In his new book "A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness," science writer Michael Pollan explores the enduring mystery of human consciousness after five years of research. Pollan participated in experiments including wearing a beeper that randomly prompted him to record his thoughts, revealing how banal and fragmented our mental processes often are.

Pollan's investigation led him to William James, considered the father of American psychology, whose phenomenological approach to studying consciousness emphasized the lived experience of thought. James's observations about the stream of consciousness and the difficulty of isolating individual thoughts resonated with Pollan's own experiences during the beeper experiment, where he struggled to separate thoughts into discrete categories.

The experiments revealed that much of our mental life consists of "gossamer traces of mentation" rather than fully formed thoughts, with many people thinking in unsymbolized ways that defy easy categorization. Pollan found that modern scientific approaches to consciousness often reduce complex mental experiences to simpler phenomena like visual perception or "qualia," missing the nuance that James captured in his writings.