OPINION

CAN
SCIENCE
ILLUMINATE
OUR
INNER
DARK
MATTER?
Neither introspection nor brain scans
can reveal our deepest thoughts
By John Horgan

what ’ s going on in your head right now? how about ...

now? Or . . . now? Answering this question is harder than
you might think. As soon as you pay attention to your
thoughts, you alter them, as surely as you alter an electron’s
course by looking at it. You can’t describe your thoughts the
way you describe, say, the room in which you are reading,
Maria Maglionico/Eye Em/Getty Images

which remains stolidly unaffected by your scrutiny.

William James draws attention to this paradox in “The Stream of Thought,” a
section of T
 he Principles of Psychology. T
 rying to examine your thoughts through
“introspective analysis,” he writes, is like studying snowflakes by catching them
in your “warm hand,” “seizing a spinning top to catch its motion” or “trying to
turn up the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks.”

96 | SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN | SPECIAL EDITION | WINTER 2022

 I’ve been brooding over these sorts of puzzles a lot
lately, even more than usual. In 2020 I released a book
entitled P  ay Attention: Sex, Death, and Science, a
stream-of-thought account of a day in my life. Or rath-
er, in the life of my fictional alter ego, Eamon Toole, a
“divorced science writer and professor struggling to re-
main rational while buffeted by fears and desires.” As
soon as I send a book out into the world, I compulsive-
ly think of things I should have put in it.
Also, my ongoing attempt to learn quantum me-
chanics has mystified my world, inner and outer. So, I’d
like to offer a few thoughts (second thoughts? after-
thoughts?) about thoughts, the most inescapable and
maddeningly elusive features of our existence.
META-THOUGHTS AND
THOUGHTLESS THOUGHTS
A note on terms. J ames coined the phrases “stream
of thought” and “stream of consciousness” and some-
times used them interchangeably, but I distinguish
thoughts from consciousness in the following way:
Thoughts are the c ontents of consciousness, including
fears, fantasies, recollections, realizations, delibera-
tions, decisions and all the other flora of subjective ex-
perience. If consciousness is the medium, thoughts are
the message.
I also like the easy self-referentiality of “thoughts
about thoughts,” which captures a deep truth about us.
We are what Douglas Hofstadter calls self-generating
“strange loops,” akin to M. C. Escher’s famous drawing
THOUGHTS ARE “CONTINUOUS,” THEY “FLOW,” THEY
KEEP COMING EVEN WHEN WE PAY NO ATTENTION
TO THEM, AND THEY KEEP CHANGING; NO THOUGHT
IS PRECISELY LIKE ANOTHER.
of two hands drawing each other. (Who draws the draw-
er?) Thoughts spring from thoughts and—in ways still
beyond our ken—from our brains, which contain rough-
ly 100 billion neurons linked by one quadrillion synaps-
es, each of which processes an average of 10 electro-
chemical signals, or action potentials, every second.
If you equate action potentials with the operations
of a computer, as many neuroscientists do, then the
brain carries out 10 quadrillion operations in a typical
second. That approaches the speed of the world’s fast-
est supercomputers, and the brain may perform expo-
nentially more calculations via processes other than ac-
tion potentials. The result of all this activity is that brains
churn out thoughts as ceaselessly as hearts pump blood.
As James puts it, thoughts are “continuous,” they
“flow,” they keep coming even when we pay no atten-
tion to them, and they keep changing; no thought is pre-
cisely like another. James thus doubts whether psychol-
98 | SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN | SPECIAL EDITION | WINTER 2022
ogists can reduce the human mind to a mental equiva-
lent of atoms as physicists have done with matter.
With some effort, I can direct my thoughts, focus
them, but they often seem to have a will of their own.
They swerve this way or that for reasons obscure to me,
a tendency that Buddhists disparage as “monkey mind.”
When we do notice a thought and reflect on it—perhaps
to convey it to ourselves or to others—we instantly trans-
form it, turning it into a different, higher-order thought.
Call it a meta-thought, a thought about a thought.
Meta-thoughts—the thoughts I express to myself
and to others through writing and speech—are my
bread and butter. I make my living off them. But they
constitute an infinitesimal fraction of my thoughts. The
vast majority are unformed, incoherent, inexpressible,
and they come and go without my dwelling on them.
You might call them thoughtless thoughts. Thoughtless
thoughts are what course through your head when no
one is watching you, not even you.
CONSCIOUSNESS WITHOUT THOUGHT?
I once tried to teach m  editation to a class of
stressed-out freshmen. I told them to close their eyes,
still their minds and stop thinking. After 10 minutes of
silence, I asked how many had succeeded in thinking
of nothing. To my surprise, about half raised their
hands. I didn’t believe them. Even freshmen always
have thoughts, whether or not they notice them.
Is thoughtless consciousness possible? Yes, accord-
ing to religious scholar Robert Forman, a veteran med-
itator. He claims that he and others
have achieved “pure conscious-
ness,” a mystical state devoid of any
specific thoughts. You are conscious
but not conscious of anything. Con-
sciousness without content strikes
me as a contradiction, an oxymo-
ron, like a book without words or
a film without images. And how
would you k  now you’re in a state of
pure consciousness? How would
you remember it? Even Forman admits that states of
pure consciousness, if they exist, are rare.
Meditation is touted as a route to knowledge of your
deepest self, your innermost thoughts. I’ve had delight-
ful experiences meditating, especially on a silent retreat
in 2018. But meditation and other contemplative tech-
niques are designed to control and suppress thoughts
rather than to understand them. Meditation is self-
brainwashing aimed at taming your monkey mind. I
don’t want to tame my monkey mind; I want to study
it, to comprehend its antics.
Although we may not notice them and may even
deny their existence, thoughtless thoughts are always
there, underpinned by our brains’ incessant chatter.
Without thoughtless thoughts, we would lack meta-
thoughts. Thoughtless thoughts are the dark matter of
our minds, giving shape via hidden mechanisms to what
is observable, visible, luminous in our inner cosmos.
THE LIMITS OF STREAM-OF-THOUGHT FICTION
C a n w e s t u dy t h o u g h t l e s s thoughts, the mind’s
dark matter, given that simple introspection doesn’t
work? Some neuroscientists predict that external brain-
scanning devices, such as MRIs, or arrays of implanted
electrodes will soon allow us to read minds. But this
feat would require cracking the neural code, the set of
rules or algorithms that turn neural
activity into mental activity—that
is, thoughts. The neural code is the
enigma at the core of the mind-body WILL SCIENCE EVER DISCOVER A FINAL THEORY
problem. The more we investigate
it, the more intractable it seems. OF THE MIND? ONE THAT SOLVES THE MIND-BODY
I try to describe my thoughts in
my book P  ay Attention (original
PROBLEM AND MAKES US FULLY TRANSPARENT
title: W hat Is It Like to Be a Science TO OURSELVES?
Writer?). The book is based on jour-
nals in which I wrote down what I
did, saw, said, heard and thought over the course of a
typical day, as I commuted to the university where I
work, talked to a freshman humanities class (about
James’s “Stream of Thought”), jawed with colleagues
over lunch (about Thomas Kuhn’s views of “truth”) and
spent the evening with “Emily,” my girlfriend.
In the first draft of my book, to make my thoughts
seem more raw and real, I expressed them as sentence
fragments running into each other, with little punctu-
ation. An editor who read this draft described it as
“sludge.” Even I found that draft hard to read. So I
cheated. I rewrote the book with more or less coherent
sentences with conventional grammar and punctua-
tion. I also added contextual information for readers,
information that I wouldn’t have actually thought about
because I just knew it implicitly.
To justify these moves in the direction of readabili-
ty, I could point out that the book’s narrator is an ex-
tremely self-conscious science writer trying to make his
private thoughts public. He is in a sense performing his
thoughts, first for himself and then for readers. But that
means my book consists of meta-thoughts. It isn’t an
accurate depiction of my thoughtless thoughts, which
remain veiled from me.
Nobody depicts thoughts in all their raw weirdness
as vividly as James Joyce. In U  lysses, Joyce plops us in-
side the heads of Stephen Dedalus, a teacher and aspir-
ing writer and an avatar for Joyce as a young man; Leo-
pold Bloom, a nerdy, genial ad salesman; Bloom’s vo-
luptuous wife, Molly; and other characters living in
Dublin in the early 20th century. We see, feel, remem-
ber what they see, feel, remember.
But Joyce’s notoriously difficult masterpiece isn’t en-
tirely stream of thought. If it were, it would be far more
difficult. To help orient us, give us a little context, Joyce
occasionally shifts his point of view from inside char-
acters’ heads to outside, that is, from a first-person to a
third-person perspective.
Joyce’s final opus, F innegans Wake, w  hich I “read”
in college, makes no concessions to readability. Even
Joyce’s admirers complained about its opacity, but
James defended his gobbledygookian work. “One great
part of every human existence,” he told a friend, “is
passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by
the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar
and goahead plot.” But even Finnegans Wake, a n unri-
valed imagining of mental dark matter, consists entire-
ly of Joyce’s hyperconscious, insanely erudite meta-
thoughts. And what about all the thoughts that cannot
be captured by words?
HIDDEN-VARIABLE THEORIES OF THE MIND
A final point: I see analogies between efforts to under-
stand thoughts and the quantum realm. I alluded to one
correlation above: observing particles alters them, as does
observing thoughts. Here’s another: some physicists, dis-
satisfied with probabilistic quantum accounts of electrons
and photons, seek to explain their behavior in terms of
“hidden variables” that follow deterministic rules.
Mind scientists, similarly, have proposed hidden-
variable paradigms of the mind. Psychoanalysis holds
that our conscious minds are yanked this way and that
by deep-rooted lusts and aversions. Evolutionary psy-
chology traces our emotions and actions to instincts em-
bedded in our ancestors by natural selection. Cognitive
science postulates that our thoughts stem from compu-
tations carried out by our neural machinery and are as
far removed from our conscious thoughts as the machine
code of your smartphone is from the icons on its screen.
Although each of these paradigms has appealing fea-
tures, each finally falls short, as do all theories of the
mind. Will science ever discover a final theory of the
mind? One that solves the mind-body problem and
makes us fully transparent to ourselves? That reveals
the hidden variables underpinning and linking our
meta-thoughts and thoughtless thoughts?
I doubt it. Physicists can’t grok the behavior of a sin-
gle electron that is identical to every other electron. So
what hope do we have of capturing the thought pass-
ing through your head right . . . now, a thought unlike
any that you, let alone anyone else, have ever had or will
have? And if we can’t grasp a single thought, which
melts the instant we grasp it, how can we possibly un-
derstand ourselves? Think about t hat.
John Horgan d irects the Center for Science Writings at the Stevens Institute
of Technology. His books include T he End of Science, The End of War and Mind-
Body Problems, a vailable for free at mindbodyproblems.com. For many years
he wrote the popular blog Cross Check for Scientific American.
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