Ep104 "What is your internal world really like?" (with Russell Hurlburt)

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 look the way they do. Today's episode is about what you can know about your inner life. Now you may 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 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 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

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 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 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

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 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 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.

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 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, 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 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, 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 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?

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. 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 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.

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 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 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

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 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

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. 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.

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, 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.

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 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, 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 that time, not let's set aside everything else and just take a look at that particular moment as if that was interesting enough.

to myself a lot. And many of the people who 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.

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 flight by the beep.

the characteristic of my method that I call iterative. We're 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 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.

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. 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. 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 original thought about a hamburger and changing my mind to a hot dog.

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.

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. 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 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 at all or this all manner of alternatives.

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. 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 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 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 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.

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 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. But it's a first person plural exercise. It is not a first person seeing their exercise.

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.

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.

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.

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 are hard to tease apart.

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.

not an internspeaker. Let's let's find out. That's the bracketing technique. 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 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.

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 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 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 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.

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 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 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, 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 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

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, 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.

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 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 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.

from that, leaving that behind. Whether we can transcend that and figure out how to get back to in her 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 extraordinary and often overlooked cosmos inside of us.