Speaker 1: If you had to describe the details of what happens
Speaker 1: in your mind when you're just sitting around, how good
Speaker 1: would you be at it? Does paying attention to what's
Speaker 1: happening in your thoughts change your thoughts? How do we
Speaker 1: build language about our interior life when much of it
Speaker 1: doesn't have any words at all? What does this have
Speaker 1: to do with getting surprised by a random beep and
Speaker 1: immediately writing down what you're thinking. Welcome to enter cosmos
Speaker 1: with me David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and author at
Speaker 1: Stanford and in these episodes we sail deeply into our
Speaker 1: three pound universe to understand why and how our lives
Speaker 1: look the way they do. Today's episode is about what
Speaker 1: you can know about your inner life. Now you may
Speaker 1: know that I wrote my book Incognito about the giant
Speaker 1: swirling river happening under the hood, all of the things
Speaker 1: that your brain is doing that the conscious you has
Speaker 1: no access to and no awareness of. Most of the
Speaker 1: action is happening down at that level, but we do
Speaker 1: have conscious thought. Think of that like the surface of
Speaker 1: that swirling river. That's your inner thoughts. But the really
Speaker 1: weird part is you're generally not very good at describing
Speaker 1: your inner thoughts. In other words, we might think, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: I know what my conscious experience is. I have an
Speaker 1: inner voice, and I narrate what I'm going to do next,
Speaker 1: and sometimes I feel happy or sad. But the issue
Speaker 1: we're going to dive into today is that your insight
Speaker 1: into your own conscious experience is shockingly bad, and we're
Speaker 1: going to see a way that this can be studied
Speaker 1: and made better. So let's start here. If you had
Speaker 1: to describe the world around you, you could point to
Speaker 1: the things that you see. There's buildings, there's trees, there's
Speaker 1: a bicyclist. You could measure distances, you could measure temperatures,
Speaker 1: how much things weigh, and you can put together a
Speaker 1: detailed and accurate account of the world around you. But
Speaker 1: the other world we inhabit is our inner cosmos, the
Speaker 1: world inside. So think about the swirl of thoughts that
Speaker 1: drifts through your mind while you're driving, or the inner
Speaker 1: voice that narrates your day, sometimes it's encouraging, sometimes critical.
Speaker 1: Or think about the images that flash by when you're
Speaker 1: lost in a memory, or the sense of anticipation when
Speaker 1: you're waiting for something to happen. And maybe this has
Speaker 1: you know, words associated with it. This inner world is
Speaker 1: arguably just as important as the outer world. It's where
Speaker 1: our emotions are felt and our plans are born. And yet,
Speaker 1: despite its centrality, despite the fact that we each live
Speaker 1: inside this private theater of experience, it's really hard to
Speaker 1: nail down. We don't understand it nearly as well as
Speaker 1: we think we do. Now why not? Well, part of
Speaker 1: the challenge is that the inner world is very fleeting.
Speaker 1: A thought appears for you and then it morphs, and
Speaker 1: then it's gone before you can catch it, or any
Speaker 1: emotion wells up and fades before you even find a
Speaker 1: word for it. So most of the time we move
Speaker 1: through our days immersed in this invisible river of experience
Speaker 1: without even realizing it's there. We are like fish in water,
Speaker 1: surrounded by it, but unable to describe it because we've
Speaker 1: never seen anything else. Now, imagine you're a scientist and
Speaker 1: you want to study this inner world. You want to
Speaker 1: take conscious experience not as an abstract idea, but it's
Speaker 1: something that can be studied. Now, how would you do it.
Speaker 1: We have a few tools like fMRI or EEG, but
Speaker 1: these don't allow you to actually put a thought under
Speaker 1: the microscope. You can't weigh a feeling on a scale.
Speaker 1: You can't take a snapshot of a passing daydream. So
Speaker 1: maybe what you would do instead is just try to
Speaker 1: get people to pay attention to their inner life and
Speaker 1: describe it. But the difficulty there is that when a
Speaker 1: person tries to pay attention to their inner life, that
Speaker 1: changes it. The rawness of experience gets replaced with their
Speaker 1: ideas about experience. Maybe memories get polished, or gaps get
Speaker 1: filled in, or stories get invented. So if you truly
Speaker 1: wanted to study conscious experience, the real, messy, flickering reality
Speaker 1: of it, you would need a new kind of method.
Speaker 1: One that doesn't assume it already knows what's happening inside,
Speaker 1: one that doesn't force people's minds into neat categories, one
Speaker 1: that finds a way to respect the fluid and delicate
Speaker 1: and often unexpected nature of inner life. And that brings
Speaker 1: us to today's guest, Russell Hurlbert. He's a professor of
Speaker 1: psychology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Russell has
Speaker 1: spent decades wrestling with exactly these questions, and he developed
Speaker 1: a technique to get at the details of people's moment
Speaker 1: to moment experience as faithfully as possible. He's worked for
Speaker 1: a long time to turn the mysterious territory of consciousness
Speaker 1: into something we can actually explore. So in our conversation today,
Speaker 1: we'll talk about what kinds of inner experiences people really have,
Speaker 1: why our intuitions about our own minds are often wrong,
Speaker 1: and why our inner world is richer and stranger and
Speaker 1: more surprising than we usually imagine. Here's my conversation with
Speaker 1: Russell Hurlbert. Okay, Russ, So before we get into your
Speaker 1: contributions and trying to understand internal experience, I want to
Speaker 1: understand how people were thinking about the world when you
Speaker 1: were a young student. So, if I'm correct, you once
Speaker 1: met BF Skinner. What was that like and what was
Speaker 1: his view on private subjective experience?
Speaker 2: Well, that's a great question, because I consider Skinner one
Speaker 2: of my significant ancestors. I guess you could say so,
Speaker 2: and I would say it's an important question because you
Speaker 2: have to understand what I think Skinner thought and when
Speaker 2: I think everybody else thinks that Skinner thought, and those
Speaker 2: are very different things. What everybody else thinks that Skinner
Speaker 2: thought was that nobody had inner experience in the world
Speaker 2: was a black box or something, and what was interesting
Speaker 2: was behavior, things that you could measure and external behavior
Speaker 2: and and but that isn't what Skinner wrote, and it
Speaker 2: isn't what he said, and it isn't what he believed.
Speaker 2: But that's what a lot of people think think that
Speaker 2: he said. What he actually believed was that inner experience
Speaker 2: was there, and you experience things like hot and pain
Speaker 2: and visual visual stuff. That stuff is there. But he said,
Speaker 2: it's very difficult to scientifically deal with that stuff because
Speaker 2: the language that you use to describe inner experience is
Speaker 2: not well differentiated. And that was his main that was
Speaker 2: one of his main contributions, one of the main one
Speaker 2: of the main things that drives my research.
Speaker 1: What did he means, not well differentiated?
Speaker 2: So, for example, you have a blue background going on
Speaker 2: right now, and we can we can have a conversation
Speaker 2: where we can be very careful about what the color
Speaker 2: that blue is. It's not navy blue, it's sort of
Speaker 2: like sky blue. It's not turquoise blue. It is sort
Speaker 2: of azure. Maybe it's not azure. We can we can
Speaker 2: refine our language about that quite effectively, exterior language. But
Speaker 2: if I say I'm feeling blue, and George says he's
Speaker 2: feeling blue, and Doug says he's feeling blue. Well, there's
Speaker 2: no guarantee at all that those mean the same thing,
Speaker 2: And we cannot present a different blue to me, a
Speaker 2: different inner blue to me, and a different and the
Speaker 2: same inner blue to Doug, and and there and thereby
Speaker 2: figure out what the language is. So so you can't
Speaker 2: you cannot differentiate the language, Skinner said, And I think
Speaker 2: he was sort of half right about that. I think
Speaker 2: the language is not well differentiated in general, but I
Speaker 2: think you can differentiate it. So that's maybe where Skinner
Speaker 2: and I depart. So so we're in basic agreement that
Speaker 2: people people's language about their inner experience is not to
Speaker 2: be trusted. Where we differ is he said, well, let's
Speaker 2: just let's just not deal with that, let's do let's
Speaker 2: look at external behavior. And I said, I say, well,
Speaker 2: let's just try to differentiate and do the best we
Speaker 2: can and figure out ways that we can become confident
Speaker 2: about the language that we use, and up to the
Speaker 2: extent that we can do that. The other thing that
Speaker 2: Skinner said that was important and that I totally agree with,
Speaker 2: is that he was entirely opposed to mentalistic explanations of behavior.
Speaker 2: So things like I eat because I'm hungry, because I'm
Speaker 2: hungry portion is a mentalistic explanation. And he said menalisms
Speaker 2: are bad science because you can't measure hunger directly. If
Speaker 2: you try to measure hunger directly, even in rats, you
Speaker 2: know you can. You can measure hunger by saying, well,
Speaker 2: it's been a month since he's since I've given him
Speaker 2: anything to eat, or this is at the amount of
Speaker 2: shock that he would endure to eat, or this is
Speaker 2: the amount of quinine that I can put into his
Speaker 2: pellets and they'll still still eat him. All those things
Speaker 2: are sort of measures hunger, but they don't correlate very
Speaker 2: well with each other, and so there isn't a state
Speaker 2: of hunger that drives that stuff, he would say, And
Speaker 2: I totally agree with that, and so my research is
Speaker 2: not mentalistic. I try to describe things that are directly apprehended.
Speaker 2: They're private, yes, but they're not mentalisms. They're directly apprehended experiences.
Speaker 2: So that's a lot. That's a long conversation about Skinner,
Speaker 2: But Skinner a Skinner was right about almost everything, but
Speaker 2: the path that he took was entirely behavioristic, or as
Speaker 2: the path that I take is to say, well, let's
Speaker 2: do the best we can about in our experience.
Speaker 1: So tell us what you mean exactly by something being apprehended.
Speaker 2: Well, the work that I do is I generally give
Speaker 2: people a beeper, and a beeper has an earphone, and
Speaker 2: it delivers a beep at a random time. And I
Speaker 2: am interested in what is ongoing before the footlights of
Speaker 2: your consciousness at the moment of that beat. And what
Speaker 2: I mean by directly apprehended is it has to be
Speaker 2: absolutely ongoing for you right then, not ten seconds before,
Speaker 2: not in general, but at the moment, it has to
Speaker 2: be happening for you. So, for example, if you were
Speaker 2: speaking to yourself at the moment of the beat, and
Speaker 2: I was saying I was saying I should get a hamburger,
Speaker 2: if the words quote I should get a hamburger are there,
Speaker 2: that I would call that directly apprehended. But if I
Speaker 2: was sort of somehow hungry maybe and we we were
Speaker 2: planning and going to lunch, and but that would not
Speaker 2: necessarily be apprehended. It would be a fact of the
Speaker 2: universe that I'm about to go get a Hamberger, but
Speaker 2: it wouldn't be directly present to me.
Speaker 1: Okay, so you know that people have these kind of experiences,
Speaker 1: but your contribution was developing this new method to study that.
Speaker 1: So what did you do with the beeper to get
Speaker 1: at experience in the way that people could tell you
Speaker 1: what they were apprehending at that moment.
Speaker 2: So the method is very simple. I give you a beeper,
Speaker 2: I ask you what's going on at the moment of
Speaker 2: the that was going on in your experience caught in
Speaker 2: flight by the beep? That's all. That's all I do.
Speaker 1: So the beep goes off at a random time, the
Speaker 1: person doesn't know that it's going to happen, and suddenly,
Speaker 1: what were you thinking? Right then?
Speaker 2: That's right? And that seems like a very simple question,
Speaker 2: and much of sort of modern experiential science believes that
Speaker 2: people can answer that question. I personally don't think people
Speaker 2: can answer that question without some training. So when I
Speaker 2: do that that kind of a study. So I give
Speaker 2: you a beeper and I tell you tell me what
Speaker 2: was in your experience at the moment of the beep,
Speaker 2: and then come back and tell me about that well
Speaker 2: later that day or tomorrow, maybe within a relatively short time.
Speaker 2: We'll have a conversation about that. And when we have
Speaker 2: that conversation, it'll turn out that you won't you won't
Speaker 2: be telling me about things that were going on at
Speaker 2: the moment of the beat. You'll be telling me about
Speaker 2: things that happened last week, or things that were I
Speaker 2: was startled by the people that would be after the
Speaker 2: after the moment of the beat, or things that you
Speaker 2: think happened in general, Well I always do this, or
Speaker 2: I never do that, or whatever, And we would have
Speaker 2: a conversation in which I would say, well, it might
Speaker 2: be true that you will almost always do that, but
Speaker 2: let's let's let the let's let the study demonstrate that.
Speaker 2: Don't tell me what you always do. Just tell me
Speaker 2: what was happening at this particular moment. And you would say,
Speaker 2: if you're a typical participant in my research, you would say, oh, yeah,
Speaker 2: you're right about that, but that really wasn't there. So
Speaker 2: I'll try to do better next time. And so next
Speaker 2: time you would you would presumably be somewhat better at it,
Speaker 2: or you might be somewhat better at it, and we
Speaker 2: would have another conversation where I would shape your ability
Speaker 2: to what I call cleave to experience and cleave to
Speaker 2: the moment of the beat. Let's zero in just on
Speaker 2: that time, not let's set aside everything else and just
Speaker 2: take a look at that particular moment as if that
Speaker 2: was interesting enough.
Speaker 1: So this is how descriptive experience sampling differs from other
Speaker 1: introspective methods, because you're saying, what are you feeling right now?
Speaker 1: And you have this surprising beep that goes off surprising
Speaker 1: in time, and it doesn't sound like other things, doesn't
Speaker 1: sound like your phone or other beeps that you're used to,
Speaker 1: and so people have to say, what was I doing
Speaker 1: internally just then? And so what sorts of answers did
Speaker 1: you discover?
Speaker 2: Well, what I would consider sort of my main main
Speaker 2: contribution is that people a don't know what the characteristics
Speaker 2: of their own inner experience are. People are very often
Speaker 2: entirely mistaken about that. So, for example, a lot of
Speaker 2: people come in to my studies, come in saying, well,
Speaker 2: you're going to find that I talk to myself a lot,
Speaker 2: because everybody talks to themselves a lot, and I talk
Speaker 2: to myself a lot. And many of the people who
Speaker 2: leave my studies leave saying, well, you know, I thought
Speaker 2: I was going to talk to myself, but it turns
Speaker 2: out I don't talk to myself ever, and that is
Speaker 2: not at all uncommon. People are sometimes dramatically mistaken, often
Speaker 2: dramatically mistaken, particularly about things like inner speech. People think
Speaker 2: that inner speech occurs, as a matter of fact, inner speaking.
Speaker 2: I prefer to call it inner speaking rather than inner speech,
Speaker 2: because it's more a verb than it is a thing.
Speaker 2: It's an action that I'm taking, So I think inner
Speaker 2: speaking is a more descriptive deal. And some people do
Speaker 2: talk innerly, so they will be saying, I'm going to
Speaker 2: go get a hamburger unquote, and that gets caught in
Speaker 2: flight by the beep.
Speaker 1: And so when when you started collecting these detailed reports,
Speaker 1: it sounds like you were surprised by it, but I
Speaker 1: imagine the people themselves were surprised. Did it change their
Speaker 1: notion of who they were in some sense?
Speaker 2: Yes? So the method is you're going to wear the beeper,
Speaker 2: we're going to talk about it. Then you're going to
Speaker 2: wear the beeper again, and we're going to talk about
Speaker 2: it again. And then we're going to wear the beeper
Speaker 2: and we're going to talk about it again. And then
Speaker 2: you're going to do it again, and you're going to
Speaker 2: get better at that each time, and I'm going to
Speaker 2: get better at understanding what to ask you. This is
Speaker 2: the characteristic of my method that I call iterative. We're
Speaker 2: going to get better and better at it as we progress,
Speaker 2: and that is really what makes my research different from
Speaker 2: most other people's research, the fact that I don't think
Speaker 2: you're going to be good at it on the first day,
Speaker 2: but I think that we can get better at it
Speaker 2: than the second day, and even better at it than
Speaker 2: the third day, and even better at it, which means
Speaker 2: I think that Skinner was right. You're not going to
Speaker 2: be good at it. Your language is going to be
Speaker 2: crappy at it on the first day, but we can
Speaker 2: learn how to talk about it by confronting or considering
Speaker 2: a series of your experiences over the course of several
Speaker 2: days of conversation.
Speaker 1: So what did you find. What were the most common
Speaker 1: types of inner experience that people have?
Speaker 2: Well times refer to what I call the five FP
Speaker 2: or five frequent phenomena, which are inner speaking people do
Speaker 2: talk to themselves sometimes inner seeing. Most people call that
Speaker 2: seeing image. I think there's a lot of reasons not
Speaker 2: that call it that, but people have visual imagery. That's two.
Speaker 2: The third is sensory awareness. Sensory awareness is I'm interested
Speaker 2: in some particularly sensory aspect for its own sake. Like
Speaker 2: we're having this conversation, and I could be drawn to
Speaker 2: the blue of the blue of your background, not because
Speaker 2: the blue is important to me or important to our conversation,
Speaker 2: are relevant to our conversation, but for whatever reason, I'm
Speaker 2: interested in the blue of the background. That's sensory awareness
Speaker 2: from my point of view. Then the fourth is feelings.
Speaker 2: People do experience emotions from time to time. And the
Speaker 2: fifth I call unsymbolized thinking. And by unsymbolized thinking, I
Speaker 2: mean I experience myself to be thinking about something and
Speaker 2: it's directly before the footlights of my consciousness thinking, but
Speaker 2: there's no words and no pictures, no imagery or whatever.
Speaker 2: So I could be thinking, let's go have a hamburger. No,
Speaker 2: I think I'll have a hot dog. Something that would
Speaker 2: be that explicit Hamburger's hot dogs, but without the words
Speaker 2: hamburger or hot dog, and no picture of a hamburger,
Speaker 2: and no smell of a hamburger and anything about a
Speaker 2: hamber except that I recognize myself to be contradicting my
Speaker 2: original thought about a hamburger and changing my mind to
Speaker 2: a hot dog.
Speaker 1: And how common is the unsymbolized thinking and is this
Speaker 1: different from person to person?
Speaker 2: All of the five the five FP all are common,
Speaker 2: and by common, I mean across all of my samples.
Speaker 2: They occur a quarter or third or of the time.
Speaker 2: And you can have more than one at a time,
Speaker 2: so the numbers don't have to add up to one.
Speaker 2: But they're all common, and they're all The frequency varies
Speaker 2: from zero to one hundred percent within people, so people
Speaker 2: are hugely different. There are some people who who do
Speaker 2: innerally speak almost all the time, and others who never
Speaker 2: innerly speak, and some who we have visual imagery all
Speaker 2: the time, and some who never do and all and
Speaker 2: everywhere in between. So people are people are very different
Speaker 2: about that.
Speaker 1: This list of five frequent phenomenon, this is not exhaustive, right,
Speaker 1: There are other phenomena that people experience.
Speaker 2: Absolutely. I don't want us to think that there's these
Speaker 2: five things that you can do and that's all that's
Speaker 2: all you got. You can take this one off the
Speaker 2: shelf and do that, and you're gonna take inner speaking
Speaker 2: off the shelf and do that. That's not the way
Speaker 2: it is. What I think is that there are enough
Speaker 2: people who who just scribe a phenomenon where they are
Speaker 2: engaged in some kind of speaking with themselves, that we
Speaker 2: might as well give it a name and call it
Speaker 2: the same thing across people. That would be inner speaking.
Speaker 2: But there's all kinds of variations, both within the five
Speaker 2: categories that I've ticked off there and others. So you
Speaker 2: can inner speaking, for example, has as its neighbors interheering.
Speaker 2: You can hear your own voice rather than speak it,
Speaker 2: and that's a very different phenomenon, actually as different as
Speaker 2: speaking into a tape recorder or hearing your voice come
Speaker 2: back out of a tape recorder, same words, same voice, whatever,
Speaker 2: But the experience is dramatically different. And inner speaking takes
Speaker 2: place sometimes with entire sentences and sometimes with sort of
Speaker 2: a shorthand version of sentences. There's some theorists who think
Speaker 2: that all inner speaking is a condensed thing, but that's
Speaker 2: not true. It's actually it's actually more common and from
Speaker 2: my point of view, and more complete sentences than condensed.
Speaker 2: And sometimes words are present and sometimes they're missing, and
Speaker 2: you can have the experience of speaking without any words
Speaker 2: at all or this all manner of alternatives.
Speaker 1: And this question comes back to what you said about
Speaker 1: training people iteratively to do this. But I can imagine
Speaker 1: it feels to me that with unsymbolized thinking, people would
Speaker 1: often feel like they need to describe that as inner speech.
Speaker 1: They might confuse those do you see that happening. Let's
Speaker 1: say I'm imagining the hammerger and the hot dog, and
Speaker 1: you say, what were you thinking just then? And I
Speaker 1: might put it into speech even if it wasn't actually
Speaker 1: how I experienced it.
Speaker 2: That's what generally happens. So the typical pattern is that
Speaker 2: somebody says, I talk to myself all the time, and
Speaker 2: so I said, well, that may be will be true,
Speaker 2: but let's discover that. And the first peek was you
Speaker 2: would say say I was saying to myself, I should
Speaker 2: go have a hammerger, And I said, well, what exactly
Speaker 2: were the words that you were saying? And you would say,
Speaker 2: I think I'd like to have a hamburger, and I
Speaker 2: would point out, well, those are not exactly the same words.
Speaker 2: The first set of words was I should go get
Speaker 2: a hamburger, and the other one was I would like
Speaker 2: to have a hamburger. Those are not exactly the same words.
Speaker 2: And I'm interested in words, so when you if you
Speaker 2: have words, I'd like to know exactly what those words are.
Speaker 2: And you would say, oh, that seems fair. If if
Speaker 2: I'm saying what the words are, I'll tell him then.
Speaker 2: And then the second day you would come back and
Speaker 2: say I was saying to myself that I should turn
Speaker 2: up thermostat And I would say, well, what are you
Speaker 2: saying to yourself? And you would say, well, the room
Speaker 2: was cold, and so I think I was saying to
Speaker 2: myself that I should put it up to seventy six degrees.
Speaker 2: And I would say, well, you know, seventy six degrees
Speaker 2: is a little bit different from my being cold. What
Speaker 2: were those words? And then the third day you would
Speaker 2: come back and you say, you know, I've been telling
Speaker 2: you all these things about words, but they're not really words.
Speaker 2: It takes it takes three days or four or five
Speaker 2: of careful interviewing before the typical person can say, well,
Speaker 2: you know, there really weren't words there. People have the
Speaker 2: notion what I call the presupposition, that words are present,
Speaker 2: and I would say that that My technique was never well,
Speaker 2: I don't believe you when you say you had words there,
Speaker 2: tell me about it. What I said instead was you
Speaker 2: tell me what the words were. I'll like to know
Speaker 2: exactly what those words were. I was always in favor
Speaker 2: of your telling me about the words you, because you're
Speaker 2: an honest broker, as most people really are, down deep,
Speaker 2: would try to would think of that as a reasonable
Speaker 2: question to try to do it, and they you would
Speaker 2: discover for yourself, No, there weren't really words there. So
Speaker 2: I'm I feel like an innocent observer in that regard.
Speaker 1: I know some researchers are skeptical about the reliability of
Speaker 1: the reports of inner experiences, So how do you how
Speaker 1: do you defend against that?
Speaker 2: So I think everybody is justifiably skeptical about reports about
Speaker 2: in your experience, And I would say, I think you
Speaker 2: should not think of the results of my studies as
Speaker 2: being reports of inner experience. They are descriptions of in
Speaker 2: your experience that have been generated by the participant and
Speaker 2: me together. That is not a report. It's a big
Speaker 2: difference from my point of view, because most of psychology
Speaker 2: is based on reports. We'll get a report from you
Speaker 2: and that's it. The subject is down the road, and
Speaker 2: then we try to analyze this kind of a report.
Speaker 2: I think that's bad science. I don't do that. What
Speaker 2: I do instead is you give me a report that
Speaker 2: said I was thinking I should have a hamburger, and
Speaker 2: I said, well, let's flesh that out. Let's see whether
Speaker 2: we can get a description about that. It turns out
Speaker 2: to be a bad description. The second day you'll give
Speaker 2: me another report and I'll say, well, let's flesh that out.
Speaker 2: That turns out to be a bad description too. The
Speaker 2: third day you give me another report. But together we
Speaker 2: can make that into a description that I think is believable.
Speaker 2: But it's a first person plural exercise. It is not
Speaker 2: a first person seeing their exercise.
Speaker 1: Got it? And what you're really shooting for here is
Speaker 1: what you call pristine inner experience. Tell us what you
Speaker 1: mean by that.
Speaker 2: By pristine, I mean naturally occurring in your natural environment.
Speaker 2: So I want to know what David's experience was like
Speaker 2: when he's doing whatever it is that David's doing. If
Speaker 2: he's doing an interview, I would like to know what
Speaker 2: his experienced like to do in an interview. See if
Speaker 2: he's driving to the grocery store, I'd like to know
Speaker 2: what's happening in the grocery store. That's what I mean
Speaker 2: by pristine in your natural environment, un altered by the
Speaker 2: intentions or whatever. So I use pristine in the same
Speaker 2: way that you would talk about a forest being pristine,
Speaker 2: but before there's an asphalt walkway, and before the plastic bags,
Speaker 2: and before the road signs and all the other.
Speaker 1: And this is how you differentiated from other psychology experiments
Speaker 1: where someone comes into the lab, they do a report
Speaker 1: of some sort, and they leave. Just so we're clear here,
Speaker 1: how often were these beeps? And they were going off
Speaker 1: just during somebody's day, right as they were proceeding through life.
Speaker 2: What I found is that in an hour, which is
Speaker 2: a pretty long time for interpersonal reaction in personal relationships,
Speaker 2: So in an hour, we can talk about a half
Speaker 2: a dozen beeps. And so I asked you to collect
Speaker 2: a half a dozen beeps in and I set up
Speaker 2: I generally set the beeper so that it's random, with
Speaker 2: an average time in between beeps of a half an hour.
Speaker 2: So you're gonna wear the beeper for three or four hours.
Speaker 2: You're gonna get a half a dozen beeps, and then
Speaker 2: we're going to talk about those half a dozen beeps.
Speaker 2: And then you're gonna wear the beeper again tomorrow or
Speaker 2: next week or whatever for another three or four hours
Speaker 2: and get another half a dozen beeps.
Speaker 1: And the idea is that I wear that at home
Speaker 1: while I'm going about my life.
Speaker 2: If you're at home, or if you're work or where,
Speaker 2: if you're at the grocery store or whatever. I don't
Speaker 2: have a rule about how you do that, but what
Speaker 2: generally happens is that people will say, after they've done
Speaker 2: it for a few days, well, you know, I really
Speaker 2: out of work when I'm doing this kind of behavior,
Speaker 2: because when I'm engaged in that activity, maybe my thinking
Speaker 2: is different and we should try that. And I would say, well,
Speaker 2: that sounds like a good idea.
Speaker 1: And just remind us. When the beep goes off, does
Speaker 1: the person immediately stop what they're doing and write it
Speaker 1: down or record it?
Speaker 2: Yes, So your task, you're wearing the beeper, You're going
Speaker 2: about your everyday life. This is a beeper has an
Speaker 2: earphone in it. You put an earphone in you and
Speaker 2: put this in your pocket and go about your every
Speaker 2: day life, and when it beeps, you suspend whatever it
Speaker 2: is that you were doing to freeze your inner experience
Speaker 2: enough so that you can jot down some notes about it,
Speaker 2: and then generally the best way to do it is
Speaker 2: to jot down notes in a notebook. But your task
Speaker 2: is to jot down notes enough so that then we
Speaker 2: can talk about it and you can remember what that
Speaker 2: particular experience was about. I don't look at your notes
Speaker 2: the notes. The notes are between you and you so
Speaker 2: that you can do a good job of describing your experience.
Speaker 1: Are there things about inner experience that science is not
Speaker 1: able to measure?
Speaker 2: Yes, So the work that I do I try to
Speaker 2: get what I call a high fidelity description of inner experience,
Speaker 2: but it's short of perfection. I strive for perfection and
Speaker 2: fall short all the time. But I think there's a
Speaker 2: pretty big difference between somebody saying to themselves I should
Speaker 2: go have a hamburger and somebody else having a visual
Speaker 2: imagery of a hamburger. There's very little confusion about that
Speaker 2: if people are actually saying it and people are actually
Speaker 2: seeing it. If they're not, then you know, if you've
Speaker 2: got some theory about the way consciousness is and how
Speaker 2: hamburgers present themselves in consciousness, then those that those things
Speaker 2: are hard to tease apart.
Speaker 1: Could we use descriptive experience sampling to help people become
Speaker 1: more aware of their own mental patterns in let's say,
Speaker 1: therapy or mindfulness. Is there a way that if you
Speaker 1: had better a more realistic insight into your own thought processes,
Speaker 1: into your own inner experience, that that would help you
Speaker 1: in some way?
Speaker 2: I think they answered it as definitely yes. The typical
Speaker 2: person who finishes my study says, that's the best therapy
Speaker 2: I've ever had, and a lot of them have had
Speaker 2: a lot of therapy. And the interesting thing about it
Speaker 2: is that that what we did was never anything other
Speaker 2: than tell me about what was in your experience at
Speaker 2: the moment of the beat. We never tried to fix
Speaker 2: you or try to you know, why do they say
Speaker 2: that's the best therapy? What's their experience? Because they now
Speaker 2: feel themselves to be less delusional than they were before.
Speaker 2: Ah great, I think they oracle is right and know
Speaker 2: yourself as an important deal.
Speaker 1: Have you ever made a phone app that allows people
Speaker 1: to do this on at scale?
Speaker 2: I have a phone app that I have made, but
Speaker 2: it isn't good enough. Sooner or later I will I
Speaker 2: will build a beeper that would be easier, easily available.
Speaker 2: But it's not just the beeper. It's the beeper along
Speaker 2: with somebody who is skilled at helping you what I
Speaker 2: call bracket your presuppositions. So you've got you have presuppositions
Speaker 2: about I'm an inner speaker, say and and my technique,
Speaker 2: what I call bracketing presuppositions is well, let's just set
Speaker 2: that aside. Maybe you are an inner speaker, maybe you're
Speaker 2: not an internspeaker. Let's let's find out. That's the bracketing technique.
Speaker 2: That's ah, that is a non trivial skill if you were.
Speaker 2: If you will leave yourself incorrectly to be an inner
Speaker 2: speaker and you wore a beeper until the cows came home,
Speaker 2: you would end up believing yourself to be an inner
Speaker 2: speaker because at every beep you would say, well, us,
Speaker 2: as I was saying to myself and then your next people,
Speaker 2: I was saying to myself, and at the next people,
Speaker 2: I was saying to myself, you need skilled interlocutor who
Speaker 2: can ask questions that help you overcome your own presuppositions.
Speaker 2: It's my job as an interviewer is to try to
Speaker 2: pay attention to where it looks like you're describing experience
Speaker 2: and where it looks like you're not describing experience and
Speaker 2: help you get from one to the other.
Speaker 1: I agree. I do wonder, in this era of incredible AI,
Speaker 1: whether we could get that to bracket presuppositions almost as
Speaker 1: well as the human does.
Speaker 2: I doubt it, but I've been mistaken about these things before,
Speaker 2: so I don't really know.
Speaker 1: What can your work tell us about somebody, let's say,
Speaker 1: with depression.
Speaker 2: I think a good exploration of experience and depression would
Speaker 2: be valuable, and I've done a little bit of it,
Speaker 2: but I can. Let me tell you just one example
Speaker 2: of a person who was a psychlothemic kind of person
Speaker 2: who was depressed today and up tomorrow and down the
Speaker 2: next day and then up or whatever. And what I
Speaker 2: found was that their inner experience was very different on
Speaker 2: those days. So when they were down in a depressed day,
Speaker 2: they had a lot of what I would call unsymbolized thinking,
Speaker 2: and when they had an up day, they had a
Speaker 2: lot of what I would call visual inner scene. And
Speaker 2: the interesting thing that I would like to tell you
Speaker 2: about that is that when they were down, they knew
Speaker 2: themselves to be down, but they did didn't know themselves
Speaker 2: to be absent of visual imagery, and when they were up,
Speaker 2: they knew themselves to be up, but they didn't say, well,
Speaker 2: you know, when I'm up, I have visual imagery, and
Speaker 2: when I'm down, I don't have visual imagery that came
Speaker 2: from the exploration. So people, people's inner experience, I think
Speaker 2: is directly connected to something. Whether whether it's the inner
Speaker 2: experience causes it, or whether it's a result of it,
Speaker 2: or whether it is an epiphenomenon, I don't. I don't
Speaker 2: know the answer to that. I think you need a
Speaker 2: lot of people out there like me doing this kind
Speaker 2: of work. But what you what that what that example
Speaker 2: says is you can't expect a person to be able
Speaker 2: to tell you what the important things are because they
Speaker 2: just don't know.
Speaker 1: Have you ever tried this, let's say, with somebody who's schizophrenia.
Speaker 2: Yes, my first book actually was about schizophrenia, which is
Speaker 2: which is a small sample of schizophrenics. But the when
Speaker 2: what I found was that there was quite a bit
Speaker 2: of visual imagery involved schizophrenics, and that that visual imagery
Speaker 2: was very often what one of my participants called goofed up,
Speaker 2: which I came to adopt as a technical term for myself.
Speaker 2: So a goofed up. Well. So, first off, a normal image,
Speaker 2: a non schizophrenic image, is not seeing an image. It
Speaker 2: is an inter seeing. So I prefer to call it intercening.
Speaker 2: And so if you're not schizophrenic, and you're you and
Speaker 2: you have an inner visual phenomenon, it's pretty much like
Speaker 2: having an external version for most people, which is to say,
Speaker 2: the center of it is sort of more detailed and
Speaker 2: it disappears off at the edges, which means it's not
Speaker 2: like looking at a photograph with a border. And my
Speaker 2: schizophrenic subjects, they're intercene was like seeing an image and
Speaker 2: the image, which is to say, what they saw had
Speaker 2: characteristics of an image. It did have a border, and
Speaker 2: that border could be very arbitrary, like the border could
Speaker 2: be like that, and or they or the image could
Speaker 2: have spots on it, like somebody had taken the tooth
Speaker 2: parts with ink on it and spattered spattered the image,
Speaker 2: and and that spattering is on the image. It's not
Speaker 2: on the face of the guy. It's on the image
Speaker 2: of the guy. And or the image would float away.
Speaker 2: So they see it like this, and then they see
Speaker 2: the sort of curl up and disappear. That is not
Speaker 2: what normal what normal people do. So that is part
Speaker 2: of the reason why I'm fairly sensitive when people say
Speaker 2: I was seeing an image. I think it's true the
Speaker 2: schizophrenic individuals, at least some schizophrenic individuals see an image,
Speaker 2: whereas most normal people don't. And it's a hugely different deal. Yeah,
Speaker 2: which which is unknown to most of experiential science, which
Speaker 2: to me is we will. You have to You have
Speaker 2: to pay attention closely, because if you let somebody tell you, well,
Speaker 2: I'm seeing an image, then and you lost the game.
Speaker 2: Schizophrenics are often given credits for having blunted affect, which
Speaker 2: which by which the business means they don't really experience
Speaker 2: any emotions. And what I found was that my schizophrenic participants,
Speaker 2: at least some of my schizophrenics, had what I what
Speaker 2: I would characterize as hyper clear affect. And and and
Speaker 2: so they would they would say I was angry, and
Speaker 2: that anger, that anger was a tear dropped shape in
Speaker 2: my chest, and it was sort of this white here,
Speaker 2: and then it got wider and it was half an
Speaker 2: inch below my chest here and two inches thick down here.
Speaker 2: That is not the way most non schizophrenic people talk
Speaker 2: about their their inner experience, but excuse thephrenics have learned
Speaker 2: not to talk like that, and so they as a
Speaker 2: general rule, they don't tell you about that aspect of
Speaker 2: their experience, and so it looks from the outside like
Speaker 2: they're inner, like their feelings are blunted. But I don't
Speaker 2: think that's necessarily true. I think there's a lot to
Speaker 2: be learned from knowing something about somebody's inner experience the
Speaker 2: way their inner experience actually is. But to do that
Speaker 2: you have to go through three or four days worth
Speaker 2: of editative training, and most psychology is one shot. Do
Speaker 2: you the irony there is that in my work I
Speaker 2: throw out the first day or two of descriptive experience
Speaker 2: ampling work results all the time, because I'm sure that
Speaker 2: people don't know what they're talking about. Most of the
Speaker 2: rest of the science spend. All they do is look
Speaker 2: at what I would call the first or second day,
Speaker 2: so they look at what I think is just absolutely
Speaker 2: not worth watching.
Speaker 1: Last question, if I understand correctly, you started descriptive experience
Speaker 1: am playing fifty years ago. Is that correct?
Speaker 2: That's true?
Speaker 1: Okay, so where do you think it's going to be
Speaker 1: in fifty years from now?
Speaker 2: You know, I think about that sometimes I think I'm
Speaker 2: fifty years out of date, and sometimes i think I'm
Speaker 2: fifty years ahead of the game. I think in her
Speaker 2: experience is vitally important, and I think the I think
Speaker 2: the oracles were right. Know thyself as an important deal,
Speaker 2: and I think the I think that's at the heart
Speaker 2: of almost every thoughtful tradition people. People want to know themselves,
Speaker 2: and I think we've sort of fallen away from that.
Speaker 2: AI is sort of the maximally falling away, falling away
Speaker 2: from that, leaving that behind. Whether we can transcend that
Speaker 2: and figure out how to get back to in her
Speaker 2: experience the way in your experience is actually experienced before
Speaker 2: we destroy ourselves through some other method. I don't know
Speaker 2: the answer to that question.
Speaker 1: Talking with Russell Hurlbert reminds us of something that's easy
Speaker 1: to forget. The most familiar things in our lives, our
Speaker 1: own thoughts and feelings and sensations, are in many ways
Speaker 1: still unexplored territory. We move through our days surrounded by
Speaker 1: the chatter of inner speech and flashes of imagery and
Speaker 1: the subtle currents of emotion, but we rarely pause to
Speaker 1: look carefully. We rarely ask what is actually happening inside
Speaker 1: me right now, we rarely recognize how much is there,
Speaker 1: and when we do turn our attention inward, it's easy
Speaker 1: to bring with us a set of assumptions that we're
Speaker 1: constantly narrating our lives in full sentences, that our thoughts
Speaker 1: are always well formed and logical and coherent, that we
Speaker 1: already know what it feels like to be ourselves. But
Speaker 1: as Russell's work shows, the reality of inner experience is
Speaker 1: typically messier and stranger than the stories that we tell
Speaker 1: about it. Some moments are rich with inner speech, Others
Speaker 1: unfold in pure wordless awareness. Some thoughts flash by without
Speaker 1: any verbal or visual form at all. Sometimes what seems
Speaker 1: central to us, like emotions, barely register at all in
Speaker 1: a given moment, and other times a sensory awareness or
Speaker 1: maybe unsymbolized thinking or a subtle feeling, these are the
Speaker 1: things that take center stage. So what Russell is offering
Speaker 1: isn't just a scientific method. It's an invitation, an invitation
Speaker 1: to approach our own experience with the same curiosity, the
Speaker 1: same openness that a scientist brings to a new and
Speaker 1: unfamiliar landscape, to bracket our expectations, to listen carefully to
Speaker 1: resist the urge to simplify or categorize too quickly, and
Speaker 1: maybe even to be surprised by what we find. Inner
Speaker 1: experience is not just an echo of the outside world.
Speaker 1: It is its own territory. It's complex and dynamic, and
Speaker 1: it's worth studying, not just scientifically but personally, because in
Speaker 1: the end, understanding our conscious lives is not just an
Speaker 1: academic exercise. It's you. It's what you've got going on
Speaker 1: in there, so you may as well figure out what
Speaker 1: it is. Thanks for joining me today, and I hope
Speaker 1: today's episode will give you a little window into the
Speaker 1: extraordinary and often overlooked cosmos inside of us.
Speaker 2: All go to.
Speaker 1: Eagleman dot com slash podcast for more information and to
Speaker 1: find further reading. Check out my newsletter on substack and
Speaker 1: be a part of the online chats there, or you
Speaker 1: can send me an email at podcasts at Eagleman dot
Speaker 1: com with questions or discussion. Finally, you can watch the
Speaker 1: videos of Inner Cosmos on YouTube, where you can leave comments.
Speaker 1: Until next time, I'm David Eagleman, and we are catching
Speaker 1: glimpses of the inner cosmos