Describing Inner Experience

"I had the privilege of working with Russell Hurlburt in the last few years. He is one of the most extraordinary scientists I’ve ever worked with. He is somebody who has swum against the stream for decades. He has tried to describe inner experience in a way many people think is impossible, while trends in psychology and neuroscience have been going in the opposite direction. He’s done it by using a method he calls ‘descriptive experience sampling,’ which works in a beautifully simple way: you carry this little beeper around with you and wear an earpiece, and every so often the beeper goes off. You report what was in your experience just before the beep went off. It is a really hard thing to do. People are rubbish at it when they first do it. But after about 4 or 5 days, most people are really good. I’ve seen this plenty of times. On day 1 people pack in all these preconceptions and myths, self-mythologies, and just give them back to the interviewer, and then the interviewer says, ‘No, I don’t want your preconceptions or theories about what you were thinking. I want the best possible description of that tiny moment of experience, not the moment before it, not the moment after it. Just that moment.’ We did a study with this method in Berlin a couple of years ago, and we’ve been publishing the data including the first ever integration with MRI. We were able to look at what people were reporting using this method and map it onto their brain activation. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter This is one of the most interesting books you can read on the nature of consciousness. It has an extraordinary structure. It is the story of one woman and her sampling through descriptive experience sampling over the course of five days, going into details about what she said about these moment of experience, how she got better at doing the method and at reporting on her experience, with fascinating scientific and philosophical asides drilling down into some of the phenomena that she describes. But, most importantly, the book is set up as a dialogue between two people: Russ, who is the inventor of this method and the champion of this approach, and Eric Schwitzgebel, who is a philosopher, and who has become well-known as a sceptic about introspection. Neither quite wins the other one around, but on the way, they have this extraordinary discussion: beautifully written, completely compelling and insightful."