May 12, 2025 • 42 mins
If you had to give a detailed description of what flits through your mind, how good would you be at it? Might you be surprised at how many of your thoughts don't involve language? Are your thoughts changed by paying attention to them? What does this have to do with getting surprised by a random beep and immediately writing down what you’re thinking? Join Eagleman this week in conversation with Russell Hurlburt, a clinical psychologist who developed a new method to probe inner life.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
If you had to describe the details of what happens
in your mind when you're just sitting around, how good
would you be at it? Does paying attention to what's
happening in your thoughts change your thoughts? How do we
build language about our interior life when much of it
doesn't have any words at all? What does this have
(00:27):
to do with getting surprised by a random beep and
immediately writing down what you're thinking. Welcome to enter cosmos
with me David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and author at
Stanford and in these episodes we sail deeply into our
three pound universe to understand why and how our lives
(00:48):
look the way they do. Today's episode is about what
you can know about your inner life. Now you may
(01:12):
know that I wrote my book Incognito about the giant
swirling river happening under the hood, all of the things
that your brain is doing that the conscious you has
no access to and no awareness of. Most of the
action is happening down at that level, but we do
have conscious thought. Think of that like the surface of
(01:34):
that swirling river. That's your inner thoughts. But the really
weird part is you're generally not very good at describing
your inner thoughts. In other words, we might think, oh, yeah,
I know what my conscious experience is. I have an
inner voice, and I narrate what I'm going to do next,
and sometimes I feel happy or sad. But the issue
(01:57):
we're going to dive into today is that your insight
into your own conscious experience is shockingly bad, and we're
going to see a way that this can be studied
and made better. So let's start here. If you had
to describe the world around you, you could point to
the things that you see. There's buildings, there's trees, there's
(02:18):
a bicyclist. You could measure distances, you could measure temperatures,
how much things weigh, and you can put together a
detailed and accurate account of the world around you. But
the other world we inhabit is our inner cosmos, the
world inside. So think about the swirl of thoughts that
(02:38):
drifts through your mind while you're driving, or the inner
voice that narrates your day, sometimes it's encouraging, sometimes critical.
Or think about the images that flash by when you're
lost in a memory, or the sense of anticipation when
you're waiting for something to happen. And maybe this has
(03:00):
you know, words associated with it. This inner world is
arguably just as important as the outer world. It's where
our emotions are felt and our plans are born. And yet,
despite its centrality, despite the fact that we each live
inside this private theater of experience, it's really hard to
(03:21):
nail down. We don't understand it nearly as well as
we think we do. Now why not? Well, part of
the challenge is that the inner world is very fleeting.
A thought appears for you and then it morphs, and
then it's gone before you can catch it, or any
emotion wells up and fades before you even find a
word for it. So most of the time we move
(03:45):
through our days immersed in this invisible river of experience
without even realizing it's there. We are like fish in water,
surrounded by it, but unable to describe it because we've
never seen anything else. Now, imagine you're a scientist and
you want to study this inner world. You want to
(04:06):
take conscious experience not as an abstract idea, but it's
something that can be studied. Now, how would you do it.
We have a few tools like fMRI or EEG, but
these don't allow you to actually put a thought under
the microscope. You can't weigh a feeling on a scale.
(04:26):
You can't take a snapshot of a passing daydream. So
maybe what you would do instead is just try to
get people to pay attention to their inner life and
describe it. But the difficulty there is that when a
person tries to pay attention to their inner life, that
changes it. The rawness of experience gets replaced with their
(04:49):
ideas about experience. Maybe memories get polished, or gaps get
filled in, or stories get invented. So if you truly
wanted to study conscious experience, the real, messy, flickering reality
of it, you would need a new kind of method.
One that doesn't assume it already knows what's happening inside,
(05:11):
one that doesn't force people's minds into neat categories, one
that finds a way to respect the fluid and delicate
and often unexpected nature of inner life. And that brings
us to today's guest, Russell Hurlbert. He's a professor of
psychology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Russell has
(05:34):
spent decades wrestling with exactly these questions, and he developed
a technique to get at the details of people's moment
to moment experience as faithfully as possible. He's worked for
a long time to turn the mysterious territory of consciousness
into something we can actually explore. So in our conversation today,
(05:56):
we'll talk about what kinds of inner experiences people really have,
why our intuitions about our own minds are often wrong,
and why our inner world is richer and stranger and
more surprising than we usually imagine. Here's my conversation with
Russell Hurlbert. Okay, Russ, So before we get into your
(06:21):
contributions and trying to understand internal experience, I want to
understand how people were thinking about the world when you
were a young student. So, if I'm correct, you once
met BF Skinner. What was that like and what was
his view on private subjective experience?
Speaker 2 (06:40):
Well, that's a great question, because I consider Skinner one
of my significant ancestors. I guess you could say so,
and I would say it's an important question because you
have to understand what I think Skinner thought and when
I think everybody else thinks that Skinner thought, and those
(07:00):
are very different things. What everybody else thinks that Skinner
thought was that nobody had inner experience in the world
was a black box or something, and what was interesting
was behavior, things that you could measure and external behavior
and and but that isn't what Skinner wrote, and it
isn't what he said, and it isn't what he believed.
(07:21):
But that's what a lot of people think think that
he said. What he actually believed was that inner experience
was there, and you experience things like hot and pain
and visual visual stuff. That stuff is there. But he said,
it's very difficult to scientifically deal with that stuff because
(07:43):
the language that you use to describe inner experience is
not well differentiated. And that was his main that was
one of his main contributions, one of the main one
of the main things that drives my research.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
What did he means, not well differentiated?
Speaker 2 (07:57):
So, for example, you have a blue background going on
right now, and we can we can have a conversation
where we can be very careful about what the color
that blue is. It's not navy blue, it's sort of
like sky blue. It's not turquoise blue. It is sort
of azure. Maybe it's not azure. We can we can
refine our language about that quite effectively, exterior language. But
(08:18):
if I say I'm feeling blue, and George says he's
feeling blue, and Doug says he's feeling blue. Well, there's
no guarantee at all that those mean the same thing,
And we cannot present a different blue to me, a
different inner blue to me, and a different and the
same inner blue to Doug, and and there and thereby
(08:41):
figure out what the language is. So so you can't
you cannot differentiate the language, Skinner said, And I think
he was sort of half right about that. I think
the language is not well differentiated in general, but I
think you can differentiate it. So that's maybe where Skinner
and I depart. So so we're in basic agreement that
people people's language about their inner experience is not to
(09:04):
be trusted. Where we differ is he said, well, let's
just let's just not deal with that, let's do let's
look at external behavior. And I said, I say, well,
let's just try to differentiate and do the best we
can and figure out ways that we can become confident
about the language that we use, and up to the
(09:25):
extent that we can do that. The other thing that
Skinner said that was important and that I totally agree with,
is that he was entirely opposed to mentalistic explanations of behavior.
So things like I eat because I'm hungry, because I'm
hungry portion is a mentalistic explanation. And he said menalisms
(09:46):
are bad science because you can't measure hunger directly. If
you try to measure hunger directly, even in rats, you
know you can. You can measure hunger by saying, well,
it's been a month since he's since I've given him
anything to eat, or this is at the amount of
shock that he would endure to eat, or this is
the amount of quinine that I can put into his
(10:06):
pellets and they'll still still eat him. All those things
are sort of measures hunger, but they don't correlate very
well with each other, and so there isn't a state
of hunger that drives that stuff, he would say, And
I totally agree with that, and so my research is
not mentalistic. I try to describe things that are directly apprehended.
(10:27):
They're private, yes, but they're not mentalisms. They're directly apprehended experiences.
So that's a lot. That's a long conversation about Skinner,
But Skinner a Skinner was right about almost everything, but
the path that he took was entirely behavioristic, or as
the path that I take is to say, well, let's
do the best we can about in our experience.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
So tell us what you mean exactly by something being apprehended.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
Well, the work that I do is I generally give
people a beeper, and a beeper has an earphone, and
it delivers a beep at a random time. And I
am interested in what is ongoing before the footlights of
your consciousness at the moment of that beat. And what
I mean by directly apprehended is it has to be
(11:10):
absolutely ongoing for you right then, not ten seconds before,
not in general, but at the moment, it has to
be happening for you. So, for example, if you were
speaking to yourself at the moment of the beat, and
I was saying I was saying I should get a hamburger,
if the words quote I should get a hamburger are there,
(11:32):
that I would call that directly apprehended. But if I
was sort of somehow hungry maybe and we we were
planning and going to lunch, and but that would not
necessarily be apprehended. It would be a fact of the
universe that I'm about to go get a Hamberger, but
it wouldn't be directly present to me.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
Okay, so you know that people have these kind of experiences,
but your contribution was developing this new method to study that.
So what did you do with the beeper to get
at experience in the way that people could tell you
what they were apprehending at that moment.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
So the method is very simple. I give you a beeper,
I ask you what's going on at the moment of
the that was going on in your experience caught in
flight by the beep? That's all. That's all I do.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
So the beep goes off at a random time, the
person doesn't know that it's going to happen, and suddenly,
what were you thinking? Right then?
Speaker 2 (12:29):
That's right? And that seems like a very simple question,
and much of sort of modern experiential science believes that
people can answer that question. I personally don't think people
can answer that question without some training. So when I
do that that kind of a study. So I give
you a beeper and I tell you tell me what
was in your experience at the moment of the beep,
and then come back and tell me about that well
(12:51):
later that day or tomorrow, maybe within a relatively short time.
We'll have a conversation about that. And when we have
that conversation, it'll turn out that you won't you won't
be telling me about things that were going on at
the moment of the beat. You'll be telling me about
things that happened last week, or things that were I
was startled by the people that would be after the
after the moment of the beat, or things that you
(13:13):
think happened in general, Well I always do this, or
I never do that, or whatever, And we would have
a conversation in which I would say, well, it might
be true that you will almost always do that, but
let's let's let the let's let the study demonstrate that.
Don't tell me what you always do. Just tell me
what was happening at this particular moment. And you would say,
if you're a typical participant in my research, you would say, oh, yeah,
(13:35):
you're right about that, but that really wasn't there. So
I'll try to do better next time. And so next
time you would you would presumably be somewhat better at it,
or you might be somewhat better at it, and we
would have another conversation where I would shape your ability
to what I call cleave to experience and cleave to
the moment of the beat. Let's zero in just on
(13:56):
that time, not let's set aside everything else and just
take a look at that particular moment as if that
was interesting enough.
Speaker 1 (14:05):
So this is how descriptive experience sampling differs from other
introspective methods, because you're saying, what are you feeling right now?
And you have this surprising beep that goes off surprising
in time, and it doesn't sound like other things, doesn't
sound like your phone or other beeps that you're used to,
and so people have to say, what was I doing
(14:27):
internally just then? And so what sorts of answers did
you discover?
Speaker 2 (14:31):
Well, what I would consider sort of my main main
contribution is that people a don't know what the characteristics
of their own inner experience are. People are very often
entirely mistaken about that. So, for example, a lot of
people come in to my studies, come in saying, well,
you're going to find that I talk to myself a lot,
because everybody talks to themselves a lot, and I talk
to myself a lot. And many of the people who
(14:54):
leave my studies leave saying, well, you know, I thought
I was going to talk to myself, but it turns
out I don't talk to myself ever, and that is
not at all uncommon. People are sometimes dramatically mistaken, often
dramatically mistaken, particularly about things like inner speech. People think
that inner speech occurs, as a matter of fact, inner speaking.
(15:15):
I prefer to call it inner speaking rather than inner speech,
because it's more a verb than it is a thing.
It's an action that I'm taking, So I think inner
speaking is a more descriptive deal. And some people do
talk innerly, so they will be saying, I'm going to
go get a hamburger unquote, and that gets caught in
(15:38):
flight by the beep.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
And so when when you started collecting these detailed reports,
it sounds like you were surprised by it, but I
imagine the people themselves were surprised. Did it change their
notion of who they were in some sense?
Speaker 2 (15:52):
Yes? So the method is you're going to wear the beeper,
we're going to talk about it. Then you're going to
wear the beeper again, and we're going to talk about
it again. And then we're going to wear the beeper
and we're going to talk about it again. And then
you're going to do it again, and you're going to
get better at that each time, and I'm going to
get better at understanding what to ask you. This is
the characteristic of my method that I call iterative. We're
(16:14):
going to get better and better at it as we progress,
and that is really what makes my research different from
most other people's research, the fact that I don't think
you're going to be good at it on the first day,
but I think that we can get better at it
than the second day, and even better at it than
the third day, and even better at it, which means
(16:34):
I think that Skinner was right. You're not going to
be good at it. Your language is going to be
crappy at it on the first day, but we can
learn how to talk about it by confronting or considering
a series of your experiences over the course of several
days of conversation.
Speaker 1 (16:52):
So what did you find. What were the most common
types of inner experience that people have?
Speaker 2 (16:58):
Well times refer to what I call the five FP
or five frequent phenomena, which are inner speaking people do
talk to themselves sometimes inner seeing. Most people call that
seeing image. I think there's a lot of reasons not
that call it that, but people have visual imagery. That's two.
The third is sensory awareness. Sensory awareness is I'm interested
(17:24):
in some particularly sensory aspect for its own sake. Like
we're having this conversation, and I could be drawn to
the blue of the blue of your background, not because
the blue is important to me or important to our conversation,
are relevant to our conversation, but for whatever reason, I'm
interested in the blue of the background. That's sensory awareness
from my point of view. Then the fourth is feelings.
(17:47):
People do experience emotions from time to time. And the
fifth I call unsymbolized thinking. And by unsymbolized thinking, I
mean I experience myself to be thinking about something and
it's directly before the footlights of my consciousness thinking, but
there's no words and no pictures, no imagery or whatever.
(18:09):
So I could be thinking, let's go have a hamburger. No,
I think I'll have a hot dog. Something that would
be that explicit Hamburger's hot dogs, but without the words
hamburger or hot dog, and no picture of a hamburger,
and no smell of a hamburger and anything about a
hamber except that I recognize myself to be contradicting my
(18:31):
original thought about a hamburger and changing my mind to
a hot dog.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
And how common is the unsymbolized thinking and is this
different from person to person?
Speaker 2 (18:43):
All of the five the five FP all are common,
and by common, I mean across all of my samples.
They occur a quarter or third or of the time.
And you can have more than one at a time,
so the numbers don't have to add up to one.
But they're all common, and they're all The frequency varies
(19:04):
from zero to one hundred percent within people, so people
are hugely different. There are some people who who do
innerally speak almost all the time, and others who never
innerly speak, and some who we have visual imagery all
the time, and some who never do and all and
everywhere in between. So people are people are very different
about that.
Speaker 1 (19:38):
This list of five frequent phenomenon, this is not exhaustive, right,
There are other phenomena that people experience.
Speaker 2 (19:44):
Absolutely. I don't want us to think that there's these
five things that you can do and that's all that's
all you got. You can take this one off the
shelf and do that, and you're gonna take inner speaking
off the shelf and do that. That's not the way
it is. What I think is that there are enough
people who who just scribe a phenomenon where they are
engaged in some kind of speaking with themselves, that we
(20:05):
might as well give it a name and call it
the same thing across people. That would be inner speaking.
But there's all kinds of variations, both within the five
categories that I've ticked off there and others. So you
can inner speaking, for example, has as its neighbors interheering.
(20:25):
You can hear your own voice rather than speak it,
and that's a very different phenomenon, actually as different as
speaking into a tape recorder or hearing your voice come
back out of a tape recorder, same words, same voice, whatever,
But the experience is dramatically different. And inner speaking takes
place sometimes with entire sentences and sometimes with sort of
(20:49):
a shorthand version of sentences. There's some theorists who think
that all inner speaking is a condensed thing, but that's
not true. It's actually it's actually more common and from
my point of view, and more complete sentences than condensed.
And sometimes words are present and sometimes they're missing, and
you can have the experience of speaking without any words
(21:11):
at all or this all manner of alternatives.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
And this question comes back to what you said about
training people iteratively to do this. But I can imagine
it feels to me that with unsymbolized thinking, people would
often feel like they need to describe that as inner speech.
They might confuse those do you see that happening. Let's
say I'm imagining the hammerger and the hot dog, and
you say, what were you thinking just then? And I
(21:39):
might put it into speech even if it wasn't actually
how I experienced it.
Speaker 2 (21:43):
That's what generally happens. So the typical pattern is that
somebody says, I talk to myself all the time, and
so I said, well, that may be will be true,
but let's discover that. And the first peek was you
would say say I was saying to myself, I should
go have a hammerger, And I said, well, what exactly
were the words that you were saying? And you would say,
(22:05):
I think I'd like to have a hamburger, and I
would point out, well, those are not exactly the same words.
The first set of words was I should go get
a hamburger, and the other one was I would like
to have a hamburger. Those are not exactly the same words.
And I'm interested in words, so when you if you
have words, I'd like to know exactly what those words are.
And you would say, oh, that seems fair. If if
I'm saying what the words are, I'll tell him then.
(22:27):
And then the second day you would come back and
say I was saying to myself that I should turn
up thermostat And I would say, well, what are you
saying to yourself? And you would say, well, the room
was cold, and so I think I was saying to
myself that I should put it up to seventy six degrees.
And I would say, well, you know, seventy six degrees
(22:49):
is a little bit different from my being cold. What
were those words? And then the third day you would
come back and you say, you know, I've been telling
you all these things about words, but they're not really words.
It takes it takes three days or four or five
of careful interviewing before the typical person can say, well,
you know, there really weren't words there. People have the
(23:10):
notion what I call the presupposition, that words are present,
and I would say that that My technique was never well,
I don't believe you when you say you had words there,
tell me about it. What I said instead was you
tell me what the words were. I'll like to know
exactly what those words were. I was always in favor
of your telling me about the words you, because you're
(23:33):
an honest broker, as most people really are, down deep,
would try to would think of that as a reasonable
question to try to do it, and they you would
discover for yourself, No, there weren't really words there. So
I'm I feel like an innocent observer in that regard.
Speaker 1 (23:50):
I know some researchers are skeptical about the reliability of
the reports of inner experiences, So how do you how
do you defend against that?
Speaker 2 (24:00):
So I think everybody is justifiably skeptical about reports about
in your experience, And I would say, I think you
should not think of the results of my studies as
being reports of inner experience. They are descriptions of in
your experience that have been generated by the participant and
(24:21):
me together. That is not a report. It's a big
difference from my point of view, because most of psychology
is based on reports. We'll get a report from you
and that's it. The subject is down the road, and
then we try to analyze this kind of a report.
I think that's bad science. I don't do that. What
I do instead is you give me a report that
(24:42):
said I was thinking I should have a hamburger, and
I said, well, let's flesh that out. Let's see whether
we can get a description about that. It turns out
to be a bad description. The second day you'll give
me another report and I'll say, well, let's flesh that out.
That turns out to be a bad description too. The
third day you give me another report. But together we
can make that into a description that I think is believable.
(25:06):
But it's a first person plural exercise. It is not
a first person seeing their exercise.
Speaker 1 (25:12):
Got it? And what you're really shooting for here is
what you call pristine inner experience. Tell us what you
mean by that.
Speaker 2 (25:19):
By pristine, I mean naturally occurring in your natural environment.
So I want to know what David's experience was like
when he's doing whatever it is that David's doing. If
he's doing an interview, I would like to know what
his experienced like to do in an interview. See if
he's driving to the grocery store, I'd like to know
what's happening in the grocery store. That's what I mean
by pristine in your natural environment, un altered by the
(25:46):
intentions or whatever. So I use pristine in the same
way that you would talk about a forest being pristine,
but before there's an asphalt walkway, and before the plastic bags,
and before the road signs and all the other.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
And this is how you differentiated from other psychology experiments
where someone comes into the lab, they do a report
of some sort, and they leave. Just so we're clear here,
how often were these beeps? And they were going off
just during somebody's day, right as they were proceeding through life.
Speaker 2 (26:18):
What I found is that in an hour, which is
a pretty long time for interpersonal reaction in personal relationships,
So in an hour, we can talk about a half
a dozen beeps. And so I asked you to collect
a half a dozen beeps in and I set up
I generally set the beeper so that it's random, with
an average time in between beeps of a half an hour.
(26:41):
So you're gonna wear the beeper for three or four hours.
You're gonna get a half a dozen beeps, and then
we're going to talk about those half a dozen beeps.
And then you're gonna wear the beeper again tomorrow or
next week or whatever for another three or four hours
and get another half a dozen beeps.
Speaker 1 (26:54):
And the idea is that I wear that at home
while I'm going about my life.
Speaker 2 (26:58):
If you're at home, or if you're work or where,
if you're at the grocery store or whatever. I don't
have a rule about how you do that, but what
generally happens is that people will say, after they've done
it for a few days, well, you know, I really
out of work when I'm doing this kind of behavior,
because when I'm engaged in that activity, maybe my thinking
is different and we should try that. And I would say, well,
that sounds like a good idea.
Speaker 1 (27:19):
And just remind us. When the beep goes off, does
the person immediately stop what they're doing and write it
down or record it?
Speaker 2 (27:27):
Yes, So your task, you're wearing the beeper, You're going
about your everyday life. This is a beeper has an
earphone in it. You put an earphone in you and
put this in your pocket and go about your every
day life, and when it beeps, you suspend whatever it
is that you were doing to freeze your inner experience
enough so that you can jot down some notes about it,
(27:48):
and then generally the best way to do it is
to jot down notes in a notebook. But your task
is to jot down notes enough so that then we
can talk about it and you can remember what that
particular experience was about. I don't look at your notes
the notes. The notes are between you and you so
that you can do a good job of describing your experience.
Speaker 1 (28:06):
Are there things about inner experience that science is not
able to measure?
Speaker 2 (28:11):
Yes, So the work that I do I try to
get what I call a high fidelity description of inner experience,
but it's short of perfection. I strive for perfection and
fall short all the time. But I think there's a
pretty big difference between somebody saying to themselves I should
go have a hamburger and somebody else having a visual
(28:33):
imagery of a hamburger. There's very little confusion about that
if people are actually saying it and people are actually
seeing it. If they're not, then you know, if you've
got some theory about the way consciousness is and how
hamburgers present themselves in consciousness, then those that those things
(28:54):
are hard to tease apart.
Speaker 1 (28:56):
Could we use descriptive experience sampling to help people become
more aware of their own mental patterns in let's say,
therapy or mindfulness. Is there a way that if you
had better a more realistic insight into your own thought processes,
into your own inner experience, that that would help you
(29:19):
in some way?
Speaker 2 (29:20):
I think they answered it as definitely yes. The typical
person who finishes my study says, that's the best therapy
I've ever had, and a lot of them have had
a lot of therapy. And the interesting thing about it
is that that what we did was never anything other
(29:42):
than tell me about what was in your experience at
the moment of the beat. We never tried to fix
you or try to you know, why do they say
that's the best therapy? What's their experience? Because they now
feel themselves to be less delusional than they were before.
Ah great, I think they oracle is right and know
yourself as an important deal.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
Have you ever made a phone app that allows people
to do this on at scale?
Speaker 2 (30:10):
I have a phone app that I have made, but
it isn't good enough. Sooner or later I will I
will build a beeper that would be easier, easily available.
But it's not just the beeper. It's the beeper along
with somebody who is skilled at helping you what I
(30:32):
call bracket your presuppositions. So you've got you have presuppositions
about I'm an inner speaker, say and and my technique,
what I call bracketing presuppositions is well, let's just set
that aside. Maybe you are an inner speaker, maybe you're
not an internspeaker. Let's let's find out. That's the bracketing technique.
(30:53):
That's ah, that is a non trivial skill if you were.
If you will leave yourself incorrectly to be an inner
speaker and you wore a beeper until the cows came home,
you would end up believing yourself to be an inner
speaker because at every beep you would say, well, us,
as I was saying to myself and then your next people,
I was saying to myself, and at the next people,
I was saying to myself, you need skilled interlocutor who
(31:20):
can ask questions that help you overcome your own presuppositions.
It's my job as an interviewer is to try to
pay attention to where it looks like you're describing experience
and where it looks like you're not describing experience and
help you get from one to the other.
Speaker 1 (31:37):
I agree. I do wonder, in this era of incredible AI,
whether we could get that to bracket presuppositions almost as
well as the human does.
Speaker 2 (31:48):
I doubt it, but I've been mistaken about these things before,
so I don't really know.
Speaker 1 (32:07):
What can your work tell us about somebody, let's say,
with depression.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
I think a good exploration of experience and depression would
be valuable, and I've done a little bit of it,
but I can. Let me tell you just one example
of a person who was a psychlothemic kind of person
who was depressed today and up tomorrow and down the
next day and then up or whatever. And what I
(32:32):
found was that their inner experience was very different on
those days. So when they were down in a depressed day,
they had a lot of what I would call unsymbolized thinking,
and when they had an up day, they had a
lot of what I would call visual inner scene. And
(32:52):
the interesting thing that I would like to tell you
about that is that when they were down, they knew
themselves to be down, but they did didn't know themselves
to be absent of visual imagery, and when they were up,
they knew themselves to be up, but they didn't say, well,
you know, when I'm up, I have visual imagery, and
when I'm down, I don't have visual imagery that came
(33:14):
from the exploration. So people, people's inner experience, I think
is directly connected to something. Whether whether it's the inner
experience causes it, or whether it's a result of it,
or whether it is an epiphenomenon, I don't. I don't
know the answer to that. I think you need a
lot of people out there like me doing this kind
of work. But what you what that what that example
(33:38):
says is you can't expect a person to be able
to tell you what the important things are because they
just don't know.
Speaker 1 (33:47):
Have you ever tried this, let's say, with somebody who's schizophrenia.
Speaker 2 (33:51):
Yes, my first book actually was about schizophrenia, which is
which is a small sample of schizophrenics. But the when
what I found was that there was quite a bit
of visual imagery involved schizophrenics, and that that visual imagery
was very often what one of my participants called goofed up,
(34:13):
which I came to adopt as a technical term for myself.
So a goofed up. Well. So, first off, a normal image,
a non schizophrenic image, is not seeing an image. It
is an inter seeing. So I prefer to call it intercening.
And so if you're not schizophrenic, and you're you and
you have an inner visual phenomenon, it's pretty much like
(34:36):
having an external version for most people, which is to say,
the center of it is sort of more detailed and
it disappears off at the edges, which means it's not
like looking at a photograph with a border. And my
schizophrenic subjects, they're intercene was like seeing an image and
(34:56):
the image, which is to say, what they saw had
characteristics of an image. It did have a border, and
that border could be very arbitrary, like the border could
be like that, and or they or the image could
have spots on it, like somebody had taken the tooth
parts with ink on it and spattered spattered the image,
(35:21):
and and that spattering is on the image. It's not
on the face of the guy. It's on the image
of the guy. And or the image would float away.
So they see it like this, and then they see
the sort of curl up and disappear. That is not
what normal what normal people do. So that is part
(35:41):
of the reason why I'm fairly sensitive when people say
I was seeing an image. I think it's true the
schizophrenic individuals, at least some schizophrenic individuals see an image,
whereas most normal people don't. And it's a hugely different deal. Yeah,
which which is unknown to most of experiential science, which
(36:04):
to me is we will. You have to You have
to pay attention closely, because if you let somebody tell you, well,
I'm seeing an image, then and you lost the game.
Schizophrenics are often given credits for having blunted affect, which
which by which the business means they don't really experience
any emotions. And what I found was that my schizophrenic participants,
(36:29):
at least some of my schizophrenics, had what I what
I would characterize as hyper clear affect. And and and
so they would they would say I was angry, and
that anger, that anger was a tear dropped shape in
my chest, and it was sort of this white here,
and then it got wider and it was half an
inch below my chest here and two inches thick down here.
(36:52):
That is not the way most non schizophrenic people talk
about their their inner experience, but excuse thephrenics have learned
not to talk like that, and so they as a
general rule, they don't tell you about that aspect of
their experience, and so it looks from the outside like
they're inner, like their feelings are blunted. But I don't
(37:13):
think that's necessarily true. I think there's a lot to
be learned from knowing something about somebody's inner experience the
way their inner experience actually is. But to do that
you have to go through three or four days worth
of editative training, and most psychology is one shot. Do
you the irony there is that in my work I
(37:35):
throw out the first day or two of descriptive experience
ampling work results all the time, because I'm sure that
people don't know what they're talking about. Most of the
rest of the science spend. All they do is look
at what I would call the first or second day,
so they look at what I think is just absolutely
not worth watching.
Speaker 1 (37:56):
Last question, if I understand correctly, you started descriptive experience
am playing fifty years ago. Is that correct?
Speaker 2 (38:02):
That's true?
Speaker 1 (38:03):
Okay, so where do you think it's going to be
in fifty years from now?
Speaker 2 (38:06):
You know, I think about that sometimes I think I'm
fifty years out of date, and sometimes i think I'm
fifty years ahead of the game. I think in her
experience is vitally important, and I think the I think
the oracles were right. Know thyself as an important deal,
and I think the I think that's at the heart
(38:26):
of almost every thoughtful tradition people. People want to know themselves,
and I think we've sort of fallen away from that.
AI is sort of the maximally falling away, falling away
from that, leaving that behind. Whether we can transcend that
and figure out how to get back to in her
(38:51):
experience the way in your experience is actually experienced before
we destroy ourselves through some other method. I don't know
the answer to that question.
Speaker 1 (39:05):
Talking with Russell Hurlbert reminds us of something that's easy
to forget. The most familiar things in our lives, our
own thoughts and feelings and sensations, are in many ways
still unexplored territory. We move through our days surrounded by
the chatter of inner speech and flashes of imagery and
(39:26):
the subtle currents of emotion, but we rarely pause to
look carefully. We rarely ask what is actually happening inside
me right now, we rarely recognize how much is there,
and when we do turn our attention inward, it's easy
to bring with us a set of assumptions that we're
(39:47):
constantly narrating our lives in full sentences, that our thoughts
are always well formed and logical and coherent, that we
already know what it feels like to be ourselves. But
as Russell's work shows, the reality of inner experience is
typically messier and stranger than the stories that we tell
(40:09):
about it. Some moments are rich with inner speech, Others
unfold in pure wordless awareness. Some thoughts flash by without
any verbal or visual form at all. Sometimes what seems
central to us, like emotions, barely register at all in
a given moment, and other times a sensory awareness or
(40:31):
maybe unsymbolized thinking or a subtle feeling, these are the
things that take center stage. So what Russell is offering
isn't just a scientific method. It's an invitation, an invitation
to approach our own experience with the same curiosity, the
same openness that a scientist brings to a new and
(40:54):
unfamiliar landscape, to bracket our expectations, to listen carefully to
resist the urge to simplify or categorize too quickly, and
maybe even to be surprised by what we find. Inner
experience is not just an echo of the outside world.
It is its own territory. It's complex and dynamic, and
(41:19):
it's worth studying, not just scientifically but personally, because in
the end, understanding our conscious lives is not just an
academic exercise. It's you. It's what you've got going on
in there, so you may as well figure out what
it is. Thanks for joining me today, and I hope
today's episode will give you a little window into the
(41:41):
extraordinary and often overlooked cosmos inside of us.
Speaker 2 (41:46):
All go to.
Speaker 1 (41:50):
Eagleman dot com slash podcast for more information and to
find further reading. Check out my newsletter on substack and
be a part of the online chats there, or you
can send me an email at podcasts at Eagleman dot
com with questions or discussion. Finally, you can watch the
videos of Inner Cosmos on YouTube, where you can leave comments.
Until next time, I'm David Eagleman, and we are catching
(42:13):
glimpses of the inner cosmos
If you had to describe the details of what happens
in your mind when you're just sitting around, how good
would you be at it? Does paying attention to what's
happening in your thoughts change your thoughts? How do we
build language about our interior life when much of it
doesn't have any words at all? What does this have
(00:27):
to do with getting surprised by a random beep and
immediately writing down what you're thinking. Welcome to enter cosmos
with me David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and author at
Stanford and in these episodes we sail deeply into our
three pound universe to understand why and how our lives
(00:48):
look the way they do. Today's episode is about what
you can know about your inner life. Now you may
(01:12):
know that I wrote my book Incognito about the giant
swirling river happening under the hood, all of the things
that your brain is doing that the conscious you has
no access to and no awareness of. Most of the
action is happening down at that level, but we do
have conscious thought. Think of that like the surface of
(01:34):
that swirling river. That's your inner thoughts. But the really
weird part is you're generally not very good at describing
your inner thoughts. In other words, we might think, oh, yeah,
I know what my conscious experience is. I have an
inner voice, and I narrate what I'm going to do next,
and sometimes I feel happy or sad. But the issue
(01:57):
we're going to dive into today is that your insight
into your own conscious experience is shockingly bad, and we're
going to see a way that this can be studied
and made better. So let's start here. If you had
to describe the world around you, you could point to
the things that you see. There's buildings, there's trees, there's
(02:18):
a bicyclist. You could measure distances, you could measure temperatures,
how much things weigh, and you can put together a
detailed and accurate account of the world around you. But
the other world we inhabit is our inner cosmos, the
world inside. So think about the swirl of thoughts that
(02:38):
drifts through your mind while you're driving, or the inner
voice that narrates your day, sometimes it's encouraging, sometimes critical.
Or think about the images that flash by when you're
lost in a memory, or the sense of anticipation when
you're waiting for something to happen. And maybe this has
(03:00):
you know, words associated with it. This inner world is
arguably just as important as the outer world. It's where
our emotions are felt and our plans are born. And yet,
despite its centrality, despite the fact that we each live
inside this private theater of experience, it's really hard to
(03:21):
nail down. We don't understand it nearly as well as
we think we do. Now why not? Well, part of
the challenge is that the inner world is very fleeting.
A thought appears for you and then it morphs, and
then it's gone before you can catch it, or any
emotion wells up and fades before you even find a
word for it. So most of the time we move
(03:45):
through our days immersed in this invisible river of experience
without even realizing it's there. We are like fish in water,
surrounded by it, but unable to describe it because we've
never seen anything else. Now, imagine you're a scientist and
you want to study this inner world. You want to
(04:06):
take conscious experience not as an abstract idea, but it's
something that can be studied. Now, how would you do it.
We have a few tools like fMRI or EEG, but
these don't allow you to actually put a thought under
the microscope. You can't weigh a feeling on a scale.
(04:26):
You can't take a snapshot of a passing daydream. So
maybe what you would do instead is just try to
get people to pay attention to their inner life and
describe it. But the difficulty there is that when a
person tries to pay attention to their inner life, that
changes it. The rawness of experience gets replaced with their
(04:49):
ideas about experience. Maybe memories get polished, or gaps get
filled in, or stories get invented. So if you truly
wanted to study conscious experience, the real, messy, flickering reality
of it, you would need a new kind of method.
One that doesn't assume it already knows what's happening inside,
(05:11):
one that doesn't force people's minds into neat categories, one
that finds a way to respect the fluid and delicate
and often unexpected nature of inner life. And that brings
us to today's guest, Russell Hurlbert. He's a professor of
psychology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Russell has
(05:34):
spent decades wrestling with exactly these questions, and he developed
a technique to get at the details of people's moment
to moment experience as faithfully as possible. He's worked for
a long time to turn the mysterious territory of consciousness
into something we can actually explore. So in our conversation today,
(05:56):
we'll talk about what kinds of inner experiences people really have,
why our intuitions about our own minds are often wrong,
and why our inner world is richer and stranger and
more surprising than we usually imagine. Here's my conversation with
Russell Hurlbert. Okay, Russ, So before we get into your
(06:21):
contributions and trying to understand internal experience, I want to
understand how people were thinking about the world when you
were a young student. So, if I'm correct, you once
met BF Skinner. What was that like and what was
his view on private subjective experience?
Speaker 2 (06:40):
Well, that's a great question, because I consider Skinner one
of my significant ancestors. I guess you could say so,
and I would say it's an important question because you
have to understand what I think Skinner thought and when
I think everybody else thinks that Skinner thought, and those
(07:00):
are very different things. What everybody else thinks that Skinner
thought was that nobody had inner experience in the world
was a black box or something, and what was interesting
was behavior, things that you could measure and external behavior
and and but that isn't what Skinner wrote, and it
isn't what he said, and it isn't what he believed.
(07:21):
But that's what a lot of people think think that
he said. What he actually believed was that inner experience
was there, and you experience things like hot and pain
and visual visual stuff. That stuff is there. But he said,
it's very difficult to scientifically deal with that stuff because
(07:43):
the language that you use to describe inner experience is
not well differentiated. And that was his main that was
one of his main contributions, one of the main one
of the main things that drives my research.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
What did he means, not well differentiated?
Speaker 2 (07:57):
So, for example, you have a blue background going on
right now, and we can we can have a conversation
where we can be very careful about what the color
that blue is. It's not navy blue, it's sort of
like sky blue. It's not turquoise blue. It is sort
of azure. Maybe it's not azure. We can we can
refine our language about that quite effectively, exterior language. But
(08:18):
if I say I'm feeling blue, and George says he's
feeling blue, and Doug says he's feeling blue. Well, there's
no guarantee at all that those mean the same thing,
And we cannot present a different blue to me, a
different inner blue to me, and a different and the
same inner blue to Doug, and and there and thereby
(08:41):
figure out what the language is. So so you can't
you cannot differentiate the language, Skinner said, And I think
he was sort of half right about that. I think
the language is not well differentiated in general, but I
think you can differentiate it. So that's maybe where Skinner
and I depart. So so we're in basic agreement that
people people's language about their inner experience is not to
(09:04):
be trusted. Where we differ is he said, well, let's
just let's just not deal with that, let's do let's
look at external behavior. And I said, I say, well,
let's just try to differentiate and do the best we
can and figure out ways that we can become confident
about the language that we use, and up to the
(09:25):
extent that we can do that. The other thing that
Skinner said that was important and that I totally agree with,
is that he was entirely opposed to mentalistic explanations of behavior.
So things like I eat because I'm hungry, because I'm
hungry portion is a mentalistic explanation. And he said menalisms
(09:46):
are bad science because you can't measure hunger directly. If
you try to measure hunger directly, even in rats, you
know you can. You can measure hunger by saying, well,
it's been a month since he's since I've given him
anything to eat, or this is at the amount of
shock that he would endure to eat, or this is
the amount of quinine that I can put into his
(10:06):
pellets and they'll still still eat him. All those things
are sort of measures hunger, but they don't correlate very
well with each other, and so there isn't a state
of hunger that drives that stuff, he would say, And
I totally agree with that, and so my research is
not mentalistic. I try to describe things that are directly apprehended.
(10:27):
They're private, yes, but they're not mentalisms. They're directly apprehended experiences.
So that's a lot. That's a long conversation about Skinner,
But Skinner a Skinner was right about almost everything, but
the path that he took was entirely behavioristic, or as
the path that I take is to say, well, let's
do the best we can about in our experience.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
So tell us what you mean exactly by something being apprehended.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
Well, the work that I do is I generally give
people a beeper, and a beeper has an earphone, and
it delivers a beep at a random time. And I
am interested in what is ongoing before the footlights of
your consciousness at the moment of that beat. And what
I mean by directly apprehended is it has to be
(11:10):
absolutely ongoing for you right then, not ten seconds before,
not in general, but at the moment, it has to
be happening for you. So, for example, if you were
speaking to yourself at the moment of the beat, and
I was saying I was saying I should get a hamburger,
if the words quote I should get a hamburger are there,
(11:32):
that I would call that directly apprehended. But if I
was sort of somehow hungry maybe and we we were
planning and going to lunch, and but that would not
necessarily be apprehended. It would be a fact of the
universe that I'm about to go get a Hamberger, but
it wouldn't be directly present to me.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
Okay, so you know that people have these kind of experiences,
but your contribution was developing this new method to study that.
So what did you do with the beeper to get
at experience in the way that people could tell you
what they were apprehending at that moment.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
So the method is very simple. I give you a beeper,
I ask you what's going on at the moment of
the that was going on in your experience caught in
flight by the beep? That's all. That's all I do.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
So the beep goes off at a random time, the
person doesn't know that it's going to happen, and suddenly,
what were you thinking? Right then?
Speaker 2 (12:29):
That's right? And that seems like a very simple question,
and much of sort of modern experiential science believes that
people can answer that question. I personally don't think people
can answer that question without some training. So when I
do that that kind of a study. So I give
you a beeper and I tell you tell me what
was in your experience at the moment of the beep,
and then come back and tell me about that well
(12:51):
later that day or tomorrow, maybe within a relatively short time.
We'll have a conversation about that. And when we have
that conversation, it'll turn out that you won't you won't
be telling me about things that were going on at
the moment of the beat. You'll be telling me about
things that happened last week, or things that were I
was startled by the people that would be after the
after the moment of the beat, or things that you
(13:13):
think happened in general, Well I always do this, or
I never do that, or whatever, And we would have
a conversation in which I would say, well, it might
be true that you will almost always do that, but
let's let's let the let's let the study demonstrate that.
Don't tell me what you always do. Just tell me
what was happening at this particular moment. And you would say,
if you're a typical participant in my research, you would say, oh, yeah,
(13:35):
you're right about that, but that really wasn't there. So
I'll try to do better next time. And so next
time you would you would presumably be somewhat better at it,
or you might be somewhat better at it, and we
would have another conversation where I would shape your ability
to what I call cleave to experience and cleave to
the moment of the beat. Let's zero in just on
(13:56):
that time, not let's set aside everything else and just
take a look at that particular moment as if that
was interesting enough.
Speaker 1 (14:05):
So this is how descriptive experience sampling differs from other
introspective methods, because you're saying, what are you feeling right now?
And you have this surprising beep that goes off surprising
in time, and it doesn't sound like other things, doesn't
sound like your phone or other beeps that you're used to,
and so people have to say, what was I doing
(14:27):
internally just then? And so what sorts of answers did
you discover?
Speaker 2 (14:31):
Well, what I would consider sort of my main main
contribution is that people a don't know what the characteristics
of their own inner experience are. People are very often
entirely mistaken about that. So, for example, a lot of
people come in to my studies, come in saying, well,
you're going to find that I talk to myself a lot,
because everybody talks to themselves a lot, and I talk
to myself a lot. And many of the people who
(14:54):
leave my studies leave saying, well, you know, I thought
I was going to talk to myself, but it turns
out I don't talk to myself ever, and that is
not at all uncommon. People are sometimes dramatically mistaken, often
dramatically mistaken, particularly about things like inner speech. People think
that inner speech occurs, as a matter of fact, inner speaking.
(15:15):
I prefer to call it inner speaking rather than inner speech,
because it's more a verb than it is a thing.
It's an action that I'm taking, So I think inner
speaking is a more descriptive deal. And some people do
talk innerly, so they will be saying, I'm going to
go get a hamburger unquote, and that gets caught in
(15:38):
flight by the beep.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
And so when when you started collecting these detailed reports,
it sounds like you were surprised by it, but I
imagine the people themselves were surprised. Did it change their
notion of who they were in some sense?
Speaker 2 (15:52):
Yes? So the method is you're going to wear the beeper,
we're going to talk about it. Then you're going to
wear the beeper again, and we're going to talk about
it again. And then we're going to wear the beeper
and we're going to talk about it again. And then
you're going to do it again, and you're going to
get better at that each time, and I'm going to
get better at understanding what to ask you. This is
the characteristic of my method that I call iterative. We're
(16:14):
going to get better and better at it as we progress,
and that is really what makes my research different from
most other people's research, the fact that I don't think
you're going to be good at it on the first day,
but I think that we can get better at it
than the second day, and even better at it than
the third day, and even better at it, which means
(16:34):
I think that Skinner was right. You're not going to
be good at it. Your language is going to be
crappy at it on the first day, but we can
learn how to talk about it by confronting or considering
a series of your experiences over the course of several
days of conversation.
Speaker 1 (16:52):
So what did you find. What were the most common
types of inner experience that people have?
Speaker 2 (16:58):
Well times refer to what I call the five FP
or five frequent phenomena, which are inner speaking people do
talk to themselves sometimes inner seeing. Most people call that
seeing image. I think there's a lot of reasons not
that call it that, but people have visual imagery. That's two.
The third is sensory awareness. Sensory awareness is I'm interested
(17:24):
in some particularly sensory aspect for its own sake. Like
we're having this conversation, and I could be drawn to
the blue of the blue of your background, not because
the blue is important to me or important to our conversation,
are relevant to our conversation, but for whatever reason, I'm
interested in the blue of the background. That's sensory awareness
from my point of view. Then the fourth is feelings.
(17:47):
People do experience emotions from time to time. And the
fifth I call unsymbolized thinking. And by unsymbolized thinking, I
mean I experience myself to be thinking about something and
it's directly before the footlights of my consciousness thinking, but
there's no words and no pictures, no imagery or whatever.
(18:09):
So I could be thinking, let's go have a hamburger. No,
I think I'll have a hot dog. Something that would
be that explicit Hamburger's hot dogs, but without the words
hamburger or hot dog, and no picture of a hamburger,
and no smell of a hamburger and anything about a
hamber except that I recognize myself to be contradicting my
(18:31):
original thought about a hamburger and changing my mind to
a hot dog.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
And how common is the unsymbolized thinking and is this
different from person to person?
Speaker 2 (18:43):
All of the five the five FP all are common,
and by common, I mean across all of my samples.
They occur a quarter or third or of the time.
And you can have more than one at a time,
so the numbers don't have to add up to one.
But they're all common, and they're all The frequency varies
(19:04):
from zero to one hundred percent within people, so people
are hugely different. There are some people who who do
innerally speak almost all the time, and others who never
innerly speak, and some who we have visual imagery all
the time, and some who never do and all and
everywhere in between. So people are people are very different
about that.
Speaker 1 (19:38):
This list of five frequent phenomenon, this is not exhaustive, right,
There are other phenomena that people experience.
Speaker 2 (19:44):
Absolutely. I don't want us to think that there's these
five things that you can do and that's all that's
all you got. You can take this one off the
shelf and do that, and you're gonna take inner speaking
off the shelf and do that. That's not the way
it is. What I think is that there are enough
people who who just scribe a phenomenon where they are
engaged in some kind of speaking with themselves, that we
(20:05):
might as well give it a name and call it
the same thing across people. That would be inner speaking.
But there's all kinds of variations, both within the five
categories that I've ticked off there and others. So you
can inner speaking, for example, has as its neighbors interheering.
(20:25):
You can hear your own voice rather than speak it,
and that's a very different phenomenon, actually as different as
speaking into a tape recorder or hearing your voice come
back out of a tape recorder, same words, same voice, whatever,
But the experience is dramatically different. And inner speaking takes
place sometimes with entire sentences and sometimes with sort of
(20:49):
a shorthand version of sentences. There's some theorists who think
that all inner speaking is a condensed thing, but that's
not true. It's actually it's actually more common and from
my point of view, and more complete sentences than condensed.
And sometimes words are present and sometimes they're missing, and
you can have the experience of speaking without any words
(21:11):
at all or this all manner of alternatives.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
And this question comes back to what you said about
training people iteratively to do this. But I can imagine
it feels to me that with unsymbolized thinking, people would
often feel like they need to describe that as inner speech.
They might confuse those do you see that happening. Let's
say I'm imagining the hammerger and the hot dog, and
you say, what were you thinking just then? And I
(21:39):
might put it into speech even if it wasn't actually
how I experienced it.
Speaker 2 (21:43):
That's what generally happens. So the typical pattern is that
somebody says, I talk to myself all the time, and
so I said, well, that may be will be true,
but let's discover that. And the first peek was you
would say say I was saying to myself, I should
go have a hammerger, And I said, well, what exactly
were the words that you were saying? And you would say,
(22:05):
I think I'd like to have a hamburger, and I
would point out, well, those are not exactly the same words.
The first set of words was I should go get
a hamburger, and the other one was I would like
to have a hamburger. Those are not exactly the same words.
And I'm interested in words, so when you if you
have words, I'd like to know exactly what those words are.
And you would say, oh, that seems fair. If if
I'm saying what the words are, I'll tell him then.
(22:27):
And then the second day you would come back and
say I was saying to myself that I should turn
up thermostat And I would say, well, what are you
saying to yourself? And you would say, well, the room
was cold, and so I think I was saying to
myself that I should put it up to seventy six degrees.
And I would say, well, you know, seventy six degrees
(22:49):
is a little bit different from my being cold. What
were those words? And then the third day you would
come back and you say, you know, I've been telling
you all these things about words, but they're not really words.
It takes it takes three days or four or five
of careful interviewing before the typical person can say, well,
you know, there really weren't words there. People have the
(23:10):
notion what I call the presupposition, that words are present,
and I would say that that My technique was never well,
I don't believe you when you say you had words there,
tell me about it. What I said instead was you
tell me what the words were. I'll like to know
exactly what those words were. I was always in favor
of your telling me about the words you, because you're
(23:33):
an honest broker, as most people really are, down deep,
would try to would think of that as a reasonable
question to try to do it, and they you would
discover for yourself, No, there weren't really words there. So
I'm I feel like an innocent observer in that regard.
Speaker 1 (23:50):
I know some researchers are skeptical about the reliability of
the reports of inner experiences, So how do you how
do you defend against that?
Speaker 2 (24:00):
So I think everybody is justifiably skeptical about reports about
in your experience, And I would say, I think you
should not think of the results of my studies as
being reports of inner experience. They are descriptions of in
your experience that have been generated by the participant and
(24:21):
me together. That is not a report. It's a big
difference from my point of view, because most of psychology
is based on reports. We'll get a report from you
and that's it. The subject is down the road, and
then we try to analyze this kind of a report.
I think that's bad science. I don't do that. What
I do instead is you give me a report that
(24:42):
said I was thinking I should have a hamburger, and
I said, well, let's flesh that out. Let's see whether
we can get a description about that. It turns out
to be a bad description. The second day you'll give
me another report and I'll say, well, let's flesh that out.
That turns out to be a bad description too. The
third day you give me another report. But together we
can make that into a description that I think is believable.
(25:06):
But it's a first person plural exercise. It is not
a first person seeing their exercise.
Speaker 1 (25:12):
Got it? And what you're really shooting for here is
what you call pristine inner experience. Tell us what you
mean by that.
Speaker 2 (25:19):
By pristine, I mean naturally occurring in your natural environment.
So I want to know what David's experience was like
when he's doing whatever it is that David's doing. If
he's doing an interview, I would like to know what
his experienced like to do in an interview. See if
he's driving to the grocery store, I'd like to know
what's happening in the grocery store. That's what I mean
by pristine in your natural environment, un altered by the
(25:46):
intentions or whatever. So I use pristine in the same
way that you would talk about a forest being pristine,
but before there's an asphalt walkway, and before the plastic bags,
and before the road signs and all the other.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
And this is how you differentiated from other psychology experiments
where someone comes into the lab, they do a report
of some sort, and they leave. Just so we're clear here,
how often were these beeps? And they were going off
just during somebody's day, right as they were proceeding through life.
Speaker 2 (26:18):
What I found is that in an hour, which is
a pretty long time for interpersonal reaction in personal relationships,
So in an hour, we can talk about a half
a dozen beeps. And so I asked you to collect
a half a dozen beeps in and I set up
I generally set the beeper so that it's random, with
an average time in between beeps of a half an hour.
(26:41):
So you're gonna wear the beeper for three or four hours.
You're gonna get a half a dozen beeps, and then
we're going to talk about those half a dozen beeps.
And then you're gonna wear the beeper again tomorrow or
next week or whatever for another three or four hours
and get another half a dozen beeps.
Speaker 1 (26:54):
And the idea is that I wear that at home
while I'm going about my life.
Speaker 2 (26:58):
If you're at home, or if you're work or where,
if you're at the grocery store or whatever. I don't
have a rule about how you do that, but what
generally happens is that people will say, after they've done
it for a few days, well, you know, I really
out of work when I'm doing this kind of behavior,
because when I'm engaged in that activity, maybe my thinking
is different and we should try that. And I would say, well,
that sounds like a good idea.
Speaker 1 (27:19):
And just remind us. When the beep goes off, does
the person immediately stop what they're doing and write it
down or record it?
Speaker 2 (27:27):
Yes, So your task, you're wearing the beeper, You're going
about your everyday life. This is a beeper has an
earphone in it. You put an earphone in you and
put this in your pocket and go about your every
day life, and when it beeps, you suspend whatever it
is that you were doing to freeze your inner experience
enough so that you can jot down some notes about it,
(27:48):
and then generally the best way to do it is
to jot down notes in a notebook. But your task
is to jot down notes enough so that then we
can talk about it and you can remember what that
particular experience was about. I don't look at your notes
the notes. The notes are between you and you so
that you can do a good job of describing your experience.
Speaker 1 (28:06):
Are there things about inner experience that science is not
able to measure?
Speaker 2 (28:11):
Yes, So the work that I do I try to
get what I call a high fidelity description of inner experience,
but it's short of perfection. I strive for perfection and
fall short all the time. But I think there's a
pretty big difference between somebody saying to themselves I should
go have a hamburger and somebody else having a visual
(28:33):
imagery of a hamburger. There's very little confusion about that
if people are actually saying it and people are actually
seeing it. If they're not, then you know, if you've
got some theory about the way consciousness is and how
hamburgers present themselves in consciousness, then those that those things
(28:54):
are hard to tease apart.
Speaker 1 (28:56):
Could we use descriptive experience sampling to help people become
more aware of their own mental patterns in let's say,
therapy or mindfulness. Is there a way that if you
had better a more realistic insight into your own thought processes,
into your own inner experience, that that would help you
(29:19):
in some way?
Speaker 2 (29:20):
I think they answered it as definitely yes. The typical
person who finishes my study says, that's the best therapy
I've ever had, and a lot of them have had
a lot of therapy. And the interesting thing about it
is that that what we did was never anything other
(29:42):
than tell me about what was in your experience at
the moment of the beat. We never tried to fix
you or try to you know, why do they say
that's the best therapy? What's their experience? Because they now
feel themselves to be less delusional than they were before.
Ah great, I think they oracle is right and know
yourself as an important deal.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
Have you ever made a phone app that allows people
to do this on at scale?
Speaker 2 (30:10):
I have a phone app that I have made, but
it isn't good enough. Sooner or later I will I
will build a beeper that would be easier, easily available.
But it's not just the beeper. It's the beeper along
with somebody who is skilled at helping you what I
(30:32):
call bracket your presuppositions. So you've got you have presuppositions
about I'm an inner speaker, say and and my technique,
what I call bracketing presuppositions is well, let's just set
that aside. Maybe you are an inner speaker, maybe you're
not an internspeaker. Let's let's find out. That's the bracketing technique.
(30:53):
That's ah, that is a non trivial skill if you were.
If you will leave yourself incorrectly to be an inner
speaker and you wore a beeper until the cows came home,
you would end up believing yourself to be an inner
speaker because at every beep you would say, well, us,
as I was saying to myself and then your next people,
I was saying to myself, and at the next people,
I was saying to myself, you need skilled interlocutor who
(31:20):
can ask questions that help you overcome your own presuppositions.
It's my job as an interviewer is to try to
pay attention to where it looks like you're describing experience
and where it looks like you're not describing experience and
help you get from one to the other.
Speaker 1 (31:37):
I agree. I do wonder, in this era of incredible AI,
whether we could get that to bracket presuppositions almost as
well as the human does.
Speaker 2 (31:48):
I doubt it, but I've been mistaken about these things before,
so I don't really know.
Speaker 1 (32:07):
What can your work tell us about somebody, let's say,
with depression.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
I think a good exploration of experience and depression would
be valuable, and I've done a little bit of it,
but I can. Let me tell you just one example
of a person who was a psychlothemic kind of person
who was depressed today and up tomorrow and down the
next day and then up or whatever. And what I
(32:32):
found was that their inner experience was very different on
those days. So when they were down in a depressed day,
they had a lot of what I would call unsymbolized thinking,
and when they had an up day, they had a
lot of what I would call visual inner scene. And
(32:52):
the interesting thing that I would like to tell you
about that is that when they were down, they knew
themselves to be down, but they did didn't know themselves
to be absent of visual imagery, and when they were up,
they knew themselves to be up, but they didn't say, well,
you know, when I'm up, I have visual imagery, and
when I'm down, I don't have visual imagery that came
(33:14):
from the exploration. So people, people's inner experience, I think
is directly connected to something. Whether whether it's the inner
experience causes it, or whether it's a result of it,
or whether it is an epiphenomenon, I don't. I don't
know the answer to that. I think you need a
lot of people out there like me doing this kind
of work. But what you what that what that example
(33:38):
says is you can't expect a person to be able
to tell you what the important things are because they
just don't know.
Speaker 1 (33:47):
Have you ever tried this, let's say, with somebody who's schizophrenia.
Speaker 2 (33:51):
Yes, my first book actually was about schizophrenia, which is
which is a small sample of schizophrenics. But the when
what I found was that there was quite a bit
of visual imagery involved schizophrenics, and that that visual imagery
was very often what one of my participants called goofed up,
(34:13):
which I came to adopt as a technical term for myself.
So a goofed up. Well. So, first off, a normal image,
a non schizophrenic image, is not seeing an image. It
is an inter seeing. So I prefer to call it intercening.
And so if you're not schizophrenic, and you're you and
you have an inner visual phenomenon, it's pretty much like
(34:36):
having an external version for most people, which is to say,
the center of it is sort of more detailed and
it disappears off at the edges, which means it's not
like looking at a photograph with a border. And my
schizophrenic subjects, they're intercene was like seeing an image and
(34:56):
the image, which is to say, what they saw had
characteristics of an image. It did have a border, and
that border could be very arbitrary, like the border could
be like that, and or they or the image could
have spots on it, like somebody had taken the tooth
parts with ink on it and spattered spattered the image,
(35:21):
and and that spattering is on the image. It's not
on the face of the guy. It's on the image
of the guy. And or the image would float away.
So they see it like this, and then they see
the sort of curl up and disappear. That is not
what normal what normal people do. So that is part
(35:41):
of the reason why I'm fairly sensitive when people say
I was seeing an image. I think it's true the
schizophrenic individuals, at least some schizophrenic individuals see an image,
whereas most normal people don't. And it's a hugely different deal. Yeah,
which which is unknown to most of experiential science, which
(36:04):
to me is we will. You have to You have
to pay attention closely, because if you let somebody tell you, well,
I'm seeing an image, then and you lost the game.
Schizophrenics are often given credits for having blunted affect, which
which by which the business means they don't really experience
any emotions. And what I found was that my schizophrenic participants,
(36:29):
at least some of my schizophrenics, had what I what
I would characterize as hyper clear affect. And and and
so they would they would say I was angry, and
that anger, that anger was a tear dropped shape in
my chest, and it was sort of this white here,
and then it got wider and it was half an
inch below my chest here and two inches thick down here.
(36:52):
That is not the way most non schizophrenic people talk
about their their inner experience, but excuse thephrenics have learned
not to talk like that, and so they as a
general rule, they don't tell you about that aspect of
their experience, and so it looks from the outside like
they're inner, like their feelings are blunted. But I don't
(37:13):
think that's necessarily true. I think there's a lot to
be learned from knowing something about somebody's inner experience the
way their inner experience actually is. But to do that
you have to go through three or four days worth
of editative training, and most psychology is one shot. Do
you the irony there is that in my work I
(37:35):
throw out the first day or two of descriptive experience
ampling work results all the time, because I'm sure that
people don't know what they're talking about. Most of the
rest of the science spend. All they do is look
at what I would call the first or second day,
so they look at what I think is just absolutely
not worth watching.
Speaker 1 (37:56):
Last question, if I understand correctly, you started descriptive experience
am playing fifty years ago. Is that correct?
Speaker 2 (38:02):
That's true?
Speaker 1 (38:03):
Okay, so where do you think it's going to be
in fifty years from now?
Speaker 2 (38:06):
You know, I think about that sometimes I think I'm
fifty years out of date, and sometimes i think I'm
fifty years ahead of the game. I think in her
experience is vitally important, and I think the I think
the oracles were right. Know thyself as an important deal,
and I think the I think that's at the heart
(38:26):
of almost every thoughtful tradition people. People want to know themselves,
and I think we've sort of fallen away from that.
AI is sort of the maximally falling away, falling away
from that, leaving that behind. Whether we can transcend that
and figure out how to get back to in her
(38:51):
experience the way in your experience is actually experienced before
we destroy ourselves through some other method. I don't know
the answer to that question.
Speaker 1 (39:05):
Talking with Russell Hurlbert reminds us of something that's easy
to forget. The most familiar things in our lives, our
own thoughts and feelings and sensations, are in many ways
still unexplored territory. We move through our days surrounded by
the chatter of inner speech and flashes of imagery and
(39:26):
the subtle currents of emotion, but we rarely pause to
look carefully. We rarely ask what is actually happening inside
me right now, we rarely recognize how much is there,
and when we do turn our attention inward, it's easy
to bring with us a set of assumptions that we're
(39:47):
constantly narrating our lives in full sentences, that our thoughts
are always well formed and logical and coherent, that we
already know what it feels like to be ourselves. But
as Russell's work shows, the reality of inner experience is
typically messier and stranger than the stories that we tell
(40:09):
about it. Some moments are rich with inner speech, Others
unfold in pure wordless awareness. Some thoughts flash by without
any verbal or visual form at all. Sometimes what seems
central to us, like emotions, barely register at all in
a given moment, and other times a sensory awareness or
(40:31):
maybe unsymbolized thinking or a subtle feeling, these are the
things that take center stage. So what Russell is offering
isn't just a scientific method. It's an invitation, an invitation
to approach our own experience with the same curiosity, the
same openness that a scientist brings to a new and
(40:54):
unfamiliar landscape, to bracket our expectations, to listen carefully to
resist the urge to simplify or categorize too quickly, and
maybe even to be surprised by what we find. Inner
experience is not just an echo of the outside world.
It is its own territory. It's complex and dynamic, and
(41:19):
it's worth studying, not just scientifically but personally, because in
the end, understanding our conscious lives is not just an
academic exercise. It's you. It's what you've got going on
in there, so you may as well figure out what
it is. Thanks for joining me today, and I hope
today's episode will give you a little window into the
(41:41):
extraordinary and often overlooked cosmos inside of us.
Speaker 2 (41:46):
All go to.
Speaker 1 (41:50):
Eagleman dot com slash podcast for more information and to
find further reading. Check out my newsletter on substack and
be a part of the online chats there, or you
can send me an email at podcasts at Eagleman dot
com with questions or discussion. Finally, you can watch the
videos of Inner Cosmos on YouTube, where you can leave comments.
Until next time, I'm David Eagleman, and we are catching
(42:13):
glimpses of the inner cosmos
Host
David Eagleman
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