Investigating Pristine Inner Experience: Moments of Truth

by Russell T. Hurlburt

• ISBN13: 9780521279123
• ISBN10: 0521279127
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-06-27
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

You live your entire waking life immersed in your inner experiences (thoughts, feelings, sensations, etc.) - private phenomena created by you, just for you, your own way. Despite their intimacy and ubiquity, you probably don't 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 so on.

Author Biography

Russell T. Hurlburt pioneered the investigation of inner experience, inventing (1973) the beepers that launched "thought sampling," the attempt to measure characteristics of inner experience. Despite the sophistication of his thought-sampling measurements, Hurlburt concluded (by about 1980) that science needed a better understanding of inner phenomena themselves. Therefore he developed "Descriptive Experience Sampling" (DES), the attempt to apprehend inner experience in high fidelity. That has led to four books: Sampling Normal and Schizophrenic Inner Experience (1990), Sampling Inner Experience in Disturbed Affect (1993), Exploring Inner Experience (with Chris Heavey, 2006), and Describing Inner Experience: Proponent Meets Skeptic (with Eric Schwitzgebel, 2007). A special issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies (January 2011) was devoted to DES. Hurlburt is Professor of Psychology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and is also the author of a highly regarded statistics textbook, Comprehending Behavioral Statistics (fourth edition 2006).

Table of Contents

List of Figures and Tables	p. ix
Preface	p. xi
Acknowledgments	p. xiii
Moments of Truth	p. 1
Fragmented Experience in Bulimia Nervosa (with Sharon Jones-Forrester)	p. 28
Apprehending Pristine Experience	p. 49
Everyday Experience	p. 72
Moments Are Essential	p. 81
Experience in Tourette's Syndrome (with Michael J. Kane)	p. 94
The Moment (Not): Happy and Sad	p. 104
Subjunctification	p. 116
Before and After Experience? Adolescence and Old Age	p. 125
Iteration Is Essential	p. 152
Epistemological Q/A	p. 178
A Consciousness Scientist as DES Subject	p. 201
Pristine Experience (Not): Emotion and Schizophrenia	p. 230
Multiple Autonomous Experience in a Virtuoso Musician (with Ricardo Cobo)	p. 258
Unsymbolized Thinking (with Sarah A. Akhter)	p. 291
Sensory Awareness (with Chris Heavey and Arva Bensaheb)	p. 309
The Radical Non-subjectivity of Pristine Experience	p. 325
Diamonds versus Glass	p. 347
Into the Floor: A Right-or-Wrong-Answer Natural Experiment (with Chris Heavey)	p. 361
The Emergence of Salient Characteristics	p. 390
Investigating Pristine Inner Experience	p. 411
Appendix: List of Constraints	p. 437
References	p. 443
Index	p. 451
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