Science Quote by David Bohm

Bohm is quietly indicting the modern mind for mistaking mental chatter for understanding. The line lands because it doesn’t flatter the reader: it suggests that most of what we call “thinking” is really just consuming and rearranging content - opinions, facts, anxieties, plans - without noticing the machinery producing it. That’s a scientist’s critique smuggled into a near-meditative observation: if you don’t study the instrument, you can’t trust the measurement.

The intent isn’t anti-thought; it’s anti-automatic thought. Bohm aims at the blind spot where cognition feels transparent, as if ideas simply arrive fully formed and self-justifying. Paying attention only to content makes thought look like a neutral conduit rather than an active, biased, self-protecting process. The subtext is unsettling: the “I” that believes it’s steering may be largely steered - by conditioning, language, fear, group identity. If you never watch the process, your convictions can’t be distinguished from reflex.

Context matters. Bohm spent his career in physics, where progress often comes from interrogating assumptions about observation itself (what counts as a measurement, what the observer does to the observed). Later, in his dialogues and writings on consciousness, he extends that epistemic humility to everyday life: treat thought as something with dynamics, feedback loops, and errors - not as a sacred inner narrator. It’s also a cultural critique of information-heavy societies: we’re drowning in content while ignoring the cognitive habits that make content persuasive, contagious, or toxic. The punchline is methodological: real clarity begins not by acquiring better thoughts, but by seeing how thought happens.