WEBVTT - Ep104 "What is your internal world really like?" (with Russell Hurlburt) 0:00:05.080 --> 0:00:08.160 If you had to describe the details of what happens 0:00:08.160 --> 0:00:11.440 in your mind when you're just sitting around, how good 0:00:11.520 --> 0:00:14.840 would you be at it? Does paying attention to what's 0:00:14.920 --> 0:00:19.480 happening in your thoughts change your thoughts? How do we 0:00:19.960 --> 0:00:23.880 build language about our interior life when much of it 0:00:23.960 --> 0:00:27.000 doesn't have any words at all? What does this have 0:00:27.080 --> 0:00:31.240 to do with getting surprised by a random beep and 0:00:31.360 --> 0:00:37.560 immediately writing down what you're thinking. Welcome to enter cosmos 0:00:37.600 --> 0:00:40.640 with me David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and author at 0:00:40.680 --> 0:00:44.120 Stanford and in these episodes we sail deeply into our 0:00:44.200 --> 0:00:48.200 three pound universe to understand why and how our lives 0:00:48.200 --> 0:01:07.520 look the way they do. Today's episode is about what 0:01:07.800 --> 0:01:12.039 you can know about your inner life. Now you may 0:01:12.080 --> 0:01:15.160 know that I wrote my book Incognito about the giant 0:01:15.360 --> 0:01:19.360 swirling river happening under the hood, all of the things 0:01:19.720 --> 0:01:23.600 that your brain is doing that the conscious you has 0:01:23.640 --> 0:01:27.120 no access to and no awareness of. Most of the 0:01:27.160 --> 0:01:30.640 action is happening down at that level, but we do 0:01:30.720 --> 0:01:34.560 have conscious thought. Think of that like the surface of 0:01:34.600 --> 0:01:39.679 that swirling river. That's your inner thoughts. But the really 0:01:39.720 --> 0:01:44.520 weird part is you're generally not very good at describing 0:01:44.600 --> 0:01:47.600 your inner thoughts. In other words, we might think, oh, yeah, 0:01:47.600 --> 0:01:50.840 I know what my conscious experience is. I have an 0:01:50.880 --> 0:01:53.919 inner voice, and I narrate what I'm going to do next, 0:01:54.280 --> 0:01:57.760 and sometimes I feel happy or sad. But the issue 0:01:57.840 --> 0:02:01.480 we're going to dive into today is that your insight 0:02:01.640 --> 0:02:06.280 into your own conscious experience is shockingly bad, and we're 0:02:06.320 --> 0:02:08.560 going to see a way that this can be studied 0:02:08.639 --> 0:02:11.720 and made better. So let's start here. If you had 0:02:11.760 --> 0:02:14.840 to describe the world around you, you could point to 0:02:14.880 --> 0:02:18.079 the things that you see. There's buildings, there's trees, there's 0:02:18.120 --> 0:02:22.519 a bicyclist. You could measure distances, you could measure temperatures, 0:02:22.560 --> 0:02:25.280 how much things weigh, and you can put together a 0:02:25.440 --> 0:02:29.560 detailed and accurate account of the world around you. But 0:02:29.680 --> 0:02:33.960 the other world we inhabit is our inner cosmos, the 0:02:34.000 --> 0:02:38.799 world inside. So think about the swirl of thoughts that 0:02:38.960 --> 0:02:43.560 drifts through your mind while you're driving, or the inner 0:02:43.639 --> 0:02:48.079 voice that narrates your day, sometimes it's encouraging, sometimes critical. 0:02:48.680 --> 0:02:51.560 Or think about the images that flash by when you're 0:02:51.919 --> 0:02:56.560 lost in a memory, or the sense of anticipation when 0:02:56.600 --> 0:02:59.840 you're waiting for something to happen. And maybe this has 0:03:00.000 --> 0:03:04.040 you know, words associated with it. This inner world is 0:03:04.160 --> 0:03:07.480 arguably just as important as the outer world. It's where 0:03:07.680 --> 0:03:11.200 our emotions are felt and our plans are born. And yet, 0:03:11.680 --> 0:03:16.520 despite its centrality, despite the fact that we each live 0:03:16.840 --> 0:03:21.640 inside this private theater of experience, it's really hard to 0:03:21.760 --> 0:03:25.320 nail down. We don't understand it nearly as well as 0:03:25.320 --> 0:03:28.320 we think we do. Now why not? Well, part of 0:03:28.360 --> 0:03:31.360 the challenge is that the inner world is very fleeting. 0:03:31.960 --> 0:03:34.360 A thought appears for you and then it morphs, and 0:03:34.400 --> 0:03:36.800 then it's gone before you can catch it, or any 0:03:36.800 --> 0:03:41.560 emotion wells up and fades before you even find a 0:03:41.720 --> 0:03:45.000 word for it. So most of the time we move 0:03:45.120 --> 0:03:49.640 through our days immersed in this invisible river of experience 0:03:49.720 --> 0:03:54.480 without even realizing it's there. We are like fish in water, 0:03:54.720 --> 0:03:58.320 surrounded by it, but unable to describe it because we've 0:03:58.360 --> 0:04:02.840 never seen anything else. Now, imagine you're a scientist and 0:04:02.880 --> 0:04:06.080 you want to study this inner world. You want to 0:04:06.120 --> 0:04:10.440 take conscious experience not as an abstract idea, but it's 0:04:10.480 --> 0:04:13.840 something that can be studied. Now, how would you do it. 0:04:14.720 --> 0:04:18.960 We have a few tools like fMRI or EEG, but 0:04:19.000 --> 0:04:22.240 these don't allow you to actually put a thought under 0:04:22.279 --> 0:04:26.239 the microscope. You can't weigh a feeling on a scale. 0:04:26.279 --> 0:04:31.640 You can't take a snapshot of a passing daydream. So 0:04:31.720 --> 0:04:33.760 maybe what you would do instead is just try to 0:04:33.760 --> 0:04:36.520 get people to pay attention to their inner life and 0:04:36.720 --> 0:04:40.039 describe it. But the difficulty there is that when a 0:04:40.080 --> 0:04:43.640 person tries to pay attention to their inner life, that 0:04:43.960 --> 0:04:49.159 changes it. The rawness of experience gets replaced with their 0:04:49.279 --> 0:04:53.920 ideas about experience. Maybe memories get polished, or gaps get 0:04:53.920 --> 0:04:58.000 filled in, or stories get invented. So if you truly 0:04:58.120 --> 0:05:03.919 wanted to study conscious experience, the real, messy, flickering reality 0:05:03.960 --> 0:05:07.239 of it, you would need a new kind of method. 0:05:07.760 --> 0:05:11.680 One that doesn't assume it already knows what's happening inside, 0:05:11.720 --> 0:05:16.640 one that doesn't force people's minds into neat categories, one 0:05:16.680 --> 0:05:21.039 that finds a way to respect the fluid and delicate 0:05:21.240 --> 0:05:26.039 and often unexpected nature of inner life. And that brings 0:05:26.120 --> 0:05:29.800 us to today's guest, Russell Hurlbert. He's a professor of 0:05:29.839 --> 0:05:34.080 psychology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Russell has 0:05:34.120 --> 0:05:37.880 spent decades wrestling with exactly these questions, and he developed 0:05:37.920 --> 0:05:42.440 a technique to get at the details of people's moment 0:05:42.520 --> 0:05:47.000 to moment experience as faithfully as possible. He's worked for 0:05:47.040 --> 0:05:51.240 a long time to turn the mysterious territory of consciousness 0:05:51.279 --> 0:05:55.760 into something we can actually explore. So in our conversation today, 0:05:56.240 --> 0:06:00.840 we'll talk about what kinds of inner experiences people really have, 0:06:01.480 --> 0:06:05.000 why our intuitions about our own minds are often wrong, 0:06:05.640 --> 0:06:09.440 and why our inner world is richer and stranger and 0:06:09.480 --> 0:06:14.120 more surprising than we usually imagine. Here's my conversation with 0:06:14.240 --> 0:06:21.640 Russell Hurlbert. Okay, Russ, So before we get into your 0:06:21.720 --> 0:06:25.560 contributions and trying to understand internal experience, I want to 0:06:25.640 --> 0:06:30.160 understand how people were thinking about the world when you 0:06:30.240 --> 0:06:33.239 were a young student. So, if I'm correct, you once 0:06:33.320 --> 0:06:36.880 met BF Skinner. What was that like and what was 0:06:37.000 --> 0:06:39.799 his view on private subjective experience? 0:06:40.160 --> 0:06:43.640 Well, that's a great question, because I consider Skinner one 0:06:43.680 --> 0:06:50.719 of my significant ancestors. I guess you could say so, 0:06:50.920 --> 0:06:54.719 and I would say it's an important question because you 0:06:54.800 --> 0:06:57.880 have to understand what I think Skinner thought and when 0:06:57.880 --> 0:07:00.640 I think everybody else thinks that Skinner thought, and those 0:07:00.680 --> 0:07:04.720 are very different things. What everybody else thinks that Skinner 0:07:04.760 --> 0:07:08.600 thought was that nobody had inner experience in the world 0:07:08.640 --> 0:07:11.360 was a black box or something, and what was interesting 0:07:11.440 --> 0:07:15.200 was behavior, things that you could measure and external behavior 0:07:15.840 --> 0:07:18.440 and and but that isn't what Skinner wrote, and it 0:07:18.480 --> 0:07:20.520 isn't what he said, and it isn't what he believed. 0:07:21.200 --> 0:07:23.960 But that's what a lot of people think think that 0:07:24.000 --> 0:07:27.640 he said. What he actually believed was that inner experience 0:07:27.800 --> 0:07:32.000 was there, and you experience things like hot and pain 0:07:32.120 --> 0:07:38.440 and visual visual stuff. That stuff is there. But he said, 0:07:38.480 --> 0:07:43.360 it's very difficult to scientifically deal with that stuff because 0:07:43.440 --> 0:07:47.880 the language that you use to describe inner experience is 0:07:47.920 --> 0:07:51.520 not well differentiated. And that was his main that was 0:07:51.520 --> 0:07:53.600 one of his main contributions, one of the main one 0:07:53.640 --> 0:07:55.160 of the main things that drives my research. 0:07:55.320 --> 0:07:57.240 What did he means, not well differentiated? 0:07:57.880 --> 0:08:00.360 So, for example, you have a blue background going on 0:08:00.480 --> 0:08:02.640 right now, and we can we can have a conversation 0:08:02.680 --> 0:08:05.280 where we can be very careful about what the color 0:08:05.360 --> 0:08:07.480 that blue is. It's not navy blue, it's sort of 0:08:07.480 --> 0:08:10.320 like sky blue. It's not turquoise blue. It is sort 0:08:10.360 --> 0:08:13.000 of azure. Maybe it's not azure. We can we can 0:08:13.080 --> 0:08:18.840 refine our language about that quite effectively, exterior language. But 0:08:18.920 --> 0:08:22.720 if I say I'm feeling blue, and George says he's 0:08:22.720 --> 0:08:26.120 feeling blue, and Doug says he's feeling blue. Well, there's 0:08:26.120 --> 0:08:29.600 no guarantee at all that those mean the same thing, 0:08:29.680 --> 0:08:32.600 And we cannot present a different blue to me, a 0:08:32.600 --> 0:08:35.480 different inner blue to me, and a different and the 0:08:35.520 --> 0:08:41.240 same inner blue to Doug, and and there and thereby 0:08:41.679 --> 0:08:44.679 figure out what the language is. So so you can't 0:08:44.920 --> 0:08:48.760 you cannot differentiate the language, Skinner said, And I think 0:08:48.840 --> 0:08:50.760 he was sort of half right about that. I think 0:08:51.640 --> 0:08:55.000 the language is not well differentiated in general, but I 0:08:55.000 --> 0:08:58.200 think you can differentiate it. So that's maybe where Skinner 0:08:58.240 --> 0:09:01.480 and I depart. So so we're in basic agreement that 0:09:01.600 --> 0:09:04.920 people people's language about their inner experience is not to 0:09:04.960 --> 0:09:10.480 be trusted. Where we differ is he said, well, let's 0:09:10.520 --> 0:09:12.640 just let's just not deal with that, let's do let's 0:09:12.640 --> 0:09:16.760 look at external behavior. And I said, I say, well, 0:09:16.840 --> 0:09:18.560 let's just try to differentiate and do the best we 0:09:18.640 --> 0:09:22.800 can and figure out ways that we can become confident 0:09:22.840 --> 0:09:25.280 about the language that we use, and up to the 0:09:25.320 --> 0:09:27.640 extent that we can do that. The other thing that 0:09:27.679 --> 0:09:30.760 Skinner said that was important and that I totally agree with, 0:09:30.920 --> 0:09:36.720 is that he was entirely opposed to mentalistic explanations of behavior. 0:09:37.400 --> 0:09:40.400 So things like I eat because I'm hungry, because I'm 0:09:40.440 --> 0:09:46.040 hungry portion is a mentalistic explanation. And he said menalisms 0:09:46.040 --> 0:09:50.480 are bad science because you can't measure hunger directly. If 0:09:50.520 --> 0:09:54.880 you try to measure hunger directly, even in rats, you 0:09:54.920 --> 0:09:57.000 know you can. You can measure hunger by saying, well, 0:09:57.040 --> 0:09:59.120 it's been a month since he's since I've given him 0:09:59.160 --> 0:10:01.679 anything to eat, or this is at the amount of 0:10:01.720 --> 0:10:03.600 shock that he would endure to eat, or this is 0:10:03.679 --> 0:10:06.559 the amount of quinine that I can put into his 0:10:06.640 --> 0:10:09.000 pellets and they'll still still eat him. All those things 0:10:09.000 --> 0:10:11.520 are sort of measures hunger, but they don't correlate very 0:10:11.520 --> 0:10:14.240 well with each other, and so there isn't a state 0:10:14.280 --> 0:10:17.120 of hunger that drives that stuff, he would say, And 0:10:17.200 --> 0:10:21.920 I totally agree with that, and so my research is 0:10:22.000 --> 0:10:26.840 not mentalistic. I try to describe things that are directly apprehended. 0:10:27.360 --> 0:10:32.960 They're private, yes, but they're not mentalisms. They're directly apprehended experiences. 0:10:33.640 --> 0:10:36.240 So that's a lot. That's a long conversation about Skinner, 0:10:36.440 --> 0:10:39.640 But Skinner a Skinner was right about almost everything, but 0:10:39.679 --> 0:10:42.440 the path that he took was entirely behavioristic, or as 0:10:42.480 --> 0:10:44.520 the path that I take is to say, well, let's 0:10:44.520 --> 0:10:46.000 do the best we can about in our experience. 0:10:46.400 --> 0:10:49.720 So tell us what you mean exactly by something being apprehended. 0:10:50.240 --> 0:10:52.719 Well, the work that I do is I generally give 0:10:52.760 --> 0:10:55.440 people a beeper, and a beeper has an earphone, and 0:10:55.480 --> 0:10:59.319 it delivers a beep at a random time. And I 0:10:59.360 --> 0:11:04.160 am interested in what is ongoing before the footlights of 0:11:04.200 --> 0:11:07.160 your consciousness at the moment of that beat. And what 0:11:07.200 --> 0:11:10.160 I mean by directly apprehended is it has to be 0:11:10.559 --> 0:11:14.880 absolutely ongoing for you right then, not ten seconds before, 0:11:15.240 --> 0:11:18.719 not in general, but at the moment, it has to 0:11:18.760 --> 0:11:22.480 be happening for you. So, for example, if you were 0:11:22.600 --> 0:11:24.839 speaking to yourself at the moment of the beat, and 0:11:24.880 --> 0:11:27.720 I was saying I was saying I should get a hamburger, 0:11:28.679 --> 0:11:31.520 if the words quote I should get a hamburger are there, 0:11:32.240 --> 0:11:37.040 that I would call that directly apprehended. But if I 0:11:37.160 --> 0:11:42.320 was sort of somehow hungry maybe and we we were 0:11:42.400 --> 0:11:46.800 planning and going to lunch, and but that would not 0:11:46.840 --> 0:11:49.040 necessarily be apprehended. It would be a fact of the 0:11:49.080 --> 0:11:51.640 universe that I'm about to go get a Hamberger, but 0:11:51.679 --> 0:11:53.040 it wouldn't be directly present to me. 0:11:53.520 --> 0:11:57.200 Okay, so you know that people have these kind of experiences, 0:11:57.280 --> 0:12:03.480 but your contribution was developing this new method to study that. 0:12:03.800 --> 0:12:06.360 So what did you do with the beeper to get 0:12:06.440 --> 0:12:08.679 at experience in the way that people could tell you 0:12:08.760 --> 0:12:10.880 what they were apprehending at that moment. 0:12:11.200 --> 0:12:14.040 So the method is very simple. I give you a beeper, 0:12:14.160 --> 0:12:15.680 I ask you what's going on at the moment of 0:12:15.720 --> 0:12:19.920 the that was going on in your experience caught in 0:12:20.000 --> 0:12:22.160 flight by the beep? That's all. That's all I do. 0:12:22.320 --> 0:12:24.720 So the beep goes off at a random time, the 0:12:24.760 --> 0:12:27.199 person doesn't know that it's going to happen, and suddenly, 0:12:27.600 --> 0:12:28.880 what were you thinking? Right then? 0:12:29.480 --> 0:12:32.120 That's right? And that seems like a very simple question, 0:12:32.360 --> 0:12:36.360 and much of sort of modern experiential science believes that 0:12:36.400 --> 0:12:39.040 people can answer that question. I personally don't think people 0:12:39.040 --> 0:12:44.000 can answer that question without some training. So when I 0:12:44.040 --> 0:12:45.800 do that that kind of a study. So I give 0:12:45.800 --> 0:12:47.600 you a beeper and I tell you tell me what 0:12:47.720 --> 0:12:49.240 was in your experience at the moment of the beep, 0:12:49.280 --> 0:12:51.640 and then come back and tell me about that well 0:12:51.760 --> 0:12:55.800 later that day or tomorrow, maybe within a relatively short time. 0:12:55.840 --> 0:12:58.360 We'll have a conversation about that. And when we have 0:12:58.520 --> 0:13:02.440 that conversation, it'll turn out that you won't you won't 0:13:02.440 --> 0:13:04.079 be telling me about things that were going on at 0:13:04.080 --> 0:13:05.880 the moment of the beat. You'll be telling me about 0:13:05.880 --> 0:13:08.559 things that happened last week, or things that were I 0:13:09.320 --> 0:13:11.000 was startled by the people that would be after the 0:13:11.280 --> 0:13:13.440 after the moment of the beat, or things that you 0:13:13.480 --> 0:13:15.560 think happened in general, Well I always do this, or 0:13:15.840 --> 0:13:19.040 I never do that, or whatever, And we would have 0:13:19.080 --> 0:13:21.199 a conversation in which I would say, well, it might 0:13:21.240 --> 0:13:23.319 be true that you will almost always do that, but 0:13:23.440 --> 0:13:26.960 let's let's let the let's let the study demonstrate that. 0:13:28.080 --> 0:13:29.720 Don't tell me what you always do. Just tell me 0:13:29.760 --> 0:13:32.520 what was happening at this particular moment. And you would say, 0:13:32.559 --> 0:13:35.199 if you're a typical participant in my research, you would say, oh, yeah, 0:13:35.240 --> 0:13:37.480 you're right about that, but that really wasn't there. So 0:13:37.640 --> 0:13:40.800 I'll try to do better next time. And so next 0:13:40.840 --> 0:13:44.439 time you would you would presumably be somewhat better at it, 0:13:44.520 --> 0:13:45.880 or you might be somewhat better at it, and we 0:13:45.920 --> 0:13:49.760 would have another conversation where I would shape your ability 0:13:49.840 --> 0:13:53.720 to what I call cleave to experience and cleave to 0:13:53.760 --> 0:13:56.360 the moment of the beat. Let's zero in just on 0:13:56.440 --> 0:14:00.640 that time, not let's set aside everything else and just 0:14:00.679 --> 0:14:02.520 take a look at that particular moment as if that 0:14:02.600 --> 0:14:03.440 was interesting enough. 0:14:05.200 --> 0:14:10.600 So this is how descriptive experience sampling differs from other 0:14:10.720 --> 0:14:15.200 introspective methods, because you're saying, what are you feeling right now? 0:14:15.800 --> 0:14:18.960 And you have this surprising beep that goes off surprising 0:14:19.000 --> 0:14:21.600 in time, and it doesn't sound like other things, doesn't 0:14:21.600 --> 0:14:23.800 sound like your phone or other beeps that you're used to, 0:14:24.200 --> 0:14:26.200 and so people have to say, what was I doing 0:14:27.080 --> 0:14:30.200 internally just then? And so what sorts of answers did 0:14:30.240 --> 0:14:30.760 you discover? 0:14:31.400 --> 0:14:33.200 Well, what I would consider sort of my main main 0:14:33.240 --> 0:14:37.400 contribution is that people a don't know what the characteristics 0:14:37.400 --> 0:14:39.520 of their own inner experience are. People are very often 0:14:39.880 --> 0:14:43.160 entirely mistaken about that. So, for example, a lot of 0:14:43.160 --> 0:14:46.000 people come in to my studies, come in saying, well, 0:14:46.000 --> 0:14:47.920 you're going to find that I talk to myself a lot, 0:14:47.920 --> 0:14:49.920 because everybody talks to themselves a lot, and I talk 0:14:49.960 --> 0:14:54.320 to myself a lot. And many of the people who 0:14:54.400 --> 0:14:57.120 leave my studies leave saying, well, you know, I thought 0:14:57.160 --> 0:14:58.520 I was going to talk to myself, but it turns 0:14:58.520 --> 0:15:02.800 out I don't talk to myself ever, and that is 0:15:02.840 --> 0:15:06.760 not at all uncommon. People are sometimes dramatically mistaken, often 0:15:06.840 --> 0:15:11.600 dramatically mistaken, particularly about things like inner speech. People think 0:15:11.640 --> 0:15:15.480 that inner speech occurs, as a matter of fact, inner speaking. 0:15:15.800 --> 0:15:18.520 I prefer to call it inner speaking rather than inner speech, 0:15:18.560 --> 0:15:20.680 because it's more a verb than it is a thing. 0:15:20.920 --> 0:15:26.160 It's an action that I'm taking, So I think inner 0:15:26.200 --> 0:15:29.680 speaking is a more descriptive deal. And some people do 0:15:30.240 --> 0:15:35.200 talk innerly, so they will be saying, I'm going to 0:15:35.200 --> 0:15:38.120 go get a hamburger unquote, and that gets caught in 0:15:38.120 --> 0:15:38.840 flight by the beep. 0:15:39.680 --> 0:15:42.840 And so when when you started collecting these detailed reports, 0:15:43.360 --> 0:15:46.160 it sounds like you were surprised by it, but I 0:15:46.160 --> 0:15:49.600 imagine the people themselves were surprised. Did it change their 0:15:49.640 --> 0:15:52.160 notion of who they were in some sense? 0:15:52.600 --> 0:15:55.720 Yes? So the method is you're going to wear the beeper, 0:15:55.880 --> 0:15:57.120 we're going to talk about it. Then you're going to 0:15:57.160 --> 0:15:58.680 wear the beeper again, and we're going to talk about 0:15:58.720 --> 0:16:01.000 it again. And then we're going to wear the beeper 0:16:01.000 --> 0:16:02.400 and we're going to talk about it again. And then 0:16:02.400 --> 0:16:04.080 you're going to do it again, and you're going to 0:16:04.080 --> 0:16:06.520 get better at that each time, and I'm going to 0:16:06.520 --> 0:16:09.720 get better at understanding what to ask you. This is 0:16:09.760 --> 0:16:14.160 the characteristic of my method that I call iterative. We're 0:16:14.160 --> 0:16:17.880 going to get better and better at it as we progress, 0:16:18.000 --> 0:16:22.600 and that is really what makes my research different from 0:16:22.640 --> 0:16:26.800 most other people's research, the fact that I don't think 0:16:26.800 --> 0:16:28.280 you're going to be good at it on the first day, 0:16:28.320 --> 0:16:30.160 but I think that we can get better at it 0:16:30.200 --> 0:16:31.680 than the second day, and even better at it than 0:16:31.720 --> 0:16:34.200 the third day, and even better at it, which means 0:16:34.880 --> 0:16:37.440 I think that Skinner was right. You're not going to 0:16:37.480 --> 0:16:38.960 be good at it. Your language is going to be 0:16:38.960 --> 0:16:41.040 crappy at it on the first day, but we can 0:16:41.120 --> 0:16:46.240 learn how to talk about it by confronting or considering 0:16:46.400 --> 0:16:50.840 a series of your experiences over the course of several 0:16:50.920 --> 0:16:51.840 days of conversation. 0:16:52.520 --> 0:16:54.560 So what did you find. What were the most common 0:16:54.680 --> 0:16:57.960 types of inner experience that people have? 0:16:58.800 --> 0:17:02.200 Well times refer to what I call the five FP 0:17:02.640 --> 0:17:06.199 or five frequent phenomena, which are inner speaking people do 0:17:06.280 --> 0:17:09.959 talk to themselves sometimes inner seeing. Most people call that 0:17:10.160 --> 0:17:12.560 seeing image. I think there's a lot of reasons not 0:17:12.600 --> 0:17:17.880 that call it that, but people have visual imagery. That's two. 0:17:18.640 --> 0:17:24.160 The third is sensory awareness. Sensory awareness is I'm interested 0:17:24.280 --> 0:17:28.919 in some particularly sensory aspect for its own sake. Like 0:17:28.920 --> 0:17:31.040 we're having this conversation, and I could be drawn to 0:17:31.080 --> 0:17:33.359 the blue of the blue of your background, not because 0:17:33.680 --> 0:17:35.960 the blue is important to me or important to our conversation, 0:17:36.000 --> 0:17:39.560 are relevant to our conversation, but for whatever reason, I'm 0:17:39.560 --> 0:17:43.920 interested in the blue of the background. That's sensory awareness 0:17:43.920 --> 0:17:47.199 from my point of view. Then the fourth is feelings. 0:17:47.359 --> 0:17:50.879 People do experience emotions from time to time. And the 0:17:50.960 --> 0:17:57.920 fifth I call unsymbolized thinking. And by unsymbolized thinking, I 0:17:58.160 --> 0:18:01.679 mean I experience myself to be thinking about something and 0:18:01.720 --> 0:18:05.879 it's directly before the footlights of my consciousness thinking, but 0:18:05.960 --> 0:18:09.159 there's no words and no pictures, no imagery or whatever. 0:18:09.920 --> 0:18:13.480 So I could be thinking, let's go have a hamburger. No, 0:18:13.560 --> 0:18:16.160 I think I'll have a hot dog. Something that would 0:18:16.200 --> 0:18:20.120 be that explicit Hamburger's hot dogs, but without the words 0:18:20.160 --> 0:18:22.440 hamburger or hot dog, and no picture of a hamburger, 0:18:22.440 --> 0:18:25.800 and no smell of a hamburger and anything about a 0:18:25.800 --> 0:18:31.600 hamber except that I recognize myself to be contradicting my 0:18:31.760 --> 0:18:34.320 original thought about a hamburger and changing my mind to 0:18:34.359 --> 0:18:34.920 a hot dog. 0:18:37.160 --> 0:18:41.480 And how common is the unsymbolized thinking and is this 0:18:41.600 --> 0:18:42.919 different from person to person? 0:18:43.520 --> 0:18:46.520 All of the five the five FP all are common, 0:18:46.840 --> 0:18:50.760 and by common, I mean across all of my samples. 0:18:51.119 --> 0:18:54.280 They occur a quarter or third or of the time. 0:18:55.200 --> 0:18:56.560 And you can have more than one at a time, 0:18:56.640 --> 0:18:58.480 so the numbers don't have to add up to one. 0:18:59.160 --> 0:19:04.159 But they're all common, and they're all The frequency varies 0:19:04.200 --> 0:19:06.560 from zero to one hundred percent within people, so people 0:19:06.560 --> 0:19:09.320 are hugely different. There are some people who who do 0:19:10.240 --> 0:19:13.520 innerally speak almost all the time, and others who never 0:19:13.640 --> 0:19:17.000 innerly speak, and some who we have visual imagery all 0:19:17.080 --> 0:19:19.600 the time, and some who never do and all and 0:19:19.680 --> 0:19:22.480 everywhere in between. So people are people are very different 0:19:22.480 --> 0:19:22.800 about that. 0:19:38.240 --> 0:19:41.640 This list of five frequent phenomenon, this is not exhaustive, right, 0:19:41.720 --> 0:19:43.920 There are other phenomena that people experience. 0:19:44.280 --> 0:19:46.600 Absolutely. I don't want us to think that there's these 0:19:46.680 --> 0:19:49.360 five things that you can do and that's all that's 0:19:49.359 --> 0:19:50.560 all you got. You can take this one off the 0:19:50.600 --> 0:19:52.439 shelf and do that, and you're gonna take inner speaking 0:19:52.440 --> 0:19:54.000 off the shelf and do that. That's not the way 0:19:54.000 --> 0:19:57.800 it is. What I think is that there are enough 0:19:57.840 --> 0:20:03.480 people who who just scribe a phenomenon where they are 0:20:03.480 --> 0:20:05.399 engaged in some kind of speaking with themselves, that we 0:20:05.480 --> 0:20:06.760 might as well give it a name and call it 0:20:06.760 --> 0:20:09.720 the same thing across people. That would be inner speaking. 0:20:10.280 --> 0:20:14.399 But there's all kinds of variations, both within the five 0:20:15.400 --> 0:20:20.760 categories that I've ticked off there and others. So you 0:20:20.760 --> 0:20:25.440 can inner speaking, for example, has as its neighbors interheering. 0:20:25.560 --> 0:20:27.600 You can hear your own voice rather than speak it, 0:20:28.680 --> 0:20:33.080 and that's a very different phenomenon, actually as different as 0:20:33.080 --> 0:20:35.159 speaking into a tape recorder or hearing your voice come 0:20:35.200 --> 0:20:38.080 back out of a tape recorder, same words, same voice, whatever, 0:20:38.160 --> 0:20:45.040 But the experience is dramatically different. And inner speaking takes 0:20:45.080 --> 0:20:49.720 place sometimes with entire sentences and sometimes with sort of 0:20:49.760 --> 0:20:53.840 a shorthand version of sentences. There's some theorists who think 0:20:53.840 --> 0:20:57.600 that all inner speaking is a condensed thing, but that's 0:20:57.680 --> 0:21:01.679 not true. It's actually it's actually more common and from 0:21:01.720 --> 0:21:05.760 my point of view, and more complete sentences than condensed. 0:21:06.840 --> 0:21:09.520 And sometimes words are present and sometimes they're missing, and 0:21:09.600 --> 0:21:11.879 you can have the experience of speaking without any words 0:21:11.880 --> 0:21:18.359 at all or this all manner of alternatives. 0:21:18.840 --> 0:21:21.000 And this question comes back to what you said about 0:21:21.119 --> 0:21:24.120 training people iteratively to do this. But I can imagine 0:21:24.160 --> 0:21:27.240 it feels to me that with unsymbolized thinking, people would 0:21:27.359 --> 0:21:32.080 often feel like they need to describe that as inner speech. 0:21:32.720 --> 0:21:35.640 They might confuse those do you see that happening. Let's 0:21:35.680 --> 0:21:37.639 say I'm imagining the hammerger and the hot dog, and 0:21:37.680 --> 0:21:39.680 you say, what were you thinking just then? And I 0:21:39.760 --> 0:21:41.760 might put it into speech even if it wasn't actually 0:21:41.800 --> 0:21:42.720 how I experienced it. 0:21:43.480 --> 0:21:47.960 That's what generally happens. So the typical pattern is that 0:21:48.040 --> 0:21:50.639 somebody says, I talk to myself all the time, and 0:21:51.760 --> 0:21:53.480 so I said, well, that may be will be true, 0:21:53.480 --> 0:21:57.280 but let's discover that. And the first peek was you 0:21:57.320 --> 0:22:00.520 would say say I was saying to myself, I should 0:22:00.560 --> 0:22:03.119 go have a hammerger, And I said, well, what exactly 0:22:03.160 --> 0:22:05.359 were the words that you were saying? And you would say, 0:22:05.840 --> 0:22:07.320 I think I'd like to have a hamburger, and I 0:22:07.359 --> 0:22:09.960 would point out, well, those are not exactly the same words. 0:22:10.080 --> 0:22:12.280 The first set of words was I should go get 0:22:12.280 --> 0:22:13.960 a hamburger, and the other one was I would like 0:22:14.000 --> 0:22:17.159 to have a hamburger. Those are not exactly the same words. 0:22:17.160 --> 0:22:19.040 And I'm interested in words, so when you if you 0:22:19.080 --> 0:22:21.240 have words, I'd like to know exactly what those words are. 0:22:21.720 --> 0:22:24.560 And you would say, oh, that seems fair. If if 0:22:24.640 --> 0:22:27.440 I'm saying what the words are, I'll tell him then. 0:22:27.960 --> 0:22:30.200 And then the second day you would come back and 0:22:31.600 --> 0:22:34.000 say I was saying to myself that I should turn 0:22:34.040 --> 0:22:36.719 up thermostat And I would say, well, what are you 0:22:36.760 --> 0:22:39.240 saying to yourself? And you would say, well, the room 0:22:39.320 --> 0:22:43.280 was cold, and so I think I was saying to 0:22:43.320 --> 0:22:46.640 myself that I should put it up to seventy six degrees. 0:22:47.760 --> 0:22:49.920 And I would say, well, you know, seventy six degrees 0:22:49.920 --> 0:22:51.840 is a little bit different from my being cold. What 0:22:51.880 --> 0:22:55.480 were those words? And then the third day you would 0:22:55.480 --> 0:22:57.600 come back and you say, you know, I've been telling 0:22:57.640 --> 0:23:00.000 you all these things about words, but they're not really words. 0:22:59.840 --> 0:23:04.040 It takes it takes three days or four or five 0:23:04.200 --> 0:23:08.200 of careful interviewing before the typical person can say, well, 0:23:08.280 --> 0:23:10.480 you know, there really weren't words there. People have the 0:23:10.560 --> 0:23:13.720 notion what I call the presupposition, that words are present, 0:23:14.720 --> 0:23:19.440 and I would say that that My technique was never well, 0:23:19.480 --> 0:23:21.760 I don't believe you when you say you had words there, 0:23:21.800 --> 0:23:24.919 tell me about it. What I said instead was you 0:23:24.960 --> 0:23:26.320 tell me what the words were. I'll like to know 0:23:26.359 --> 0:23:29.120