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      Can Inner Experience Be Apprehended in High Fidelity? Examining Brain Activation and Experience from Multiple Perspectives

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          Abstract

          We discuss the historical context for explorations of “pristine inner experience,” attempts to apprehend and describe the inner experiences that directly present themselves in natural environments. There is no generally accepted method for determining whether such apprehensions/descriptions should be considered high fidelity. By analogy from musical recording, we present and discuss one strategy for establishing experiential fidelity: the examining of brain activation associated with a variety of experiential perspectives that had not been specified at the time of data collection. We beeped participants in an fMRI scanner at randomly-determined times and recorded time-locked brain activations. We used Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES) to apprehend and describe the participant's experience that was ongoing at each beep. These apprehensions/descriptions were obtained with no specific theoretical perspective or experimental intention when originally collected. If these apprehensions/descriptions were of high fidelity, then these pairings of moments of experience and brain activations should be able to be productively examined and re-examined in multiple ways and from multiple theoretical perspectives. We discuss a small set of such re-examinations and conclude that this strategy is worthy of further examination.

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          Guiding the study of brain dynamics by using first-person data: synchrony patterns correlate with ongoing conscious states during a simple visual task.

          Even during well-calibrated cognitive tasks, successive brain responses to repeated identical stimulations are highly variable. The source of this variability is believed to reside mainly in fluctuations of the subject's cognitive "context" defined by his/her attentive state, spontaneous thought process, strategy to carry out the task, and so on... As these factors are hard to manipulate precisely, they are usually not controlled, and the variability is discarded by averaging techniques. We combined first-person data and the analysis of neural processes to reduce such noise. We presented the subjects with a three-dimensional illusion and recorded their electrical brain activity and their own report about their cognitive context. Trials were clustered according to these first-person data, and separate dynamical analyses were conducted for each cluster. We found that (i) characteristic patterns of endogenous synchrony appeared in frontal electrodes before stimulation. These patterns depended on the degree of preparation and the immediacy of perception as verbally reported. (ii) These patterns were stable for several recordings. (iii) Preparatory states modulate both the behavioral performance and the evoked and induced synchronous patterns that follow. (iv) These results indicated that first-person data can be used to detect and interpret neural processes.
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            Toward a phenomenology of inner speaking.

            Inner speaking is a common and widely discussed phenomenon of inner experience. Based on our studies of inner experience using Descriptive Experience Sampling (a qualitative method designed to produce high fidelity descriptions of randomly selected pristine inner experience), we advance an initial phenomenology of inner speaking. Inner speaking does occur in many, though certainly not all, moments of pristine inner experience. Most commonly it is experienced by the person as speaking in his or her own naturally inflected voice but with no sound being produced. In addition to prototypical instances of inner speaking, there are wide-ranging variations that fit the broad category of inner speaking and large individual differences in the frequency with which individuals experience inner speaking. Our observations are discrepant from what many have said about inner speaking, which we attribute to the characteristics of the methods different researchers have used to examine inner speaking. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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              The Descriptive Experience Sampling method

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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Journal
                Front Psychol
                Front Psychol
                Front. Psychol.
                Frontiers in Psychology
                Frontiers Media S.A.
                1664-1078
                27 January 2017
                2017
                : 8
                : 43
                Affiliations
                [1] 1Department of Psychology, University of Nevada Las Vegas, NV, USA
                [2] 2Department of Psychology, Durham University Durham, UK
                [3] 3Center for Lifespan Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Human Development Berlin, Germany
                [4] 4Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University Clinic Hamburg-Eppendorf Hamburg, Germany
                Author notes

                Edited by: Alain Morin, Mount Royal University, Canada

                Reviewed by: Tom Froese, National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico; Henry D. Schlinger, California State University, Los Angeles, USA; Tanya Luhrmann, Stanford University, USA

                †Joint senior authors.

                Article
                10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00043
                5269595
                8a1d34ac-a186-426a-bea7-f93cc72bf994
                Copyright © 2017 Hurlburt, Alderson-Day, Fernyhough and Kühn.

                This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

                History
                : 24 October 2016
                : 09 January 2017
                Page count
                Figures: 0, Tables: 0, Equations: 0, References: 34, Pages: 8, Words: 6677
                Funding
                Funded by: Wellcome Trust 10.13039/100004440
                Award ID: WT098455
                Award ID: WT103817
                Categories
                Psychology
                Focused Review

                Clinical Psychology & Psychiatry
                descriptive experience sampling (des),fmri,pristine inner experience,fidelity,introspection

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