I have not progressed beyond using a twenty minute timer to give me my sample points when I am sampling, rather than something random, as recommended, because I failed to get hold of a suitable random bleeper. Initially, I used the MS clock feature on my telephone when out and a cooking timer when in, with this latter now replaced by the same MS clock feature on my laptop. And I did make some use of the telephone timer indoors. All of which worked well enough.
I mostly sampled when I was working on the computer or when I was out on one of my morning walks. Activities which, while they do take up a fair amount of the day, perhaps a third of my waking day, miss the other two thirds, for example household duties and television duties. Sampling being a rather conspicuous and intrusive business, I have not been inclined to sample at these other times.
At the outset, as noted at reference 1, I worried first about the consistency with which one could record one’s own thoughts and second about the amount of interaction between that thought and the sampling process. Both worries remain, but as issues rather than worries. I am reasonably satisfied that one can describe one’s experience to oneself in a consistent and informative way. Sharing such experience, comparing one person’s experience with another is another matter – although I dare say Hurlburt (the inventor of the technique) would say that you can tell quite a lot about a person from their samples, just as a therapist might learn quite a lot about a person from talking to him. Perhaps the samples from young people have a different flavour from those of old people. Or the samples from sick people have a different flavour from those of well people. And while the sampling process does intrude on the inner life, it does not, to my mind, disqualify it as inner life. Any more than, say, worrying about whether the newspaper is going to publish one’s letter about the dreadful behaviour of cyclists in Epsom, in the margins of other activities, is disqualified. It’s all part of the life being sampled.
The two headlines from my samples are the absence of inner thought when I am busy, say working on the computer, even if I am reading from or writing onto the screen, and the presence of inner verbal thought when I am not busy, say out walking around Epsom, described below as the classification B phenomenon. A bit counter-intuitive, but the subjective experience is clear enough: if I am interrupted when I am working, I am not conscious of having been thinking about anything, although I could say what I had been doing, perhaps rehearse the words that I had been reading – while if I am interrupted when I am out walking, I am so conscious.
Another feature, was the propensity for rubbish to creep into inner verbal thought. The brain would play stuff as inner verbal thought, which if one paused and concentrated, was clearly rubbish. Not obscene or racist, or anything else particularly unpleasant, just common or garden rubbish. But stuff which one would hope that one would not say out loud. There is the thought that this is apt to happen when one is relaxed, not really focused on anything in particular, perhaps with the super-ego having gone off-line. One supposes that the brain generates all kinds of stuff as it goes along, most of which is filtered out well before its makes it up to consciousness, but the filtering works better at some times than at others. I associate to the notion that if one has a language, one can get one’s computer to generate all kinds of meaningful and grammatically correct sentences in that language – which might or might not be true. But they have to be expressed in order that truth might be tested.
Another feature, was what I think is called top-down activity. Where, for example, I was listening out for the bleep, sometimes hard to hear against the traffic noise, and I projected the sound of the bleep onto the broadband traffic noise. Or, putting it the other way around, there was enough in the traffic noise for me to be able to extract a coherent bleep from it. Another example would be seeing something on the path ahead, deciding that it was (say) a blackbird and then seeing a really good blackbird, projecting memories of blackbirds onto the bit of image in question. Until, getting closer, one realised that it was a crumpled sandwich wrapper from the nearby Tesco Metro.
Lastly there is the business of what Hurlburt calls unsymbolised thought. Fairly often, when interrupted by the bleep, I was fairly sure that I was thinking about something, a something which I could name, without being conscious of any inner thought, verbal or otherwise. I don’t think unsymbolised is a very good term for this, as I believe the thought is not far from being conscious and is, quite likely, quite close to being in words or pictures. Again, a bit counter-intuitive, but the subjective experience is clear enough.
Or, contrariwise, perhaps this thinking is going on in some internal language of which I know nothing. Perhaps there is another analogy with computers here. One has a perfectly straightforward polynomial expansion of the sine function in one’s hand (or from wikipedia). But one would be hard put to find that expansion in the low-level machine code which one had generated to execute it on a computer. The language with which you talk to the computer in is some layers away from that with which it talks to itself, although you hope that the content is much the same.
Some conclusions
Descriptive experience sampling does give us a procedure, a process for capturing and sharing something of the complexity of the subjective conscious experience.
And the view of consciousness that it offers seems to be consistent with that of frames and threads offered at, for example, reference 7. The thesis that consciousness can be described in terms of a rectangular array made up of frames (in time) and threads (in content), with frames being made up of a number of threads and with threads having a tendency to persist across frames, and, to a lesser extent, across takes.
With frames and takes allowing the flickering which seemed to be a feature of being out walking.
With the strength of the classification B phenomenon being good evidence for the existence of threads.
And while conscious can seem to go on and off, as, for example, when one is anaesthetised or when one wakes up suddenly, the view offered here is generally suggestive of there being threads of consciousness, with some of them being near conscious and with some of them being just conscious. Some threads more foreground, some more background. A world rather more complicated than just on or off.
On or off is just pulling the power on the arousal, the pulses of consciousness which underlie the frames we experience. Something to do with the brain stem rather than the brain.
The workbook
While maintaining consistency has been difficult, conscious thought being a rather slippery customer and it being easy for unchecked practise to drift over time, the Excel workbook which I used to record the sample points has not changed very much since August last year. The layout of the relevant worksheet is illustrated above. As ever, click to enlarge for a better view.
The 1,001 sample lines are supplemented by 47 pictures, mainly taken on the telephone, when this seemed worthwhile, as a record of the time and place of the sample point. Nearly all of the time, the Excel record was completed on the day of the sample point.
Part of the information collected at a sample point are six columns of classification and content data, to the left of the text notes in the illustration. The classification column tries to summarise what sort of a sample point it was, while the five content columns try to say something about the content of consciousness at that point. In what follows, it is this classification and content data which I have made most use of.
In the notes, visible to the right of the illustration, I used two words with a special meaning, with the two counts being indicative rather than reliable.
Bleepering: this is thinking about or around the sample process, mostly either thinking of the words to describe the thoughts just past if a bleep had gone off or thinking that a bleep was due, perhaps trying to concentrate on hearing a bleep over the noise of the traffic. The word is present in the notes of 107 sample points.
Flickering: this is when one’s attention is wandering all over the place. Sometimes over the outside world, sometimes over the inside world. Doesn’t describe what one is doing at a point in time, but it can describe what one has been doing for the last few seconds. The word is present in the notes of 74 sample points.
Classification
The classification column was coded as follows, with the numbers in brackets giving numbers (out of a total of 1,001 sample points) and percentages.
A (482, 48%): absorbed in some purposeful activity. Working on, with or towards something, these days usually book work or computer work, and this usually means no inner thought (apart from that directly arising from a primary activity such as reading or writing), no consciousness of any sensations or feelings. No gaps, the activity just rolls forward.
B (435, 43%): engaged in some purposeful, but probably undemanding primary activity, but with there being, in addition, secondary activity, often inner thought, not directly related to the primary activity. Possibly, for example, doing something with the hands, like feeling around in one’s pocket for some change, or having a conversation or listening to the radio. Or in my case, walking around Epsom while thinking, mostly in words but sometimes with pictures, of all kinds of things quite unrelated to my walking or its location. Perhaps related to the free association of the psycho-analysts, but with much less continuity and much less focus on the inner life. But what I call the primary activity generally has charge of such motor activity as there may be, at least the arms and legs part of motor activity. That is, as it were, what makes it primary.
P (44, 4%): a short pause in what is otherwise some purposeful primary activity. With it not always being clear whether to use A or P: there are lots of short pauses in otherwise purposeful activity. A question of scale and duration? When it is long enough to notice, it counts as a P? There may be secondary activity, there may just be a blank.
R (27, 3%): in repose. Not necessarily lying down, one might be standing or sitting. But there will not be any purposeful activity. There may be secondary activity, there may just be a blank.
U (8, 1%): unconscious. There won’t be much of this during sampling, but I will occasionally have dozed off, perhaps from having been in repose.
O (0, 0%): other. Anything else not sensibly classified elsewhere. A precaution which turned out not to be needed.
N (5, 0%): not applicable or not appropriate. For the odd occasion when for some reason or another there is no activity classification. Perhaps because whatever was happening at the sample point was deemed to be private.
Content columns
All coded H for high, M for medium, L for low, U for uncertain, Z for zero and N for not applicable or not available for some reason. In the event, there was not much of this last and the rest of it was a bit impressionistic – and is yet to be analysed.
U (logged at some level other than zero in 88 samples): presence of unsymbolised thought, thought which has not come out in words or images. There has been a lot of debate across the years about the existence of this category and Hurlburt spends a lot of time on it, coming down in its favour. I remain convinced about its existence but, as noted above, I think the name unsymbolised thought gives the wrong flavour: I think rather in terms of unconscious thought of whatever variety, but with the quirk that one is pretty sure that it is going on and what it is about.
W (‘W’ for word, logged in 360 samples): presence of verbal inner thought, coded as above, some of which was close to being vocalised out loud – see reference 6 for some thoughts on this point. Included here are what seemed to be an increasing proportion of samples where I seem to be savouring the sounds of words – in inner thought, not out loud – more than their meanings. Repeating the word, over and over, perhaps with slight variations of, for example, stress.
I (‘I’ for image, logged in 106 samples): presence of inner thought in some other form, nearly always pictorial. Some image from the past, recent or otherwise.
S (logged in 200 samples): awareness of some sensation from the inside or some stimulus from the outside, over and above those serving the primary activity (see below). Quite a lot of this will be eyeing something when I am out walking, something which has caught my attention. Such eyeing might or might not be accompanied by inner verbal thought or unsymbolised thought. Some of this will be listening to something in the same sort of way
F (logged in 61 samples, mostly at L/low): the presence of some kind of feeling. Something like shame would count as a feeling while pain might have counted as a sensation, had it occurred.
Q (used in 42 samples): a place to mark sample point where there was some uncertainty about how to code. Some special point of interest. Some query or other.
References
Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/descriptive-experience-sampled.html. An introduction to the technique.
Reference 2: https://faculty.unlv.edu/hurlburt/. Home page.
Reference 3: http://www.charlesfernyhough.com/. Home page.
Reference 4: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/10/the-art-of-fielding-two.html. Ruminations, some on the interaction between thinking and trying to sample and write down that thinking.
Reference 5: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/on-rubbish.html. On the propensity to think rubbish when relaxed.
Reference 6: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/on-saying-cat.html. Ruminations about what is involved in talking out loud or talking in one’s head.
Reference 7: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/an-assembly-for-consciousness.html. One of various posts advancing the thesis that consciousness can be described in terms of a rectangular array made up of frames (in time) and threads (in content).
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