He notes, "Formerly philosophers thought of mind as having to do exclusively

with conscious thought." The flaw in this, though, is that it doesn't take into
account what's happening in the unconscious mind or the inputs coming from the
body and outside the body that influence our thoughts and our
emotions. "The insufficient elimination of the foul and decaying products of
digestion may plunge us into a deep melancholy, whereas a few whiffs of nitrous
oxide may exalt us to the seventh heaven of supernal knowledge and godlike
complacency. And vice versa, a sudden word or thought may cause our heart to
jump, check our breathing, or make our knees as water. There is a whole new
literature growing up which studies the effects of our bodily secretions and our
muscular tensions and their relation to our emotions and our thinking." He
also discusses all that people experience that has an impact on them but that they
forget—just as a consequence of the brain doing its daily job as a filter—and
those things that are so habitual that we don't even think about them after we've
become accustomed to them. "We do not think enough about thinking," he
writes, "and much of our confusion is the result of current illusions in regard to
it."

He continues: "The first thing that we notice is that our thought moves with
such incredible rapidity that it is almost impossible to arrest any specimen of it
long enough to have a look at it. When we are offered a penny for our thoughts
we always find that we have recently had so many things in mind that we can
easily make a selection which will not compromise us too nakedly. On inspection,
we shall find that even if we are not downright ashamed of a great part of our
spontaneous thinking it is far too intimate, personal, ignoble or trivial to permit us
to reveal more than a small part of it. I believe this must be true of everyone. We
do not, of course, know what goes on in other people's heads. They tell us very
little and we tell them very little....We find it hard to believe that other people's
thoughts are as silly as our own, but they probably are."

Of the four types of thought Robinson identified–reverie, decision making,

rationalizing, and creative fact–reverie, he believed, is the most enjoyable.
Reverie allows for thinking that is just as long as it is wide, extending into
the past, present, and future, helping the thinker form new ideas and
inspirations.