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Sunday, October 10, 1999
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal
THE BEEP GOES ON
A UNLV psychology professor works to understand people's `inner experiences' by having them document their thoughts at the time of a random tone.
By Caren Benjamin
Review-Journal
Sara is in art class reviewing slides. When the beep comes, the instructor has just shown a slide she didn't like. Sara's inner voice was saying "I don't understand this piece." These words were spoken in a flatter, duller version of her own voice. She was confused. Sara described confusion as feeling as if her brain was squishing together or shrinking like crumpled paper.
-- -- --
Russell Hurlburt's quest to understand the human thought process began in 1973 as a graduate student in South Dakota. At the time, the world of psychology was embracing behaviorism, the idea that watching what people do is the most valid way to understand who they are.
It didn't make sense to Hurlburt.
"I felt if you wanted to call yourself a psychologist you had to know a lot about what people are typically like," he said.
To Hurlburt, a psychology professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas for nearly 20 years, that meant understanding people's "inner experiences" -- what and how they think in a given moment on a typical day.
The trick was how to do it.
Asking people what they are thinking isn't reliable, according to associate professor Chris Heavey, who works with Hurlburt. First, most people don't know what they're thinking about. He has tested young men who are certain -- perhaps because society tells them so -- that they constantly are thinking about sex. Heavey found in reality sex rarely crosses most people's minds.
Even if people could accurately report their thoughts, Heavey said, asking them to do so in a moment of consciousness destroys the process. It is what he dubs a "circular problem," meaning that if people are thinking about what they're thinking about, then they're no longer having the pure experience of thinking.
So, the trick would be to catch people by surprise in the act of being and record a snapshot of their mental lives. By collecting enough of those snapshots, Hurlburt hopes to get some idea of "what it's like to be you."
The practical applications of that are myriad, Hurlburt believes. With an understanding of a patient's inner experience, a psychologist could tailor therapy to meet an individual's needs. Charting inner experiences also could bring researchers into the minds of patients with mental illnesses and help doctors understand what kinds of therapies work and why.
To seize a series of moments in thought, Hurlburt has designed and patented a contraption that most closely resembles a Walkman with a single earpiece. The whole business fits neatly in a strap-on waist pack. Within the space of three or four hours, the box beeps randomly a half dozen times.
The person being beeped stops everything and writes down the thought, sensation, perception or feeling at that moment. Later the person will meet with the psychologist to dissect the thought. If the subject says, "I was trying to decide whether to take Tropicana or Flamingo," Hurlburt asks: "Did you see the streets and picture the traffic? Or did the words `Tropicana or Flamingo' actually ring in your ears? Were you annoyed by the necessity of making the decision? How did annoyed feel to you? Did your stomach clench? Was the clench around the middle of your abdomen or closer to your heart?"
The process takes some practice. Most of his subjects find the first beep or two disconcerting, Hurlburt says. Those being beeped often are not sure the thought they are recording is the exact thought at the moment of the beep or whether it is, technically, a thought at all. The first time or two it seems that at the beep they're thinking only about the beep. Eventually it becomes easy if not a little eerie to most subjects, he has noticed. Often, he says, they're surprised by how and what they think.
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A few seconds before the beep Nancy was wondering what colors she would use when decorating her apartment for Christmas. She was sitting on her couch staring at the window and, at the moment of the beep, was experiencing an inner visual image of a Christmas tree with ornaments. Nancy was superimposing this imagined tree in front of the window she was staring at. The image of the tree was located in the middle of the window, where a real tree had been placed during the previous holiday season.
However, the imagined tree was not as clear or detailed as a real tree would be. This particular image was primarily green -- green tree, green ornaments, etc. -- and was part of a series of images that were primarily red or primarily white.
-- -- --
These days the hot areas in psychology are in neuroscience, the actual structural workings of the brain and cognitive approaches. Cognitive psychology can be described roughly as the study of internal mental processes.
Hurlburt's work, which he has published in two books, can most easily be lumped into the cognitive school. But even among cognitive theorists there are those who consider it outdated, and a few researchers have maligned it as hopelessly unscientific.
There are some obvious methodological problems. For one thing, people could lie. Hurlburt stresses to his subjects that there is no one thing he wants to hear, and also that he can accept "none of your business" as an answer. But it is not, he admits, foolproof.
Eric Klinger, a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota, maintains that even the most honest subjects "self select," meaning they remember and relate one out of the many things that are probably available to them at the moment of the beep.
And there are those critics who simply don't believe people can remember their thoughts in a detailed way.
Of any skeptics Hurlburt says simply, "they've never been beeped."
Klinger said the study of inner experience has been around for years in one form another and may again be coming into vogue. Now he expects it to be studied in combination with other kinds of research into emotions and other workings of the self that make humans unique.
Hurlburt has discovered that what most people think about most of the time is "pretty mundane." Only people with anxiety disorders had a pattern of thoughts in which the content, a barrage of self-criticism, was illustrative.
Far more interesting than what people think, he found, is how they think it.
There are some people whose inner experience consists almost entirely of literally talking to oneself, Hurlburt says. Thoughts flash through the mind in full sentences. The thinker actually hears the words "should I take Tropicana or Flamingo" in her own speaking voice.
Others think in pictures that are often very complete, detailed images. At the moment of the beep a male subject is physically in Las Vegas, but mentally on a San Diego beach. He can smell the ocean. He can hear gulls squawking.
Many also think in a third category he calls "unsymbolized thinking." There may be no words at all, fleeting images if any, thinking with no method, thinking that looks like dreaming.
Hurlburt speculates "inner voice" thinkers are probably a more linear, rational group while people who think mostly in pictures are likely to be more imaginative and less practical.
But he's reluctant to assign particular personality traits to large groups. A tendency to see people in groups rather than as individuals is the biggest problem with psychology today, he says.
When Hurlburt is beeping, he is beeping the individual. If that person also happened to be a 30-year-old woman living in Las Vegas near the turn of the century, that doesn't mean her inner experience would be the same as the inner experience of all other 30-year-old women in Las Vegas this year, he stresses.
Hurlburt can't even begin to guess how many people he has beeped over the years.
"Anywhere from 1,000 to 2,000," he estimates. He has worked with so-called normal people and schizophrenics. He has beeped bulimics and people who are depressed. He has traced the thoughts of people going through manic phases and people who tend to blush or cry easily.
This diversity was aimed partly at ensuring beeping worked. Hurlburt reasoned that if schizophrenics answered their beeps in the same way as normal people, the method would be proven flawed.
Instead, he found schizophrenics tended to think in images that were, in the words of one of his subjects, "goofed up."
The subject would be thinking about Hurlburt and picturing his face. But the face would be cut in half, or the frame of the image would be crooked, or the head would be floating above the body. Even in situations where a subject was staring directly at him, that person could see him clearly but pictured him wearing a differently colored shirt than he had on.
-- -- --
Larry was having his first cigarette of the day. At the moment of the beep he was looking at the cigarette as it was coming away from his mouth and saying to himself "cigarettes are going to kill me." At least he was saying something like that. It could have been "this" is going to kill me. He had the sense he was speaking these words more than hearing them. He felt a little groggy, as if there was dirty cotton in his head.
-- -- --
Hurlburt believes he has seen one case in which the process of being beeped and assessing those thoughts has been therapeutic in and of itself.
Fran was a middle-age bank employee with a history of psychological problems and suicide attempts. She had been diagnosed as "borderline personality disorder" -- a label Hurlburt says is slapped on anyone with obvious problems who doesn't fit into obvious categories. Fran had been under the care of a therapist and at that time, 1984, was complaining she felt out of control of her brain and, subsequently, her life.
Her notations during her beeps showed Hurlburt she thought entirely in images. But unlike most people, who hold a single image at a time, she was simultaneously holding between five and 10 images.
The problem, he believes, is that Fran lacked the figure-ground phenomenon, the way in which people focus on a single central object at a time though there are many objects in view.
Fran couldn't do this. In fact, Fran reported she could watch several television screens at a time and actually pay attention to them all simultaneously. She often annoyed her co-workers at the bank because she would start up conversations when they were counting money. Everyone else would lose count. Fran didn't understand the problem.
The images Fran reported at the beeps were often disturbing. An image of a fight she had with her father years ago would linger in her head for days, even as she was doing and thinking any number of other things. That fight would share a screen with a vision of her mother in rags and tatters and her daughter telling her she was a worthless parent.
Finally she admitted to Hurlburt there was one image she hadn't shared, a vision of herself attempting suicide.
As in his other interviews, he walked her through the image. She told him what the medicine cabinet looked like where she retrieved pills. She told him which direction the door swung and where the blood flowed when she slit her wrists.
This was on a Friday. On Monday she reported feeling better than she had in years. Her thinking was finally ordered and clear. She had regained, or finally developed, figure-ground perception.
Of course she could have been lying, Hurlburt said. But Hurlburt thinks Fran was honest about her seemingly miraculous recovery.
He said she might have dealt with past trauma by ignoring it. As a result, those traumatic incidents had lurked in her mind. By forcing her to pay close, detailed attention to one of them she learned to face her thoughts. In doing so she was able to confront and then banish the others and, from then on, to have only one at a time.
Or, he laughs, "it could have been dumb luck."
-- -- --
Richard is driving to work when he realizes he needs to stop at the post office. What he has to mail is important and he has worked hard on it. He is worried it's not perfect. The thought makes him vaguely tense. It's not really a physical reaction. He is picturing himself at the post office addressing envelopes and trying to keep track of what packet of papers goes into which envelope and wishing he could have done this at home. The envelopes are white. In the image he is wearing a striped shirt. He is not wearing stripes that day.
-- -- --
For their next project, Hurlburt and Heavey would like to beep patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Most psychologists believe that obsessive-compulsive people have recurring unwanted thoughts that prompt them to repeatedly perform an act in hopes of relieving the thought. A sufferer might obsess about whether the burners of the stove have been turned off and return to the kitchen repeatedly to check the flames.
But what if they don't have the thoughts at all, Hurlburt asks. What if, like young men and sex, obsessive-compulsives think they are having thoughts about the burner when really they are worrying about having thoughts about the burner? "Wouldn't that significantly change the therapy?" Hurlburt asks.
The two also are looking for patients in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease. By understanding what those patients are thinking, and how, Hurlburt believes he could help diagnose Alzheimer's earlier.
"People forget things all the time. As we get older we forget more," he said. People get worried they have Alzheimer's and so far there's no good way of telling early on who has Alzheimer's and who is going through the normal process of aging.
-- -- --
When the beep goes off Carol is rereading an e-mail to a friend who has just mailed her daughter a care package of cosmetics at sleep-away camp. She hears herself saying "nail polish." She's focused on the letter but also has a vision of a camp bunk. She thinks it is a memory. The beds are all made with scratchy, khaki camp blankets. She sees a hand with red nails also, but it is in the periphery. There are no people in the picture. Her hand is falling asleep.
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Printable version of this story
This patented machine beeps wearers at random. Participants in a study on inner experience are supposed to take note of what they are thinking or feeling at the exact moment of the beep.
Photo by Steve Andrascik.
For nearly 20 years UNLV professor Russell Hurlburt has been beeping students and other subjects, trying to get a handle on how and what most people think.
Photo by Steve Andrascik.
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