I quickly switched to psychology, which was divided between third-person singular (experimental psychology) and second-person singular (clinical psychology). This sent me across campus to the philosophy department, where I discovered phenomenology, which—at its most rigorous—is the systematic investigation and description of first-person singular experience. Almost any first-person experience—from the experience of mathematical proofs to elusive states like ennui—can be the subject of such investigations. So what is the phenomenological view? Pollan does eventually get to first-person truths, but—I would argue—in ways sanctioned by third-person science as outside of it: meditation and ecstatic spiritual experience.