Inner Experience

Do you talk to yourself? Most people do - even Big Frank. When that talk is internal it is called "inner speech". This phenomenon is pretty much a mystery. It is not known just how much time people spend doing this, or the form that this inner speech takes. Is this the way that thoughts are discovered and expressed to ourselves; or do we have the thought first and then express it - try it out, as it were, to ourselves afterwards? These are some of the questions that are being studied. Two investigators that are working on this are Russell Hurelburt in psychology and Eric Schwitzgebel in philosophy. In fact, they have just published a book - Describing Inner Experience -on their ingenious research based on Descriptive Experience Sampling, where they beeped a woman, Melanie, who then reported what her inner experience was when she was beeped. You can read the first chapter here, and actually read the transcripts of Melanie's descriptions of her inner experiences here.

The routine ran something like this; at random intervals Melanie would get beeped. At that moment she would jot down the inner experience that she was undergoing. Then, within 24 hours, Schwitzgebel and Hurelburt conduct a thorough interview on the inner experiences that she had undergown that day. It turns out that, despite peoples' views that such experiences are largely carried via an inner voice commenting on themselves and the world , that; many people have few words in their thoughts. Such "thoughts" are often a variation of images or bodily sensations.

Try this experiment on yourself. Set your own beeper and then write down what inner experience you were in when it sounded. Of course, then you will face the same problem that these investigators face - not only categorizing what was going on (thought or words; image or feeling; feeling or thought: or pure bodily sensation) but also the issue of whether your report is accurate. Are you capable of knowing what it is that you are experiencing?