Descriptive experience sampled

I first came across Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES), a procedure for trying to get at the subjective contents of consciousness in an organised, in a systematic way, about a year ago – but did not pay it much attention at that time.

Then for some reason, I have been fired up by what Charles Fernyhough had to say about the procedure in his book about the voices within, published by Profile Books earlier this year. There is a quite recent post spawned from an earlier book of his at reference 1.

The procedure has been the subject of work by Russell Hurlburt (see reference 2) and colleagues at the University of Las Vegas for more than thirty years now. It strikes me as an interesting and useful attempt to capture what goes on in the ordinary way in ordinary minds and I am puzzled why it does not seem to have made it into the mainstream. Naively, paying more attention to what is going on in every-day consciousness from the inside, from the subjects’ point of view, sounds like a very good complement to peering at special cases from the outside with microscopes, electrodes and scanners.

Turning to the procedure, first, the subjects carry a bleeper and a notebook around with them. The bleeper goes off at random intervals and when it does the subject notes down what they are thinking of, if anything, at the time. With things arranged so that it goes off around a half dozen times during the day.

Second, at the end of each day, the subject is interviewed by a researcher who has been trained in the procedure, training which takes some trouble to stop interviewers imposing their particular scientific view on the subjective views of the subjects. Together, they work up, round out, the notes taken by the subject at the times of the bleeps. With the result supposed to be a record of what the subject was thinking at the various times, a record which is not contaminated by theory or expectation.

Subjects are trained, then there are several warm up days, then several more data days. The usual form seems to be that the researchers get about five usable data points out of each subject each data day, with collection going on for about five days. With some hardy souls doing a great deal more than this.

All in all, I come away with the impression that this is a well thought-through and cunning attempt to capture what goes on in consciousness in a scientific way. To produce data that can be attacked with statistics and analysis – in a way that the fictional ruminations of someone like Leopold Bloom can’t be.

Hurlburt and his colleagues have identified what they call the five frequently occurring phenomena – inner speech, inner seeing, unsymbolized thinking, feelings, and sensory awareness. These five sorts of data point account for a good part of the total, with the next most frequently occurring phenomena occurring a good deal less frequently. It seems fair to concentrate on these five.

The frequencies with which these frequent phenomena occur vary a good deal from person to person. I have not seen anything on variation over time.

Unsymbolised thinking, thinking which involves neither images nor words, is frequent and most but not all subjects seem to do it. I am happy that there is some distinct phenomenon which is so classified, if for no other reason than that it seems likely that we were conscious of something before we had words, but I am not yet very happy with what exactly it might be.

While Fernyhough, who has spent quality time with the procedure, is keen to divide inner speech into inner monologue, inner dialogue and inner multilogue. I add this last, slightly mischievously, out of respect for the multiple personality community. Part of this is the entirely plausible theory that inner speech evolved out of regular speech with others, regular dialogue. Speech with others came first, speech with oneself came second. There is also the complication that inner speech is not always silent: it may be out loud, but it is not for anyone else, even though others may be in earshot. It seems that top-flight, competitive sportsmen are a well-known category of inner speakers, with quite a lot of their inner speech making it onto our television screens. I suppose, in this, one ought to allow for the possibility of this apparent inner speech, actually being some sort of a performance for the audience.

Unless one is a creative or arty person, when one is very sure that one’s inner speech is coming from someone other than oneself, one ought to start to get worried. Maybe, even, go and see a doctor. But remembering here that the vast majority of inner speech is perfectly natural and healthy.

In all this, I worry first about the consistency with which the data points are captured and classified. The researchers are trained, but they have nothing like the depth and duration of training that psycho-analysts used to have to go through, despite my impression that what the researchers are trying to do is not that different. And second about the extent to which the process of data collection disturbs the data that is to be collected. Are the data collected too much an artefact of the procedure to be useful for any proper scientific process? I think not, but it remains a bit of a worry.

So I thought I would give it a bit of a go myself, a sort of DIY version – very much in the Californian tradition of DIY mind benders. First thought was to download the free app built for the purpose onto my telephone, but then it turns out that the free app in question does not work on a Microsoft telephone. Not going to change my telephone quite yet, not least because I like it. Second thought was to try my cheap timer, probably intended for cooks, but which is plenty small enough to fit in the pocket. Apart from giving out a beep at a known to me interval, rather than at a random interval, this worked quite well indoors, but was mostly inaudible outdoors, when it was in my pocket. Third thought was the alarm clock which is on my telephone. Plenty loud enough, but so loud and twiddly as to disturb the fleeting moments which I am trying to capture. I fall prey to the uncertainty principle alluded to above which says that the business of observation will always disturb that which is observed. But maybe I will get over that in time – it is only day four.

So far the results are plenty of inner verbal thoughts while I am out walking and very little of anything when indoors working. The work seems to occupy all the space available. I have not yet surprised anything which feels like anything like a dialogue, but maybe that will come. And there is possible progress on unsymbolised thought in that I have beeped a number of spots when I was paused in what I was doing indoors: I was very alert but there was nothing in consciousness. Alert and focused on what appears to be an empty inner space. No images, sounds or thoughts – although my eyes were open and I might or might not have responded to some visual stimulation. Leaving this last aside, it seems likely that there was work going on in the unconscious, work which was quite probably very relevant to what I was doing when I paused. Maybe this is Hurlburt’s unsymbolised thoughts.

Maybe I shall report further in due course.

PS: maybe also I shall get in touch with NESCOT or somewhere like that, where they might have a student who might like to build a little app for a project. Which seemed like a good idea when I first thought it, but on second thought I rather recoil from all the time that I would need to put in with the student to make such a project work. No free lunches about here, any more than anywhere else.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/07/madeleine-moments.html.

Reference 2: https://faculty.unlv.edu/hurlburt/. This includes plenty of pointers to open-access material about DES. And google turns up plenty more stuff from ‘descriptive experience sampling’.