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All rights reserved 89-22848 CIP No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher To my wife Foreword ix living in a "complex but private world" simply does not hold up, at least for the persons sampled in this book.Ultimately we may get important clues about brain functioning from this new data source that is being tapped by Hurlburt. The method is labor-intensive, yes, but if social science research is to be funded sometime at a level even partially commensurate with natural science, we will be able to accumulate these data. It can be matched against the various new brain-imaging devices with great profit. A comparable method has already been fruitfully employed in cardiovascular research where patients can carry halter monitors, and silent ischemic painless responses on the EKG can be matched to samples of concurrent ongoing thought reports.I began by asking what are the basic data of psychology. Clearly overt acts, questionnaire responses, choices made under laboratory conditions-all are necessary sources of information for scientific evaluation. Now we have a new version of the introspective data that once were derided as "armchair" psychology. The introspective reports obtained by Hurlburt's procedure are free of the explanations and attributions that have been criticized as "after the fact" or unpredictive of behavior by social psychologists. Instead, they are the raw material of spontaneous emotion and imagery or interior monologue that can lend themselves to potentially deep analyses of ordinary thought. What they may lack in the literary attractiveness of a monologue written by James Joyce they make up in their undoubted authenticity. We have the beginnings here of an exciting means for capturing the flow of natural human thought, critical data indeed for a full understanding of human psychology.

You live your entire waking life immersed in your inner experiences (thoughts, feelings, sensations and so on) – private phenomena created by you, just for you, your own way. Despite their intimacy and ubiquity, you probably do not know the characteristics of your own inner phenomena; neither does psychology or consciousness science. Investigating Pristine Inner Experience explores how to apprehend inner experience in high fidelity. This book will transform your view of your own inner experience, awaken you to experiential differences between people and thereby reframe your thinking about psychology and consciousness science, which banned the study of inner experience for most of a century and yet continued to recognize its fundamental importance. The author, a pioneer in using beepers to explore inner experience, draws on his 35 years of studies to provide fascinating and provocative views of everyday inner experience and experience in bulimia, adolescence, the elderly, schizophrenia, Tourette's syndrome, virtuosity and more.

Psychology and cognitive neuroscience often use standardized tasks to elicit particular experiences. We explore whether elicited experiences are similar to spontaneous experiences. In an MRI scanner, five participants performed tasks designed to elicit inner speech (covertly repeating experimenter-supplied words), inner seeing, inner hearing, feeling, and sensing. Then, in their natural environments, participants were trained in four days of random-beep-triggered Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES). They subsequently returned to the scanner for nine 25-min resting-state sessions; during each they received four DES beeps and described those moments (9 × 4 = 36 moments per participant) of spontaneously occurring experience. Enough of those moments included spontaneous inner speech to allow us to compare brain activation during spontaneous inner speech with what we had found in task-elicited inner speech. ROI analysis was used to compare activation in two relevant areas (Heschl’s gyrus and left inferior frontal gyrus). Task-elicited inner speech was associated with decreased activation in Heschl’s gyrus and increased activation in left inferior frontal gyrus. However, spontaneous inner speech had the opposite effect in Heschl’s gyrus and no significant effect in left inferior frontal gyrus. This study demonstrates how spontaneous phenomena can be investigated in MRI and calls into question the assumption that task-created phenomena are often neurophysiologically and psychologically similar to spontaneously occurring phenomena.