ontogeny of a thought, interior monologue reduces exposition to “a syntactical minimum,” in the words of Édouard Dujardin, the French writer sometimes credited \(by Joyce, among others\) with “inventing” the stream\-of\-consciousness novel in the 1880s\. Woolf is the exception: She manages to evoke the free movement of her characters’ minds without sacrificing sentences and syntax\. The origins of the literary stream of consciousness may predate Dujardin by a few years\.[Vladimir Nabokov](https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/contributors/nabokov)claimed that this “method of expression” which he described as “a kind of record of a character’s mind running on and on, switching from one image or idea to another without any comment or explanation on the part of the author,” was first devised by Tolstoy for his account of Anna Karenina’s last hours, as she and her sentences decompose before us while traveling in a railway carriage to the train station\. Here, the swollen, turbulent stream of her consciousness symbolizes the loss of mental control that leads to her death\. After observing a “grimy, misshaped peasant” out the window and a “disgusting” couple seated across from her, she turns inward to dwell on how she might escape the world’s ugliness: > Yes, it troubles me very much, and reason was given us to enable us to escape; therefore I must escape\! Why not put out the candle, if there is nothing more to look at? If everything is repulsive to look at? But how? Why did that guard run past holding the handrail? Why are those young men in the next carriage shouting? Why are they talking and laughing? It’s all untrue, all lies, all deception, all evil\! The implicit conceit in any such work is that human consciousness can be rendered in words\. But does it follow that consciousness consists of words, that inner speech is the medium in which thought is conducted? Not necessarily\. This would be like saying that artists who use oils to make portraits believe that people are made of paint\. Yet there were some modernist writers who did believe consciousness consists entirely of words\. According to the literary critic Dorrit Cohn, “Joyce, who gives us Bloom’s mind almost entirely in Bloom’s words, reveals that he conceives of thought largely as verbalization\.” Others at the time disagreed\. The philosopher[Henri Bergson](https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/contributors/bergson), one of[Marcel Proust](https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/contributors/proust)’s major influences, believed in the existence of “pure” thought that precedes language, which was liable to distort it\. \(This was scarcely a new idea: Writing in the eighteenth century, poet and philosopher[Friedrich Schiller](https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/contributors/schiller)said, “When the soul speaks, alas, it is no longer the soul that speaks\.”\) The twentieth\-century French writer Nathalie Sarraute felt that more mental contents slipped through the net of interior monologue than were caught by it, including “an immense profusion of sensations, images, sentiments, memories, impulses, little larval actions that no inner language can convey, that jostle one another on the threshold of consciousness\.” For those who, like Joyce, did believe that language constitutes our minds, the stream of consciousness represented a radical advance in literary realism\. Those who didn’t, like Proust, rejected the method for being too “oblique\.” It drew our attention away from all the nonverbal “mind\-stuff” that William James had identified in consciousness, and that Proust worked so hard to capture—albeit in words\. I had always assumed, wrongly, that the stream of consciousness—the label as well as the literary technique—was modern, a product of the turn of the last century\. Though he often gets the credit, James did not invent the term\. He likely came across it in an 1859 book,*The Physiology of Common Life*, by an English philosopher and critic named George Henry Lewes\. Lewes happened to be the common\-law husband of[George Eliot](https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/contributors/eliot), so Eliot was presumably familiar with the concept too\. Eliot was certainly interested in depicting the interior lives of her characters\. So why didn’t she or any other Victorian writers attempt to give us their characters’ streams of consciousness? Why did we have to wait till the twentieth century to read one? The carriage scene at the end of*Anna Karenina*should have been my clue\. The mystery was solved when I learned of a 2015 Harvard dissertation about cognitive control and the stream of consciousness in Victorian literature\. The author, Margaret Rennix, found that many Victorian writers were well aware of the stream of consciousness as a psychological fact, but they associated it with an absence of cognitive control that they regarded as dangerous and symptomatic of madness\. For them, the stream of consciousness was not a tool for depicting “an ordinary mind on an ordinary day,” as Woolf would have it, but a device for evoking in words the psychic and verbal meltdown of an Anna Karenina\. Rennix emphasizes that cognitive control is not the same as Freudian repression\. Victorians viewed it as the sane person’s way of managing “the potential chaos of cognitive space\.” She writes that: > failure to use stream\-of\-consciousness narration in nineteenth\-century literature reflects an active belief that the mind’s capacity for fluid thought needed to be controlled so that the individual could make decisions, achieve moral ideals, and ultimately survive in a modern world\. For the Victorians, it was not spontaneous thought but deliberate control of one’s consciousness that represented freedom and agency, even character\. Rennix helped me to see that our conceptions of consciousness, if not consciousness itself, are historical artifacts as much as biological phenomena\. Yet something happened between the time of Eliot and Woolf to make the free\-flowing stream of consciousness feel spontaneous, honest, and true rather than frightening and crazy\. I wonder if Christoff Hadjilieva has any idea that the spontaneous thought she celebrates would not so very long ago have been considered a symptom of madness\. I don’t know what happened to turn the culture’s estimation of cognitive control upside\-down in the space of a few decades\. Maybe it had something to do with the dissemination of[Freud](https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/contributors/freud)’s ideas about repression and the unconscious: to the extent that the ungoverned stream allowed unconscious material to surface, it brought us closer to psychological truth\. Or perhaps it was the revolution in physics, with its radical ideas about the role of the observer in shaping reality, that stimulated interest in the operations of consciousness\. Or maybe it was the traumas of the First World War and its aftermath that shook Europe’s faith in cognitive control\. Or was it the crumbling of the colonial empires? The ferocious stranglehold that enterprise required had now been loosened and, perhaps, discredited\. One more theory—from Michael Levenson, a literary critic I interviewed—is that the rise of modern urban life and the “mass man” fired a curiosity about what was going on inside the minds of all these opaque new strangers in our midst\. These are mere guesses, of course, but whatever the cause for this sudden change in the psychological weather, it seems clear that the dialectic of spontaneous and constrained thought plays out not only in our individual minds but in our cultures too\. --- *Adapted from*[A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/646644/a-world-appears-by-michael-pollan/)*by Michael Pollan\. Copyright © 2026 by Michael Pollan\. Published by Penguin Press,**an imprint of Penguin Random House**\. Reprinted by permission\.*