What's in People's Stream of Experience During Philosophy Talks?

As you may know, Russ Hurlburt and I recently published a book centering on a woman's reports about her experience as she went about her normal day wearing a random beeper. When the beep sounded, her job was to try to recall her "last undisturbed moment of inner experience" just before the beep. Russ and I then interviewed her about these experiences, trying to get both at the truth about them and at methodological issues about the value of this sort of approach in studying consciousness.

Russ and I have presented our joint work in a number of venues now (including at an author-meets-critics session at the APA last week), and normally when we do so, we "beep" the audience. That is, we set up a random beeper to sound when Russ or I or a critic is presenting material. When the beep sounds, each audience member is to think about what was going on in her last undisturbed moment of inner experience before the beep. We then use a random number generator to select an audience member to report on her experience. We interview her right there, discussing her experience and the method with the audience and each other. We'll do this maybe three times in a three-hour session.

As a result, we now have a couple dozen samples of reported inner experience during our academic talks, and the most striking thing we've found is that people rarely report thinking about the talk. The most recent six samples are representative (three from a presentation by me at Claremont Wednesday, three from the APA).

(1.) Thinking that he should put his cell phone away (probably not formulated either in words or imagery); visual experience of cell phone and whiteboard.

(2.) Scratching an itch, noticing how it feels; having a visual experience of a book.

(3.) Feeling like he's about to fade into a sweet daydream but no sense of its content yet; "fading" visual experience of the speaker.

(4.) Feeling confused; listening to speaker and reading along on handout, taking in the meaning. [I'm counting this as an instance of thinking about the talk.]

(5.) Visual imagery of the "macaroni orange" of a recently seen flyer; skanky taste of coffee; fantasizing about biting an apple instead of tasting coffee; feeling need to go to bathroom; hearing the speaker's sentence. The macaroni orange was the most prominent part of her experience.

(6.) Reading abstract for next talk; hearing an "echo" of the speaker's last sentence; fighting a feeling of tiredness; maybe feeling tingling on tooth from permanent retainer.

Where is the cooking up of objections, the thinking through of consequences, the feeling of understanding the meaning of what is being said, the finding of connections to other people's work? In only one of these samples was taking in the meaning of the talk the foremost part of the experience.

It could just be that Russ and I and our critics are unusually deadening speakers, but I don't think so. My guess is that most audience members, listening to most academic talks, spend most of their time with some distraction or other at the forefront of their stream of experience. They may not remember this fact because when they think back on their experience of a talk, what is salient to them are those rare occasions when they did make a novel connection or think up an interesting objection. (I think the same is true of sex thoughts. People often say they spend a lot of time thinking about sex, but when you beep them they very rarely report it. It's probably that our sex thoughts, though rare, are much more frequently remembered than other thoughts and so are dramatically overrepresented in retrospective memory.)

Here are two hypotheses about understanding academic talks that harmonize with these observational data:

(1.) Our understanding of academic talks comes mostly from our ability to take them in while other things are at the forefront of consciousness. The information gets in there, despite the near-constant layer of distraction, and that information then shapes skilled regurgitations of the content of the talks.

(2.) Our understanding of academic talks comes mostly from those few salient moments when we are actually not distracted. Maybe this happens three or twelve or thirty times, for very brief stretches, during the course of the talk. The understanding we walk away with at the end is a reconstruction of what must plausibly have been the author's view based on our recollection of those few instances when we were actually paying attention to what she was saying.

Any bets on (1) vs. (2)? Or candidates for a (3)? If (2) is closer to the truth, then it may be possible to discover strategies to get much more out of talks by discovering ways to better focus our attention on the content.

[Cross-posted at The Splintered Mind.]

Comments

[Dan Hicks]

All of (1-6) deal with the simple, `discrete' events of just a few moments, as opposed to a temporally-extended and complicated activity like understanding a talk and the subsequent discussion. Perhaps something about the question or its context is prompting people to focus more on the latest discrete event rather than any ongoing activities they're involved in?

Also, this might just be a variation on (1), but perhaps we're not normally conscious of the process of understanding a talk -- occupied with the first-order task of understanding the talk, we aren't aware of, paying attention to, &c. that first-order task itself.

[Greg Frost-Arnold]

If this is what happens to people who are listening to a speaker talk about an area in which they (usually) take some interest, then I shudder to think what a similar study of undergraduates during a lecture-based class would show.

Perhaps, in order to maintain audience interest, speakers should ask the audience to do things -- similar to the sorts of things we do to keep undergrads engaged in class.

[Joshua Blanchard]

My thought while reading is similar to Hicks' comment.

It would be interesting to to a parallel experiment and see what people were thinking about for the last hour, after the talk was over. I suspect they wouldn't give a list of concerns like feeling itchy, but would instead say they would thinking about, say, experimental philosophy.

This would be fairly predictable. But because of these considerations, I would question whether we can justifiably say the itchiness is at the "forefront of their stream of experience." I suspect that much more serious cognitive attention is actually being given to the talk, and that what people report are better characterized as being in the background of experience. After all, we remember things about talks, and nothing about itchiness.

[Eric Schwitzgebel]

Thanks for the comments, folks!

Dan: I think it's possible that the narrow temporal focus misses some of the dynamics over time. But I'm inclined to think that if that were the case, you'd get reports more like "I was swept up in this extended thought that...". On your second point: Either the content of the talk is at the forefront of your conscious stream or not. If not, that's like option (2). If so, then why report itchiness etc. instead of what's really at the forefront?

Greg: Yes and yes!

Joshua: I'd be pretty skeptical about the over-the-past-hour retrospections. Why would you think those would be more trustworthy than the just-before-the-beep retrospections?

[Eric Schwitzgebel]

Comment from Bryony Pierce:

Another problem is that anticipation of the beep may influence what passes through people's minds and heighten awareness of sensation and visual/auditory input - this happened to me during the talk I attended. Habituation to the beeper isn't a solution, as it involves a sort of training and could also affect results.

Could it be that most people were attending to the talk, but reported visual/auditory aspects of their experience rather than anything meaning-related? Perhaps because of a bias towards reporting phenomenal aspects of experience rather than (less instantaneous) information processing?

There are two mentions of the speaker's last sentence, one of visual experience of the speaker, one of visual experience of the whiteboard and then there's the person who clearly was attending to the content. Participant (2) is the only one who makes no mention of anything related to attending to the talk.

A third hypothesis, similar to (1), would be that we rarely become engrossed in a talk to the exclusion of all other stimuli - that would be dangerous, though gratifying to the speaker. When other things distract us, it's because they are salient in some way (so will be recalled readily when the beep is heard). But they often take up few mental resources and can be attended to briefly while attending to the content of the talk. Alternatively, they may be keeping our attention focused on the talk, as when we are looking at the speaker or hearing the last sentence.

If we can listen to the radio while driving, why shouldn't we be able to look at books or think about apples while listening attentively to a talk? Is it useful to think in terms of there being just one thing at the forefront of experience at any given instant when all the above-mentioned participants report multiple experiences within a brief moment?

[Eric Schwitzgebel]

Thanks, Bryony, for that thoughtful comment! That's an appealing way of conceptualizing what might be happening.

[William Brady]

Interesting project!

"last undisturbed moment of inner experience". I fear, similar to Bryony, that requesting this will tend to yield reports which are perceptually dominated (rather than meaning-related reports). Think about it this way: how does one report the experience of occurent comprehension? It seems difficult becuase it isn't quite a conscious process which we have access to (other than being aware, after the fact, that we "understood" the content of the talk. So maybe these verbal reports shouldn't be taken for granted if they are meant to show that we are or aren't paying attention and/or occurently comprehending.

Also, Bryony asks, "Is it useful to think in terms of there being just one thing at the forefront of experience at any given instant when all the above-mentioned participants report multiple experiences within a brief moment?"

I think the answer is of course, "no". Sure working memory has a finite load, but introspective verbal reports just don't seem to be the best way to get at the question of whether our attentional load is at its capacity during the moment of reporting. In other words, let's say your data show people are usually thinking of 'X non-talk related content' when the beeper goes off. Even if this is true, it doesn't imply that A) they aren't paying attention in one way or another to the content of the talk (we could be daydreaming and paying attention simultaneously) and B) that the talk isn't being comprehended, even if our attentional capacities are bogged down at that moment (depending on the relationship between attention, comprehension, and occurent conscious experience).

Having said all that, it's still very interesting (and entertaining!) to find out about one portion of people's talk-listening-phenomenology.

[Eric Schwitzgebel]

Thanks for the comment, William! I agree that the issue is complicated in the ways you suggest and no conclusion about level of comprehension straightfowardly follows.

*****

I am closing comments on this post. Discussion will continue to be open on the cross-posted version at The Splintered Mind.