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"Pristine Inner Experience" by Hulburt (a review)
5 Plays13 minutes ago
How does Hurlburt’s method of sampling what is happening in our minds work? What have we learnt from it about the variety of our everyday inner worlds - from thinking without symbols, to schizophrenia, to guitar playing?
Welcome to another episode of “Imagine an apple”!
Today, Vynn interviews Francis about his new favourite book “Investigating Pristine Inner Experience”. The book describes Russell Hurlburt’s “Descriptive Experience Sampling” method, and what we’ve learnt from it.
Timestamps:
00:53 Why Francis likes the book
02:55 Hurlburt and his method
09:34 Scepticism
13:58 Unsymbolized thinking
18:22 Sampling yourself
25:59 Variety of inner experience
30:30 Schizophrenia, emotion
39:38 Benefits, guitar playing
48:10 Sonder
Show Links:
- Investigating Pristine Inner Experience: Moments of Truth - book by Russell T. Hurlburt
- Descriptive Experience Sampling Codebook - Russell T. Hurlburt and Christopher L. Heavey
- My mind sampling results - Francis’ blog
- RussHurlburt’s YouTube Channel - Recordings of DES sessions
- Inner Experience in Bulimia, Fragmented Experience in Bulimia - papers by Hurlburt
- Sampling normal and schizophrenic inner experience - book by Hurlburt
- Sonder - definition in the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows
Contact Details:
Please follow us, get in touch, tell us about your inner experiences!
Twitter: @imagine_apple @SurenVynn @frabcus
Email: imagine@flourish.org
Theme written, performed and recorded by @MJPiercello
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Empathetic Experience Study
00:00:00
Speaker
and And yeah, and that Herbert would openly study this in such a sort of positive, he's just listening to everyone. He's not imposing anything. He's not trying to change the world.
00:00:10
Speaker
He's not trying to do anything. he's not He's wanting to understand what it's like to be another person. It's like a very raw form of phenomenological kind of empathy. Yeah. Almost. It's really really beautiful.
00:00:24
Speaker
Yeah.
Exploring 'Investigating Pristine Inner Experience'
00:00:35
Speaker
Right, welcome, welcome. Your hosts for today, vin and Francis. ah Today we'll be talking about a book that Francis read recently, which is called... It's called Investigating Pristine Inner Experience by Russell T. Hilbert.
00:00:52
Speaker
We're talking about this book. This is your book, Francis. How would you describe it? It is basically my favorite book I've read for years and years and years. It's probably my top three or five books I've ever read. Really?
00:01:04
Speaker
Why is that?
Hulbert's Methodology of Mental Experience Study
00:01:06
Speaker
I think it's because it was it's really interesting intellectually because it's talking about something no one's ever studied properly. And Hulbert is basically the first person to study in a reliable way.
00:01:17
Speaker
The detail, the granular, interesting richness of mental experience in a kind of fairly authentic way. And yeah, there are potential flaws in his method, but generally speaking, it seems way better than any other method i've come across. So it's just quite a good, new, interesting thing.
00:01:33
Speaker
And then also I find it quite emotionally connecting to humanity as well. um which which not all things that are interesting are emotionally connecting. But it makes me feel closer to people. And like the richness of our diversity of experience made me feel like good by the end.
00:01:50
Speaker
And kind of almost more positive for what we are as a species, which is cool. So it wasn't just like an intellectual exercise. It was an exploration of like, it was quite emotional, in other words. be able to like Yeah. I mean, i read it in the right place. I was on holiday in Cornwall a house with a couple of friends.
Personal Reflections and Anecdotes
00:02:07
Speaker
And every morning I'd wake up an hour or two earlier than they did and go and sit in the window overlooking the sea this this old Methodist chapel cottage and like look out to the sea and read my book and drink yeah drink coffee.
00:02:20
Speaker
And it just had this really nice vibe. And I was like, oh, wow, there's this. i i did I didn't know, you know, schizophrenics experience emotion like that.
00:02:31
Speaker
It would just be kind of interesting. every chapter i would read a chapter each day and it'd be really interesting. um and kind of connecting and i didn't think about yeah you just described the perfect holiday for me just like a a peaceful holiday out uh with the but by the sea by the coast and being able to read first thing in the morning before everyone's woken up that's that's uh that's the ideal vacation for me but yeah so what what do you know about hulbert can you like let's start with that I don't butt know very much about
Descriptive Experience Sampling Technique
00:03:02
Speaker
Herbert. I just know that he's the guy who has a very special technique for interviewing people.
00:03:08
Speaker
um And I think he told me about this. It's called descriptive experience sampling, which I'm hoping to get you to talk more about. And um he's I don't it quite understand how he's his work differs from like phenomenology for per se. So maybe that's something we can talk about later as well.
00:03:27
Speaker
But to me, Herbert is just well, it's the emotion guy amongst many other emotion guys in my head. um But yeah, well, tell me more about how that why well Why you think Helbert's method is so different from phenomenology and what makes it so much more unique?
00:03:48
Speaker
The first thing is that no one's no one's really psychologists haven't really studied phenomenology in the 20th century, mainly because of this there was a switch to behavioralism in the late 19th century and people talked about what people do and their outward behavior and they measure things that are objective.
Phenomenology vs. Behaviorism in Psychology
00:04:04
Speaker
Like, do they get tricked by this optical illusion, which is somewhat objective, yeah rather than asking what's actually happening just in their mind, what's happening with their inner voice, what's happening with their imagination, how do they feel emotion?
00:04:15
Speaker
And there's various reasons for that, which I'm sure we we should we should find someone to interview about that in another podcast, just about that whole topic. But for the last 50 years, and he's very old now, Herbert has been like almost single-handedly in Las Vegas University and in the Nevada, trying to do better than that.
00:04:36
Speaker
And I think the the key concept is the name of the book. It's this phrase, pristine. So he doesn't just want, if you do kind of armchair phenomenology, you just think, oh, how do I think?
00:04:47
Speaker
Do I, like, what kind of words happen in my mind? do what what what do I see when I'm imagining and without um it's very biased to have that kind of conversation. People get very limited by society and expectations and what they think happens in their mind.
00:05:02
Speaker
ah Not many people even try to do armchair phenomenology. But when you do armchair phenomenology, you end up with the exact problems that happened in the 19th century where One person will have a strong imagination and one person will have a strong inner voice.
00:05:14
Speaker
And these two philosophers will have an argument about whether thinking is about voices or imagination. And it's a spurious argument because they're each different. And therefore thinking isn't about either or else, about both. and So it's quite that this pristine word means trying to capture the actual inexperience in the wild. it's like It's like studying a wild animal rather than domesticated animal.
00:05:36
Speaker
Because if you try and do an experiment where you tell people to think away, or you just ask people to reflect on what happened to them in the past, there's lots of noise. They'll have forgotten what actually happened to them, and they'll re-remember it based on what society expects.
00:05:49
Speaker
They'll talk excessively about what they were doing and why, not about how they experienced it. And when I say they, this includes everyone does this. Right. And yeah. Yeah. and yeah So there's a lot of like motivation and goals in the way we explain our experiences that make it less than pristine.
00:06:06
Speaker
and and And what Herbert's trying to do is basically trying to catch like the experience in the wild,
Identifying Common Aspects of Experience
00:06:12
Speaker
i.e. the pristine experience. yeah I think I read very briefly about this Herbert kind of identifies five common aspects of what he calls pristine experience.
00:06:26
Speaker
And they happen map onto to our sensory modalities. like There's inner speech, inner scene, feelings, I think unsymbolized thinking or something, and then sensory awareness.
00:06:37
Speaker
Yeah. So they those are the most five common. So Herbert doesn't really like categorizing them. He has done it in some papers. And um there's a book, code book, called The Script of Experience Sampling Handbook, yes which you can get look at online. I recommend looking at.
00:06:52
Speaker
I think in that there's like 16 or 20 different ones. But the five most common are the five that you just said. which so that But even just knowing that those five, like lots of people do, some people do them a lot, some people don't do them at all. It's massive.
00:07:07
Speaker
But the key, the the categorizations came later. He does the experience sampling first, and it's like very raw anthropological
Capturing Mental Moments with Random Buzzer
00:07:14
Speaker
research. yes He doesn't have a presupposition. He does what he calls bracketing presuppositions, which is to sort of hide any supposition about how people think.
00:07:24
Speaker
And he's very open-minded always. Every conversation he pretends is completely new, and he doesn't know anything about any experience almost. And so we never ask people, which of these things are you doing? Or hears them half say something and then jumps.
00:07:36
Speaker
He always gets them to talk about it. and And the the basic, but i mean, I should describe the basic process, which is ah he he was an electrical engineer. And so in the 1970s, he could make this random buzzer that you carry around when that was quite a hard technical thing to do before yeah we had so much tiny computers and tiny circuits.
00:07:55
Speaker
And it it had a has a ah headpiece with this piercing high pitched like noise in your ear um and it goes off randomly and you carry it around you during the day.
00:08:06
Speaker
um and when it goes off, you're meant to immediately think about how you were thinking at the moment just before the beep. And he deliberately captures one moment, a bit like ah like a camera trap firing, taking a photo in the jungle or something.
00:08:21
Speaker
It's deliberately one moment because that makes it, as soon as you go, what did you do over the last minute? You so get distracted by, and you try to summarize and you try to conceptualize it. Whereas if you go, what were you doing at this moment?
00:08:33
Speaker
You have to describe what you're doing at that moment. So it makes people say much more interesting things and be much more open. um So yeah, you write that down. And then the process is that a so ah psychologist, usually Hulbert, but he's had lots of grad students and there are a few other people who've done it, who then interview you with a very specialist interview technique he describes in great detail of the book.
00:08:55
Speaker
Some people might find that bit of the book a bit overly repetitive and forceful. It's like the first nine chapters, mainly, just repeats information about how to do this interview process. It's more like doing therapy than it is doing a psychology experiment.
00:09:09
Speaker
Because you're trying to coax out to people their pristine experience without saying something that makes them think that you want them to say a certain answer. Because it's very easy for experiment to ask leading questions or to make someone think it's socially unacceptable to have a certain experience and then they suppress it and say a different experience.
00:09:26
Speaker
So he's he's got a whole thing being careful about all that stuff. So this is what you mentioned before was bracketing presuppositions. So this method that you just described, this is the this descriptive experience sampling method, which Herbert came up with.
00:09:43
Speaker
And it's yeah supposed to get at the pristine experience, the raw experiences, without superimposing any kind of presuppositions. Yeah.
00:09:55
Speaker
i quite I'm quite skeptical about this because like I'm not sure how any kind of description can escape some kind of presupposition. And this just go now goes back to the difficulty of like introspecting one's mental state and how some people are a lot better at it than others.
00:10:15
Speaker
and or think they are. All things they are, yes. um But you know i i can I think I can confidently say that a psychologist or a shrink is going to be much better at this than like a five-year-old.
00:10:30
Speaker
um These types of things, it's hard to like you know give outright rankings and stuff like that. But of generally speaking, older you are, the more likely you the more likely you are to be be more skilled at introspection.
00:10:49
Speaker
Oh, interesting. ah Yeah, there's a bit where he tries to sample kids.
Ensuring Genuine Experience Reports
00:10:54
Speaker
So there's a i mean the there's a there's a list at the end of like 200 constraints, he calls them, which are things you have to do to make this work.
00:11:02
Speaker
Things you should be aware of when you're learning interview technique. And they're not really a list. the list They're more like a guide set of guides. And they cover all of this stuff like... um Yeah, the plausible is the enemy of the truth. Don't judge others by yourself. Subjects say things that are not true.
00:11:19
Speaker
Concede incompleteness. um The exploration of pristine experience is a personal debit. These are things that come out of the chapters. And yes, it's not a straightforward process. It's not like a simple science experiment with data.
00:11:34
Speaker
It's subjective. I think think it's just a bit... It's just a bit... week to go, i mean, I think it's better than not doing it. Like vastly, it's so much better than not doing it.
00:11:47
Speaker
And the things he finds out seem to be genuine. Like he has found out experiences he didn't know existed. So quite often he confirms them. So he won't even give them a word or a name. He'll just hear what they say. And then maybe in a later sample, they have something similar and then he'll ask more about it.
00:12:02
Speaker
And there's whole chapters that describe that for quite complex experiences. Like there's one near the end ah into the floor about someone who has a sinking experience. Well, she sinks into the floor of the library and he's doing the interview with someone else and they like unpack in various ways and they have a recording of it and then they remember what they thought of it and it goes into great detail.
00:12:23
Speaker
But yeah, she actually did feel like her body was in the floor. She was sat in a library and was so comfortable. Her body, her legs like soaked into the floor and she phenomenally experienced that they were in the floor. And she she the same person did things like ah she read a message. She was a student. She read a message from a boy who liked her and then dropped her phone in shock.
00:12:44
Speaker
But she didn't actually drop her phone in shock. She just fully imagined she dropped her phone in shock. I don't know if you've seen Ali McBeal. There was a TV show where that kind of fantastical thing happened to the main character, who was a lawyer in the nineteen ninety s um So these are called like micro psychotic experiences. I don't think the word psychotic has negative meaning in this context. Wait, did you use the term micro psychotic?
00:13:07
Speaker
ah Yeah,
Micro Psychotic and Unsymbolized Experiences
00:13:08
Speaker
they did. Yeah. Micro psychotic experiences. so So, she, yeah. So she would experience where things happened in the world, but they, they represented an emotion because obviously her emotion was, she was shocked that this boy she liked had messaged her and she'd experienced it as dropping her phone. And that's an unusual inner experience. Herbert had never felt that experience.
00:13:25
Speaker
He hadn't found it before in any interviews. So it I think the proof is that it does genuinely seem to build up like things that otherwise don't come up. And yes, there's a load of clear, obvious, interesting criticisms.
00:13:39
Speaker
I think he talks about all of them. I couldn't think of criticisms that he missed. And he's published whole books with ah Schwitz Gable talking through the sampling and the flaws and benefits of it. My view is it's pretty damn good and it's the best thing we've got. We'd love it if someone came up with something better.
00:13:54
Speaker
But I think to criticise and go, oh, we shouldn't do it because it's like better than all the previous techniques because it's got flaws still. It's like, well, it's still... ah yeah The the other other two obvious things it found that were novel were unsymbolised thinking, yeah um which no one ever mentions. Can you describe what that is?
00:14:12
Speaker
So thoughts that occur without words, images or any other symbols. Um... I'm not exactly sure what one means when one talks about unsymbolized thinking. Because like what is what is a thought that is not symbolic?
00:14:29
Speaker
um is What is a symbol even at this point? Is it just like non-representational thinking? And I think this is probably like that you know leads you into like the nitty gritty of the philosophy and the cognitive science of it.
00:14:44
Speaker
but I just can't imagine what this sort of thinking would look like. Does it not happen? I'm sure you do it. Well, I'm sure even if I do it, I'm not sure if like it enters my awareness. like I wouldn't be able recognize it.
00:15:01
Speaker
as unsymbolized thinking. um Yeah, I mean, that's exactly why the you need the random buzzer and to pay perception and attention to it. I mean, i've I've tried buzzing myself half ah in a bad way, not doing it with the full process, just to sort of try it out.
00:15:17
Speaker
Um, which is something whole bit discourages, but I think it was still useful. And I definitely got moments where the beep happened and I wasn't thinking in words I wasn't seeing pictures cause I never see pictures and I wasn't experiencing emotion. i wasn't just listening to a podcast.
00:15:31
Speaker
I was thinking about a topic, but there were no words associated with that thinking. Um, but I was ruminating on concepts about that topic that were more complex than I could easily put into words. I'd have to start think being creative to write the words down.
00:15:46
Speaker
Um, Wouldn't that be symbolic though? Well, maybe the name's wrong. Yeah. I often call it to people just conceptual thinking is like quite often what I say. Unsymbolized is what he'll... I think unsymbolized just means they're not physical symbols we can write down and share. So you can't write down words or draw the picture or or even describe the feeling in your body.
00:16:09
Speaker
yeah You can't do any of those things. Best you can do is convert the concept into words and explain it to someone else. But right the actual thought is richer than the words. like Words are very limiting. We we know there's more thought thought than is available in words.
00:16:23
Speaker
ah So yeah. Now, that is not... and Conceptual thinking being its own thing is not a thing that even people who thought about an experience tend to be aware of. But it turned out, and they only found it.
00:16:35
Speaker
It wasn't that Hilbert started out going, there are these five methods of thought. Philosophically, I'm going to do them. He started out interviewing people and finding out their pristine experience. And then in the course of doing that to hundreds of people, discovered that imagination, inner speech, emotion...
00:16:53
Speaker
ah sensory awareness and unsimplitized thinking were all really important. ah So yeah, all good, good questions. So how does he discover variability in these various like imaginative abilities?
00:17:09
Speaker
Yeah, he would love to have more discovery of variability in it. I can sort of sense he never explicitly says it, but basically he's a bit sad that loads more people aren't using the technique and there isn't loads of funding ah to do more sampling.
Exploring Imaginative Variability on YouTube
00:17:22
Speaker
So he's done hundreds of people in his career and he's got loads of records of that. So he's learned a lot from that and then analysis of all the people and categorized it and stuff. um I guess ah you can watch them on YouTube now. There's a YouTube channel he has where you can go watch interviews from the last few years like that they've recorded and published.
00:17:43
Speaker
um I wish I quite liked doing. ah that it it's Yeah, it's kind of fun. The early ones, he throws away the first couple of days of sampling because people aren't good at the technique and understanding how to describe things yet.
00:17:57
Speaker
ah But the later ones get more kind of interesting. Just qualitatively, it's like listening talks to lots of stories and going, well, people are all different because they tell different stories. If you actually listen to people's experience, you find it's quite different from people.
00:18:08
Speaker
So partly it's just directly as a human listening to other humans' experiences, you find it's different. And then partly he's done some papers of data analysis going, this varies between people. He hasn't really focused on how does imagination vary specifically.
00:18:23
Speaker
it's it's ah It's much broader than that. I think it's much richer than that. My main experience of doing the sampling on myself was it was much richer than I thought. Even my relatively quiet mind, I have a relatively quiet mind,
00:18:34
Speaker
some of The complexity of my experiences were rich. What were some of the things that you surprised or that surprised you about yourself? Oh, that surprised. I mean, mainly it surprised me that I couldn't word is if that makes sense. right So I've got a blog post where I race up what i found out.
00:18:54
Speaker
Maybe you can i think that in the show notes later on. Yeah. I mean, I did find I mainly used unsymbolised thinking with some inner speech, some emotion and little sensory awareness and no imagination.
00:19:07
Speaker
and which wasn't a surprise to me. ah and is your inner speech audible? Like, do you have it in your mind here? it's but it's it's definitely um articulatory. It's like i'm ah but I'm speaking inside my head rather than I'm listening.
00:19:21
Speaker
And so i you spend a lot of time, particularly then. i mean, at the time I didn't have a job and I was trying, I distract myself by listening to podcasts or watching videos. And when I'm doing that, I don't have other thoughts as far as I could tell. Not very often.
00:19:37
Speaker
ah which is interesting. And I think that's like a ah more trying to code. If I'm not happy, then distracting myself by taking in content is a thing that I can do. um So that was, so actually I learned, actually it was really interesting seeing that like a percentage number for that.
00:19:52
Speaker
Cause that made me think just in terms of my own mental health, why am I um doing that? Am I talking to people and journaling enough about my emotion? Am I just hiding from those things by constantly taking in content? Yeah. So I found that really interesting.
00:20:04
Speaker
So I think, yeah, this is the cool thing about it. I think even just if we so if if we if we did it more and or we had some form of doing it ourselves, which is quite hard to do with the proper technique, I think just what I would learn in terms of improving myself would be really interesting. Yeah.
00:20:20
Speaker
Yeah, there's a whole thing. Scrolling. Yeah, they found out recently that it never happened before because smartphones are new, but there's there's literally an inner experience of just scrolling. and I was doing nothing but scrolling. I wasn't thinking about the videos. I was just like, they were scrolling.
00:20:36
Speaker
Yeah. um And I quite like that. i quite I did just doing a lot of the time, which I really like. quite I literally am not, I'm just doing, i'm just walking. I'm just programming.
00:20:50
Speaker
I'm not actually thinking actively, which is quite interesting. It was really hard to work out the categories. I'd often go, that's not a category. There's all this stuff. I had all these concepts in my head. I had this other stuff going on and I can't describe it. I was often just like, fuck, this is complicated. for is like a neural network.
00:21:08
Speaker
Yeah. And I'm very bad. I'm not particularly aware of my own thinking. Like I think an expert in meditation or something might be really good at being aware of their own thinking. And I think there's a rich, you you can get quite a richness and complexity.
00:21:21
Speaker
And I think what I like about Helbert's work is it glorifies, it emphasizes that richness and complexity rather than trying to limit and categorize and and reduce. So yeah. Would you characterize Helbert's work as introspection training?
00:21:39
Speaker
Yeah, actually.
Unexpected Inner Speech in Consciousness Study
00:21:41
Speaker
training Yeah, it is Yeah. People love doing it. Like the people who you watch the YouTube videos of really like being interviewed you don't find it really interesting.
00:21:50
Speaker
I mean, there's a great, there's a great chapter where he gets a consciousness scientist to be interviewed. like a person who researches consciousness and the the the they get really excited. They find they were saying the word stufer instead of super in their inner speech. They had like a kind of almost linguistic error just in one right early sample.
00:22:15
Speaker
And then they got really fixated on that and went, oh my God, that's like really bizarre. Like the way you think is different from what i thought. And they try to generalize because they're thinking about consciousness. They then try to generalize from this one experience, which they hadn't paid attention to that kind of experience before.
00:22:31
Speaker
And yeah, it's really interesting that they were writing a book and they really struggled with just writing being an inner experience. So quite often they had no other thought, no concept in their head, no nothing no word no imagery they were literally words were coming out of their know keyboard and all they were doing was words were coming out that was their mental experience was i'm producing words and that was that's just writing um they hadn't hadn't realized that was a thing but actually i found i was doing that kind of thing quite often um
00:23:07
Speaker
Yeah. And it was, it was almost harder to interview them because they were a consciousness scientist because they felt their job was to generalize. so But I think everyone's, I genuinely think the academic consciousness studies is overly generalizing too quickly before they've even found out what the variety of experience is of consciousness.
00:23:27
Speaker
um Likewise, i think knowing the variety of experience of consciousness will inform what happens when you take psychedelics, what happens when you do meditation. I don't think you can understand what happens when you do meditation if you don't understand people's imaginations very hugely. And when you say imagine a candle, it'll be different for different people.
00:23:44
Speaker
Or when you say, oh, you suddenly become aware of this thing in meditation. I'm like, hang on. I bet you a few percent of people are always aware of that from birth. Like, how do you factor that yeah how do you yeah How do you normalize the person before they begin?
00:23:58
Speaker
you generalize this? Yeah. So... but So I think that's really interesting. And i I don't think it's, you know, all the work happening on studying what happens when people take psychedelics, what happens in meditation is incredibly valuable, but I think it would be made more rich by having just a similar level of work on what happens normally.
Cultural Variations in Inner Experience
00:24:16
Speaker
So, yeah. And that seems to be like a common critique of Helbert's work that it doesn't generalize and just the whole premise of like generalization and like psychological theories is and should be based on the average experience.
00:24:34
Speaker
Whereas, Herbert isn't really so focused on average experiences so much as how is unique and how like anomalous our experiences can be.
00:24:45
Speaker
and And that's really what the method of his studies really brings out. It's just like the sheer idiosyncrasy of these individuals. Right.
00:24:57
Speaker
Which to me is kind of a lot of what what our podcast is about. i mean, we've talked before about how emotional experience varies through history and between countries and things like that. And I think what I love about Hilbert is he's acknowledging that. He's constantly going, actually, mainly I've introduced you know white American psychology students I've mainly interviewed.
00:25:18
Speaker
I don't know anything. he'll often People often ask him a question. He'll go, I've no idea. We need to go and sample some indigenous you know rainforest people in Brazil. Um, we've never done that. And yeah, no one will ever pick up like the inner experience you described of the shaman in our first episode we had of the shaman in Borneo, who could see like spiritual entities in her like imagination, but pre-fantasically.
00:25:43
Speaker
um no one would pick that up. And like, you would have to find the right, some people in the West probably have similar experiences, but it's taboo to talk about them and they would not say them if you asked them and and and so on.
00:25:55
Speaker
So yeah, i i I love that stuff. That's a great callback to our first episode. But while we're on that as well, I think it's really interesting how Herbert manages to tease out so much variability, even from like that limited sample of like white,
00:26:12
Speaker
um college educated um americans in this very specific cultural context what would happen if we started studying yeah from vastly different cultural environments like people from different histories yeah different cultures yeah even in like the so-called west like people have not always experienced their inner mental states the same. Like we know that emotions that were much more prevalent in the medieval period
00:26:44
Speaker
are now no longer quite as common in the West. um Things such as, and and things like gender dysphoria, for instance, that's definitely, what the words don't really exist back then, but like I'm pretty sure that this is something that has emerged and become much more prevalent as a result of like the culture is just like soaking it up and making that more widely known.
00:27:06
Speaker
So, yeah, yeah, you're making me think we talked about positive feedback on our podcast earlier. And the the main piece I got was someone came up to me ah at some at ah Jess Camp this year, which was the the um ah retreat that we met at last year.
00:27:22
Speaker
And we went to the one this year. And someone there said, oh, I listened to your podcast, ah like came up to me and she goes, listened to your podcast. I really liked the bit where you talked about emotion being like potentially imagination or embodied or bodily feeling right or conceptual feeling.
Emotional Experiences and Imagination
00:27:39
Speaker
And I hadn't thought about that. And I had a couple of conversations with people who were really, who were going, yeah, I feel experienced imagination with emotion. I experienced emotion with imagery. And I think it's relatively common to experience it with imagery, but people don't really talk about that.
00:27:52
Speaker
ah because it's quite trendy to talk about bodily experience of emotion, which is also absolutely critical. But I also think conceptual experience of emotions probably important. So yeah, there's there's a lovely, uh, ah Yeah, there's a there's a loveliness to this this variety.
00:28:08
Speaker
Oh, yeah, I was going to mention Julian Jayne. I'm not going to get into the origin of consciousness in the breakdown of Bicameral Mind, which is this famously controversial but compelling and never proven or disproven radical book from the nineteen seventy s claiming that humanity changed the way they experience consciousness. Like the current modern form of consciousness started in within human history, like about 2,000, 3,000 years ago.
00:28:36
Speaker
And just imagine if we could go back and mind sample you know the people of Stonehenge and see how they experienced the world and how it differed from people in ancient Greece and how that differed from chew yeah Tudor England and how that differed from um ah China today. That would be so interesting.
00:28:53
Speaker
But even if you narrow it to the kind of people that Herbert can easily find in Las Vegas to interview, he did loads of interesting studies with other people over the years. So ah like one on bulimia,
00:29:06
Speaker
which found a very small sample, but it was they were radically different from other people. um i mean, this is part of the proof that it works, is that you follow the same technique, which is very open-ended and doesn't pre presuppose or prime people, and you just get different reports that are consistent.
00:29:24
Speaker
So you get a bunch of bulimic people and compare them to some similar non-bulimic people. and you get a different experience. So bulimia is an eating disorder.
Multiplicity of Experiences in Bulimia Study
00:29:31
Speaker
um And in there's a paper about this you can look up.
00:29:35
Speaker
And in that, they have a lot of multiplicity of experience. So they don't just get one intrusive thought about their body. They'll get it in multiple modalities all at once. So they'll see imagery. They'll be thinking conceptually about a woman on TV show. They'll be hearing things. They just get overwhelmed by like lots of thoughts about all sorts of things, part partly about...
00:29:56
Speaker
their bodies and food, but also just generally, they have multiple thoughts simultaneously a lot compared to most people. um And that becomes overwhelming. And one of the reasons they pet people who were bulimia this in the study, like vomiting, was because it gave them relief from that multiplicity of thought.
00:30:13
Speaker
So this is a really interesting insight. And it's not the main only important thing about that eating disorder, but it feels like an interesting, critical thing to know if you're supporting people who who are dealing with it.
00:30:26
Speaker
um And that's just there in the diversity. yeah yeah i really i use skiz There's a chapter on schizophrenia. There's a paper about this as well. Really interesting. They have lots of, I don't know, what would you expect a schizophrenic experience to be like? Do you have an intuition for that?
00:30:45
Speaker
I've read, and this is like based off reading R.D. Lange, who is an expert in like schizophrenia and who wrote about this in the 80s, that schizophrenics experience what they call derealization and depersonalization, which is when they feel nothing in their conscious experience is is real and I don't exactly know what it means to not experience something as not being real as opposed to like being real um surely everything is either real or not real and I don't know what makes something you know what what the the dividing line is it has like the vibe of being fake yes or something like that um
Emotional Specificity in Schizophrenia
00:31:29
Speaker
I don't yeah that's interesting one
00:31:32
Speaker
Huh. So the things that came out, there's again a paper about this. Herbert didn't sample many schizophrenics, but he sampled a few. They get emotions in their body a lot, which ah but they're really specific.
00:31:46
Speaker
So they'll get like a feeling in their chest, but it'll be a particular shape, like it'll be this tit tear shape around the center of their chest. And they can localize exactly where they're experiencing the feelings more precisely with more like just subtle shaping within their body than most people.
00:32:01
Speaker
um they get imagery to represent emotion. So for example, like suddenly seeing people riddled with machine gun fire and it meaning you're angry or something. And I'll get a really intense, like a flash of that happening.
00:32:16
Speaker
um There was a bunch of stuff that I think is probably reported already about tilt bell tilted visual phenomena, inaccurate color and images, like distortions of stuff. um Really interesting one, because it's known that schizophrenics get hallucinations a lot, although i don't think of hallucinations in a negative way that people... i'm Now I've heard that profanthesia is a thing and imaginations thing. Hallucinations to me are just another part of the brain imagining, but more intensely imagining within the real world.
00:32:45
Speaker
Although, of course, if they're happening without your conscious awareness or control, they can be very like heart they can feel difficult for the but the person experiencing them. yeah Yeah, and especially with the undesirable like visual hallucinations. Right. Yeah. like yeah the example I think example I play gave about people being riddled with machine gun fire wasn't hallucination. It was in your imagination. But yeah, you can imagine if that got really intense and then you actually saw it, that would be overwhelming.
00:33:09
Speaker
Yeah. um The visual associations aren't necessarily actually visual, which is really interesting. So what I mean is, so he would they would go, oh, I could see this person or something.
00:33:22
Speaker
And then they'd be like, what colour were their clothes? What colour was their skin? What was their hair like? And they wouldn't be able to answer. And this wasn't always case. Sometimes they would be able to answer, but sometimes, reasonably often, they wouldn't.
00:33:36
Speaker
And whole bit sense from that was that they were hallucinating, believing the being was there. Because we have other modalities, right? Like, I know there's someone behind me over there.
00:33:47
Speaker
I can hear this person. I know the person's there, but I don't know what they're wearing yet. Yes, yes, yes. That kind of thing. So they're really sure they're there. but they don't necessarily get a visual element in hallucination, although they can.
00:33:59
Speaker
So that that was super interesting. They can't get visual details, basically. Yeah. Yeah. yeah um Yeah, there's an
Describing Emotions Without Metaphors
00:34:11
Speaker
interesting bit. It goes, we did ah the episodes we did on emotion while I'm talking about that. This came up in that chapter. There's a bit where he goes into one of Lisa Feldman Barrett's studies about emotion, where she used a like her type question, you know, strongly agree, disagree question with lots of, are you happy? Are you sluggish? Et cetera, et cetera.
00:34:29
Speaker
um and herlbert goes into detail about he says it's a best best practice of current psychology paper but he feels like obviously they should be using more of his kind of methods um and he says it misses that whether people describe emotion metaphorically or descriptively like it it's it kind of it it it makes people conceptualize the emotion rather than actually describe what the experience of the emotion is. And I think that loses richness.
00:34:59
Speaker
um Anyway, yeah, I, like I say, there's a whole section on that. If you're interested in it, I think you probably, can't do it justice. I don't think. Yeah. I find that really fascinating because like, I don't know if I can describe my emotions in,
00:35:18
Speaker
a way that doesn't rely on metaphors, even though if even if the metaphors aren't um even if the metaphors involve like emotional metaphors. So what I mean by this is I might be feeling peevish, but ah instead of using the word peevish, I might say, oh, I'm feeling like I'm a bit angry.
00:35:40
Speaker
And that's kind of like a metaphor. like I'm using ah ah more general term to describe a feeling that isn't quite the the emotion, but like metaphorically anger is.
00:35:55
Speaker
Maybe you're describing a cognitive emotion So do you, if you've got an emotion, because if I've got an emotion in my body, even weekly, I can go, oh, my neck feels cloying or something. I see. I see. I see. Yeah.
00:36:06
Speaker
yeah So that's a bit more objective. Obviously, it's subjective, but it's objective in the sense you can know the bodily feeling you're getting of an emotion. Right, right, right. So it's just like much more descriptive in the sense that it's felt in the body.
00:36:19
Speaker
I get it. Or if you're seeing imagery, so someone who... like I've talked to several, but there's some there's someone Hulbert interviews in a first video, the one Lena, she's called Ellie and A, which is the first public video that Hulbert published of descriptive experience sampling.
00:36:34
Speaker
I think she gets this rosy colour glow in her head when she's finding something funny. And she goes, oh, yeah, I always get that colour. I just get the colour when I feel something funny. And I talked to a colleague at work and she said, oh I always get multiplicity of emotions. and They're all represented by different splotches in my vision. and ah these people aware that other people don't experience emotions in the same way that they do?
00:36:59
Speaker
Not very. I mean, they're about as aware as I was aware I wasn't aphantasic. I mean, I must have known I it was aphantasic. Sorry, i yeah I must have known i didn't really have an imagination, but I didn't really... no one really talks about it, so you kind of... Yeah.
00:37:11
Speaker
So no, not really. They're not very surprised. but Yeah, the colleague I talked to you about this wasn't surprised when I said, oh, I'm doing this podcast about this topic and... Most people there, it's relatively common, but it's not like, I think five or 10% of people probably experience imagination with imagery, if I had to guess.
00:37:29
Speaker
I've like seen it a few times. Not that often though. It's not like really common. um Yeah.
00:37:38
Speaker
Yes, it's... um so i think yeah the richness so yeah the the the point the the benefit of des i guess would be to get from you what's the part of it that's a bit more of he there's a whole there's a whole section later on the book where he talks about radical i think it's the radical non-subjectivity chapter no no that's not the one that's one about people have no experience we'll talk about that in a minute there's a bit where he talks about subjective and objective.
00:38:05
Speaker
And his viewpoint, everyone goes DES, it's very subjective. And it's like, well, it's not actually. It's subjective in the sense it's only happening to one person, but it's objective in the sense that he's getting people to actually describe what happens, not to come up with a subjective opinion about what happens.
00:38:22
Speaker
And the process attempts to make it and ah the best objective account of a one shot, one moment in time, subjective experience. And it's quite a subtle distinction, but I think it is quite important.
00:38:34
Speaker
um So, so yeah, so I think you could, you could certainly describe your emotions with more richness of a specific emotion you felt at a specific time.
00:38:46
Speaker
ah describe it in more detail what the bodily feeling was and pay more attention to that and stuff or describe what colors you see in more detail um See, I still don't think that's quite objective, but I think I'll be lenient with it because Herbert pioneering a new... It needs a new word, I think. yeah It's like a... It's a bit objective about something subjective.
00:39:11
Speaker
because it but it isn't yeah Because it's not like scientific objective. But then again, we've established that this isn't aiming to be like scientific because it doesn't generalize. I mean... Apart from mr MRI scans, like, all study of the mind is subjective, so, you know.
00:39:27
Speaker
um But yes. Right. um so well, I suppose I should probably ask the this question, but like what does Herbert use this for? Like, what are the study applications?
00:39:45
Speaker
yeah Yeah, I think he, like I say, I think he's but behind the the scenes kind of sad that more people haven't adopted it and hence used it more heavily. Yeah.
00:39:57
Speaker
I haven't actually followed up on whether, because the obvious ones were he did a study of bulimic people, he did a study of schizophrenic people, he did a study of, there's a really good one about adolescence and old age and he find he He goes and parks his car outside the house with a kid in it because the kid's really bad at writing things down.
00:40:15
Speaker
right So when the kid's buzzer goes off, the kid has to rush out the house to the car and then describe it directly to Hilbert what he's experiencing. This is like for a nine or 10 year old. ah ah sweet It's really cool.
00:40:26
Speaker
And he learns that kids make imagery, complex imagery slowly. So he finds people who have imaginations think they instantly get the image and The sense is from not very enough experiments that when you're a child, that's not true. The image builds up over time and you have to learn to build it up.
00:40:44
Speaker
But then you get quicker at doing that by the time you're an adult. And just like everything you do is now that you can do it really quickly when you had to spend ages a kid. So that was really interesting. And then old people get black and white imagination. Mm-hmm. And they even realize they have, but you go, what color was that thing? They go like, well, there's no color or anything.
00:41:00
Speaker
And again, that's probably a mental decline leading to the brain going, well, like I'll just not process the color anymore in my imagination or something. So anyway, yeah. So why was i talking about that?
Potential Medical Applications of DES
00:41:11
Speaker
Because you was saying yeah, the people, the benefit he gets. So in theory, if you know more about bulimics or more about people in old age and more about schizophrenics, more about um quite practical things,
00:41:23
Speaker
like circumstances like that, that should lead to a medical benefit potentially, where you can treat people differently. So you could, a therapist could help someone with bulimia learn not to have a multiplicity experience, maybe. I don't know, who knows? there might be a new technique you could develop that changed how you treat it.
00:41:42
Speaker
I don't think that's happened in a way, I haven't seen anyone say that's happened yet. I think it would happen if we did it enough and we haven't done it enough. um I think the main reason he likes it is just the richness of human experience.
00:41:57
Speaker
And I think, yeah, he just loves hearing. He genuinely is excited about each person he interviews. hear what they're like He's just like completely...
00:42:08
Speaker
actually brackets his presuppositions. He's just completely like, oh, what's this person like? I just want to know this person at this moment in time, what happened to
Sensory Awareness in Musical Expertise
00:42:16
Speaker
him? So it's really just like a curiosity then, right? It's like yeah knowledge for the sake of knowledge. and i Well, there' a really good there's a really good example about a virtuoso guitar player.
00:42:28
Speaker
Yeah. professional high-end guitar player who is his teacher. So it turns out the one personal thing about Hulbert, he ties he hides his personal stuff a lot because he doesn't want it to distract people he's interviewing.
00:42:40
Speaker
But the one most personal bit of the book is the the full chapter 14 about this musician. And he so he's learning guitar from him. And the guitar teacher says, a key technique I was taught when I was learning was to imagine my fingers on the frets.
00:42:55
Speaker
And that helps me get better. And Hilbert's going, what do you mean? Do you do you see the threat? What colour's the threat? How detailed is it? How do you imagine your fingers? And the guy's like, I don't know And they have this conversation for years before Hilbert finally trit goes, ah, I could do descriptive experience something on you and we could learn more what's going on here.
00:43:14
Speaker
And the guitarist agrees to this. so And then they very dutifully do like 14 sessions, like 14 days with four or five samples each day and 14 interviews, not playing the guitar.
00:43:27
Speaker
just to learn about this chap's experience. And he has this beautiful, rich experience. It also has multiple experiences simultaneously, but in a much more positive way than the Bulemic people.
00:43:37
Speaker
Right. ah Like he'll be writing a MySpace page for his is guitar playing. This was a while ago now, 15, 20 years ago. And he'll be his wife will be sitting next to him and he'll be sensorially aware of the context of his hip against his wife's hip.
00:43:52
Speaker
And he'll be having a conversation with her. So he'll be just talking to her, but he'll have no awareness of what the conversation's about. and you'll have And these things sort of ebb and flow. And he also had a lot of sensory experience. He was paying attention to the colour of the brown of the tile.
00:44:06
Speaker
So sensory experience in the Hurlburt's categorisation is when you're not... Everyone is sensing all the time in the background, typically. but especially especially vision. But he's talking about when you're paying attention to a sensory detail.
00:44:21
Speaker
So you're not paying attention to the meaning of some visual input, you're paying attention to the actual imagery of visual input, or similarly with audio. So this musician did a lot more sensor a lot more sensory awareness, and a lot quite rich, complex multiplicity of experience.
00:44:37
Speaker
And then They got him to play the guitar and not surprisingly, he has lots of attention on the exact feeling of his fingers on the strings, the exact sense of the music at a certain time, but he also has simultaneous distracting thoughts about other stuff going on at the same time.
00:44:53
Speaker
um
00:44:56
Speaker
And then, that yeah, this chapter culminates, they he do a concert. Would you go to that concert? Yeah. Would you go to a concert where the musician is going to be sampled during the concert?
00:45:07
Speaker
Oh yeah, yeah. Okay. um So he plays the guitar. What did he find? Go on. i mean, it's a bit wild. So they invite all these psychologists and guitarist friends to this concert, telling them seven times during the concert, a random beep will go off, the guitarist will stop playing, and then they will write down their inner experience and carry on playing. And then at the end, we'll have a conversation about it. The whole book goes and interviews him. And they do this, and everyone sits there quietly every time the guy gets interrupted, and he just carries on playing where he left off.
00:45:38
Speaker
Yeah. um I mean, go and look at the book to see. There's a table with all the... There's a detailed description of all the samples. They got like seven or eight samples of the concert. Yeah. But he was very focused but also very diverse. So he didn't have any distracting thoughts, every thought related to improving the music.
00:45:57
Speaker
But those were the the the things he was aware of were extremely rich and varied. So sometimes they would be the particular reflection of a string. Sometimes there'd be the particular something about the music he was hearing.
00:46:10
Speaker
Sometimes there would be about how the audience was experiencing it or something that might intervene and it harm the audience's experience. And he had these in multiplicity, and the sense is he his mind naturally adjusts up and down what to pay attention to, to what's critical to make the performance better.
00:46:29
Speaker
And he was, so he was constantly focusing on whatever at that moment he needed to focus more on to make the performance better. And that was really diverse. It was very, and it goes into much more detail than that, but yeah.
00:46:40
Speaker
So it's kind of not surprising result, but it's really interesting to know that's how you end up if you're really good at something. Yeah, that's pretty cool. it's It's mainly autonomous, but then you notice the bits where you're not doing it right or the experience isn't right or whatever.
00:46:55
Speaker
Yeah, to do that throughout an entire concert as well, that's kind of like, that's pretty wild me. So the conclusion from Herbert's point of view was that um he didn't actually imagine his fingers on the guitar anymore.
00:47:06
Speaker
He probably did when he was first learning, but it had become autonomous. He didn't do that anymore. So Herbert was like, okay. so So he started actually just looking at his fingers more and then trying to remember what they looked like.
00:47:18
Speaker
and is And knowing you have to go through a process where the imagination disappears again. So you can start off by looking at something a lot to learn something, but then you can get capture it in your mind's eye and start imagining it a lot.
00:47:29
Speaker
And then if you get really good at the thing and imagination can erode away. So very interesting. Again, If we did that kind of research on lots of people at different stages of learning different topics, we might be able to work out why people are blocked and go, hey, Francis, the reason you can't do X, Y, z with music is because you have no audio imagination. You basically need to go off and develop an audio imagination as a separate thing you study before you can even begin to get this level of musical ability, for example.
00:47:57
Speaker
and But no no one in the past could have ever told me that. ah They just go, oh, you're stuck. Why are you stuck? Oh, well, just go and be just do more computer programming.
00:48:08
Speaker
Skill issue. So, yeah. Yeah. um I'd like to... Yeah, let's talk about Sonder instead because, like, um i I remember you... Recounting that when you're reading the book, you weren't just like it wasn't just an intellectual experience.
00:48:24
Speaker
You also emotionally touched and you realize how I i mean, at one point you teared up because of how touching the the reading about people's experiences were.
00:48:37
Speaker
And this kind of like, in my mind, reminded me of an emotion that i was coined by John Koenig in like the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, and it's called Sonder, which is the experience of um other people living their lives as if they have their own experience.
00:48:56
Speaker
you know ah Other people own being aware that other people have a life as well that's similarly rich and complex. Yes. So having an experience as as rich and as complex ah as your own.
00:49:09
Speaker
so Do these words get this this dictionary? This is those really cool word. He just makes up really interesting words that are needed but for concepts that people don't have words for. I'm pretty sure he sticks to like words that I mean oh only words that he coins go into like the dictionary of obscure stories as opposed to like words that are just rare because they they come from like a foreign language or whatever um so he tends to like He does tend to like pluck words from other languages, but um he like creates like neologisms by like you know cutting and pasting words. So when someone is experiencing Sonder, they're presumably not thinking about inner experience normally. What kind of thing are they normally thinking about?
00:49:57
Speaker
I'm not exactly sure. I feel like they're going on about like the autobiographical experience of um fair of of other people and imagining what their autobiography looks like and how other people might be having something similar to them, but just as rich...
00:50:17
Speaker
Right. Yeah. Thinking about like who, who, yeah, all this stuff happening in my life, who are my friends? What's happening with my relationships? how How is my work? Where am I going? How do I cook my food?
00:50:28
Speaker
What's it like walking down the street? Like all of these things happen to huge, rich complexity of my life. Yeah. So Sondra is realizing that you've in have you know you've been taking people on tours around Borneo and you've got this experience of all these people and seeing all these amazing things. that And then that's completely different experience. But you're also, you've got, yeah, everyone has all this complex experience.
00:50:53
Speaker
um Cool. It's cool word. Have you felt it ever? I feel like I feel it all the time, especially um when I'm in like a more contemplative state of mind and I'm walking by myself.
00:51:09
Speaker
um And I'm gazing off into the distance and I see cars moving by or I'm seeing people in a and a cafe talking to each other. um And very offline, I'm like very disengaged from my own concerns and I get to like look at the world as if it were a TV screen.
00:51:27
Speaker
And that's when I'm like, oh, wow, those people, they have their own stories. a And so it's kind of like people watching, but taking to the next level.
00:51:38
Speaker
And I'm only in that state of mind when I'm you know alone and I'm like not talking to someone. one so That's really cool. So when I was sat in Cornwall in the window seat of this old chapel looking at the rich blue sea and it was really sunny and I could see the hills and the mountains and I was i was reading the book.
00:52:00
Speaker
And yeah I had this particular moment. i hadn' I'm not sure i recorded which chapter I felt it in, but I was obviously thinking about how everyone how many people there are and how they're going about their lives and ye What they experienced is so varied and so interesting and so rich and so human. And so it's having just read chapter after chapter about different people. And I loved reading the descriptions of a sample. I'd be like, oh, great. It's quoting what someone experienced at this one moment in time. So excited. got We get so excited. and
00:52:34
Speaker
And the culmination of that, are either chapters and chapters and chapters. just left me just, there was a moment where i just got this very intense, beautiful joy feeling, yeah ah which actually I can't phenomenologically explain ironically now I've gotten. it would be great if I'd written it down at the time.
00:52:50
Speaker
Very strong, beautiful feeling, very emotional, where I felt connection to like everyone in the world in some sense and our variety and uniqueness, but simultaneously our humanness because it's very connecting because I feel more it makes it easier to empathize when I know what someone's experiencing.
00:53:09
Speaker
It makes it much easier to understand what they're like and who they are in this much more personal way than just knowing what they do or how they behave. It felt like more getting into the who they are because is I think this whole thing of phenomenology is is a part of who we are to is under-talked about And it's not the only thing that matters. You can feel Sonder without thinking about inexperience. But I got a very strong sense Sonder from thinking about everyone's experiences being so so unique and beautiful.
00:53:46
Speaker
And there will there'll be overlaps and there'll be differences. And I found this really reassuring. Like i I kind of liked humanity more because of it. Sort of restore your faith in humanity a little bit.
00:53:59
Speaker
Yeah. and And yeah, and that Herbert would openly study this in such a sort of positive, he's just listening to everyone. He's not imposing anything. He's not trying to change the world.
00:54:11
Speaker
He's not trying to do anything. he's not He's wanting to understand what it's like to be another person. It's like a very raw form of phenomenological kind of empathy. Yeah. Almost. It's really, really beautiful.
00:54:24
Speaker
Do you think that this is similar to the experience one gets from reading a piece of literature, especially one from like the first person point of view, where you enter into like their mind and you see what they're imagining, what they're planning?
00:54:38
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, obviously that's more detail about one person, and but yes. ah Yeah, so I've watched series of like six or seven or eight interviews with one person. Like there's one with the author, Michael Pollan, on Hilbert's YouTube, for example.
00:54:53
Speaker
And you really get to know them because they're giving you random events in their life. So you know, oh, Michael... you know Michael Pollan goes to the bakery every morning because he got sampled in the bakery twice and this kind of stuff. um So you you also get background information, but it feels like you get a more interesting sample of what it's like to be them than if they just told you narratively, because the narrative is always subselected.
00:55:14
Speaker
it misses It misses what we're doing most of it. Typically, I'm only aware that I'm doing most of my time have a you know a random kind of irrelevant experience that you would never tell in a story to someone.
00:55:26
Speaker
But when you hear other people's ones, it makes you go, it's not just it makes you really know. It's not just me with this experience going through the world. Everyone has this experience going through the world. And most of that doesn't become a story or a narrative.
00:55:38
Speaker
Most of that is is everyday life. But that's what everyday life, everyday life is made of. Walking down the street, pay attention to the sunlight landing on your skin, Every, you know, everyday life is made of, and ah you know, washing up and being distracted by thinking about your lover.
00:55:57
Speaker
Life's made of those experiences, summed together. um and so yeah. Yeah. yeah go with that There you go.
00:56:09
Speaker
We should just about wrap it up. Like what a lovely message yeah leave our listeners. Yeah. um Yeah. It's a great book. So just to remind you of the name of the book, it is called Investigating Pristine In Experience.
00:56:24
Speaker
colon moments of truth by Russell T. Herbert. um But we'll put loads of links in the show notes to the things we mentioned. And lots of those will be shorter articles to read that are about Herbert.
00:56:37
Speaker
um Yeah. i And in terms of feedback, it would be great if people could email us. We're imagine at flourish.org or on Twitter stroke X, we're at imagine underscore apple.
00:56:49
Speaker
If you found anything interesting and what we said in the episode, or you um kind of, yeah, have a reaction to it, or you would want to be sampled or something like that, it'd be great to get a message. Give us a call. We'll do an episode. Yeah.
00:57:06
Speaker
Yeah. Would you do it then if i had a way of doing proper descriptive experience sampling on you, would you volunteer? Sure. I mean, if you have like the the like the structure and you're ready to to go, then i'm I'm ready as you are.
00:57:22
Speaker
I'm wary of doing it without doing it properly. But at the same time, I think even doing it half badly is still more useful. i don't think it's scientific. I think you have to do it properly to get the proper results. It's like an ethno it's like an an ethnographic study. You just talk them and get them to like talk about stuff.
00:57:40
Speaker
Right. It's a whole skill. It's exactly similar skill. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Great. Thanks, Finn. And have a beautiful rest of your day. And that's wrap.