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Can inner experience be apprehended in high fidelity? Examining brain activation and experience from multiple perspectives

Hurlburt, R.T.; Alderson-Day, B.; Fernyhough, C.; Kühn, S.

Can inner experience be apprehended in high fidelity? Examining brain activation and experience from multiple perspectives Thumbnail


Authors

R.T. Hurlburt

S. Kühn



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.

Citation

Hurlburt, R., Alderson-Day, B., Fernyhough, C., & Kühn, S. (2017). Can inner experience be apprehended in high fidelity? Examining brain activation and experience from multiple perspectives. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, Article 43. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00043

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Jan 8, 2017
Online Publication Date Jan 27, 2017
Publication Date Jan 27, 2017
Deposit Date Mar 10, 2017
Publicly Available Date Mar 13, 2017
Journal Frontiers in Psychology
Print ISSN 1664-1078
Publisher Frontiers Media
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 8
Article Number 43
DOI https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00043

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Accepted Journal Article (303 Kb)
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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
© 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.






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