What Are You Really Thinking? The Science of Your Inner World — and What It Means for Your Health
This post draws on ideas explored in Michael Pollan’s essay “Inside voice: what can our thoughts reveal about the nature of consciousness?” published in The Guardian, February 19, 2026, and adapted from his book A World Appears (Penguin Books, 2026).
Do you know how your mind works? Does anyone? We wake up, go about our day, and carry on an inner conversation with ourselves that feels familiar and constant. But what if the story you tell yourself about your own thinking is mostly fiction?
A great book on the value of self talk is Chatter. “without self talk, you would not know your own name.” Ethan Kross
That’s one of the cool ideas from an area of psychology known as descriptive experience sampling — a method developed by researcher Russell T. Hurlburt, who has spent 50 years randomly interrupting people throughout their day to ask a deceptively simple question: what were you just thinking?
What he’s found should give us space to be us. Most people, when pressed, discover they know far less about their own inner experience than they believed. Many assume their thoughts are primarily verbal — a steady inner monologue.
But Hurlburt’s research suggests that fewer than a quarter of mental experiences actually involve inner speech. A significant portion of our thinking happens in images, bodily sensations, or what he calls “unsymbolised thought” — complete ideas that exist without any words or pictures at all. READ that again, it’s a big deal.
This matters more than it might seem. At work I often see patients who arrive carrying a heavy mental load — chronic stress, anxiety, sleep disruption, and a persistent sense that their mind won’t quiet down. Western medicine tends to treat these symptoms in isolation. But traditional Chinese medicine has always understood the mind and body as inseparable. What’s happening in your inner world directly shapes what happens in your physical body.
The Wandering Mind Is Not a Broken Mind
Psychologist Kalina Christoff Hadjiilieva at UBC studies what happens in the brain during mind-wandering and spontaneous thought. Her research shows that somewhere between 30 and 50 percent of our waking mental life is not driven by our senses or our conscious intentions — it arises unbidden from somewhere deeper. Daydreams, sudden insights, creative leaps: these are not signs of distraction. They are signs of a mind doing essential background work.
This is often referred to as The default mode network (DMN). Have you read about Eureka events, maybe you have had some. They normally happen in DMN.
Using brain imaging, she has found that spontaneous thoughts actually begin in the brain nearly four seconds before we become consciously aware of them — suggesting that a great deal of mental processing happens far beneath the surface of awareness. The unconscious mind, in other words, is not idle. It is constantly at work, quietly shaping what eventually rises into our conscious experience.
Which is why constant screen time is a bad thing. I tell my kid boredom is a skill to develop as for modern people with a million different things we can do, having down time is now a rare thing. People complain of boredom, but that is where the DMN magic can happen.
This is a profound reminder that healing — like thinking — is often happening in ways we can’t directly observe or control.
Stillness Is Not Silence
Christoff Hadjiilieva’s research with experienced meditators found something humbling: even in trained minds, a new thought arises roughly every 10 to 20 seconds. As she puts it, the big lesson of meditation is that the mind cannot be controlled. But it can be supported. It can be given conditions in which it moves more freely, with less strain.
A long time ago I read a book on concentration that said read beside a stereo speaker. The goal is to read and ignore the sound from the stereo. Not possible? All parents can do it. Your young kid is having a moment of outburst… You keep reading your phone (I originally typed in newspaper but the younger readers won’t know what those were…) Then all of a sudden you hear a change in the scream and you tune into it.
Many patient from the clinic have heard a version of that story. Meditation is not so much to quiet the mind, but to train the mind it does NOT have to observe everything at all times. It can choose and that can be bliss.
This is precisely where acupuncture can play a meaningful role. Acupuncture works in part by calming the nervous system — shifting the body out of the chronic fight-or-flight state that keeps so many of us locked in repetitive, anxious thought loops. Many of you have after a treatment, noticed your mind feels quieter, not because it was forced it to be, but because the body found a different rhythm.
When the nervous system is less reactive, spontaneous thought can move more freely. The eddies and currents of the mind — what William James famously called the “stream of consciousness” — flow more naturally, rather than churning in the same tight circles.
Giving Your Mind Space to Wander
I am amazed at the amount of adults I get diagnosed with some sort of neurodivergent. I can only imagine the diagnosis the people in the next paragraph would have gotten. I am not arguing against it. I just wonder if we took these people and put them in an environment with a lot less stimuli, more downtime, regular sleep, breathing, water, exercise, fun, family time and friends. Would they improve?
Pollan’s essay touches on a study of historically accomplished figures — Darwin, Beethoven, Dalí — who despite their enormous output worked relatively short hours and spent much of their time on long walks, naps, and open-ended rest. It was often in these unstructured moments that inspiration arrived. They either had a gift or trained to capture the information and record it as music, poems, theory’s or build on other pursuits.
In our achievement-oriented culture, this kind of mental space, down time, is undervalued and increasingly rare. We are connected, scheduled, and stimulated from morning until night. The result is a mind that is technically busy but rarely able to enter DMN states.
Supporting your health means supporting your capacity for genuine rest — not just sleep, but the kind of relaxed, unfocused awareness that allows your deeper mind to do its work. Acupuncture, and the broader lifestyle approach of Chinese medicine are all, in different ways, invitations back to that quieter place.
Your mind is doing more than you think. Give it the conditions to flourish. You deserve a break today.
The Gap Between Feeling Fine and Being Well
This raises a question how can a person be unwell without knowing it? The body adapts, it has no way of knowing the stress is not the new normal. So it compensates.
It redistributes resources, dulls sensitivity, and works around the problem so efficiently that we mistake the adaptation for normal. The immune system, rather than correcting the underlying imbalance, accommodates it — until that compensation eventually fails and what was a subtle dysfunction tips into diagnosable disease.
This is the gap between feeling fine and being well. Acupuncture works in this gap. By stimulating specific points along the body’s connective tissue and nervous system pathways, it prompts the body to reassess its own state — interrupting the pattern of compensation and inviting a genuine regulatory response.
In this way, acupuncture is not simply a treatment for conditions that have already declared themselves. It is one of the few tools we have that meaningfully engages the body at the level of prevention — catching the drift toward disease before it arrives.
The recap.
Your mind is busy all the time, embrace down time to let your Default Mode solve some problems. It’s your brains “extended thinking” function.
Your minds way of processing is a lot more than words. Much of it is really indescribable. Don’t freak out if you can not always understand yourself.
The drift from wellness-adaptation-disease is one I have seen so many times over the last 30 years in practice. I generally get people very late in the game and it can be tough to turn it around. Much easier to stay healthy.
Be Well,
Ward Willison R.Ac.
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Kelowna Acupuncture & Other Natural Therapies