by James Wallace Harris, 6/15/26
In Chapter 3, “Thought” from A World Appears, Michael Pollan works with psychologist Russell T. Hurlburt, who has been collecting thought diaries from his subjects for over fifty years. The technique Hurlburt uses is called Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES). Subjects wear a device that randomly beeps in their ears. When they hear the beep, they write down what was going on in their head just before the beep. Hurlburt says:
I have sampled with some people whose inner experience is characterized almost exclusively by inner speech; with others whose inner experience is characterized almost exclusively by images, or by sensory awareness, or by unsymbolized thinking, or by feelings; with others whose inner experience is characterized by a combination of all those; with some whose inner experience is characterized by many simultaneous events; with others whose inner experience is characterized almost exclusively by one event at a time; and so on. So, yes, I think people are importantly different when it comes to inner experience.
So when you ask a person, “What are you thinking?” the answer might not be anything like how you think. For the most part, people assume everyone thinks like they do, but Hurlburt’s research shows that isn’t true.
I’ve kept a running chatter in my head my whole life, except for when I’m unconscious. However, as soon as I wake up, the voice returns. It’s weird to think that some people don’t have this inner voice. That makes me think of the science fiction novel Blindsight by Peter Watts. Watts imagines an intelligent alien race that lacks conscious self-awareness.
My inner voice is almost always analytical, always commenting on what I’m experiencing. If I have a pain in my abdomen, the voice is proposing theories as to what is causing the pain. But it’s not always like this.
When I was younger, I had constant fantasies about everything. I was a little Walter Mitty. I’ve always had imaginary conversations in my head, usually about what I was going to talk about with people in the future. Of course, I had lots of sexual fantasies, but I had many more kinds of fantasies. If I saw a movie and didn’t like the plot, I’d reimagine it with a new plot. If I didn’t like the actors, I’d recast the film in my head. I’ve mentally written hundreds of science fiction stories. For every blog post I write, I’ve already written it several times in my thoughts.
I found it fascinating that Hurlburt said some people don’t do this either.
But then, when I discovered I had aphantasia, my mind boggled trying to imagine how other people see inside their minds. I do sometimes have flashes of visual imagery. My dreams are very vivid. And sometimes if I’m tired in just the right way, I have waking dreams. When I was young and smoked dope, the visual floodgates would open.
I do “visualize” things in my head, but without pictures. I have good spatial awareness and can intuit how machines work. I have another sense for how things look. It’s very hard to describe. I wonder if it’s like how blind people develop spatial awareness?
Hurlburt’s research also showed that people see and think less in their heads as they age. That makes me wonder if I had better mental imagery when I was younger. I do feel my inner chatter is slowing.
One reason I believe that is because when I first tried to meditate in the 1970s, I had a hell of a time quieting that inner voice. Now I can relax, and it will shut up for about as long as I can hold my breath. And it feels like that. The longer I shut up mentally, the pressure builds, sort of like needing to take a breath when you’re holding it. Thoughts eventually explode out.
I’ve often wondered why most people aren’t addicted to music like I am. When I play music, it stimulates my brain in many ways. My “thinking” goes into overdrive, and my mind is flooded with ideas. Also, music creates all kinds of emotions or enhances existing emotions. Music makes me mentally high, but it’s unlike the old marijuana high that made my body high, too. I need to hear one to two hours of music a day, so it does feel like an addiction.
I’m not sure what Hurlburt means by “symbolized” and “unsymbolized thinking.” I might do that, or I might not. Nor do I know what he means by only being able to think of one event at a time. I know I’m experiencing many sensory events at once, but I think I only focus on one at a time. Are some people multichanneled? Is that like having multiple picture-in-picture on your inner TV screen?
I have to assume I’m a bookworm because of the way I think. Reading fiction is like having your own artificial reality goggles. However, I don’t visualize scenes like other readers do.
I assume I write blogs because it feels like I’m organizing my thoughts. I assume that I would think like a writer, say, like Michael Pollan. But the more I read about Hurlburt, the more I wonder.
The fact that there is so much variation from person to person in our modes of thinking is itself an important finding of Descriptive Experience Sampling. Most of us assume that our inner lives must be substantially similar—not necessarily in content but in the form our thoughts take. Hurlburt has suggested that we fail to recognize the diversity of thinking styles because we lump them all together under that single word—thinking—and assume we mean the same thing by it, though in actuality we don’t.
“When a visualizer says they are thinking about something,” Hurlburt said, “they mean they are seeing a visual image of something, and if they are predominantly inner speakers, they mean ‘I was talking to myself.’ And the reason for this, I speculate, is that when you were two and learned that when your mother, or whoever it was, says, ‘I was thinking,’ that meant something that was happening inside Mom that you couldn’t see. So when I want to tell you whatever is going on inside me, that’s ‘I’m thinking.’ But ‘thinking’ means something different from person to person.” If Hurlburt is right, the word thinking has allowed us to overlook these differences and make the unwarranted assumption that other people are having inner experiences more or less like our own.
Pollan, Michael. A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness (pp. 146-147). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Pollan was surprised when Hurlburt expressed what his DES diaries suggested:
Hurlburt proceeded to tell me that he didn’t think I had much inner experience at all. I was on the far end of a spectrum that ran from a rich inner life of words, images, and sensations to one…well, one lacking all that. Apparently, the fact that I had so much trouble distinguishing context from the moments under analysis (and kept bringing up things he considered irrelevant) suggested to him that I was, in effect, backfilling moments empty of actual inner experience.
I was flabbergasted, and reacted a little defensively.
Hurlburt said that he had arrived at his conclusion by a process of elimination: Most of my beeps lacked words, lacked images, lacked sensory awareness. Okay, but what about unsymbolized thinking? My non- or preverbal thought processes seemed to fall neatly into this mode. Hurlburt acknowledged that we had turned up a few instances of this, but “unsymbolized thoughts are complete thoughts,” he explained, not the misty “gists” of thought I had described. Subtract those and he was left with one uncomfortable possibility: that I didn’t have nearly as much of an inner life as I’d always assumed.
My interiority, he seemed to be suggesting, was sparsely furnished.
Has it always been this way? I wondered. Hurlburt pointed out that the ability to generate inner experiences depends on cognitive resources that decline with age. For example, he’s found that as people get older, their inner seeing tends to deteriorate, fading from full-color imagery to black and white. He cited James, who writes that “the older men are and the more effective as thinkers, the more, as a rule, they have lost their visualizing power…. The present writer observes it in his own person most distinctly.” Hurlburt thinks that all forms of inner experience may be subject to the same fading over time.
Pollan, Michael. A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness (pp. 148-149). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Can we know ourselves? Many philosophers and scientists say we can’t understand consciousness because we’re studying it from the inside out. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to step outside of ourselves and study who we are?
It’s quite commonly known that people see colors differently. For example, when I play Rummikub with friends, they claim the green tiles are blue. This is really no different than how different monitors show the same .jpg file with different-looking colors.
This morning, my inner voice was chatting about how we see the world, and asked if machines perceive reality differently. Does a camera see a vista as objective reality? Or are the chemicals in film, and the sensors in digital cameras, also limited by physical constraints?
It is rather weird that we have no idea what reality looks like. And it seems we have no idea what we really look like on the inside.
JWH
Auxiliary Memory 