"What was I thinking? This is not as easy or straightforward a question as I would have thought. As soon as you try to record and categorise the contents of your consciousness the sense impressions, feelings, words, images, daydreams, mind-wanderings, ruminations, deliberations, observations, opinions, intuitions and occasional insights you encounter far more questions than answers, and more than a few surprises."
"I'd always assumed that my stream of consciousness consisted mainly of an interior monologue, maybe sometimes a dialogue, but was surely composed of words; I'm a writer, after all. But it turns out that a lot of my so-called thoughts a flattering term for these gossamer traces of mental activity are preverbal, often showing up as images, sensations, or concepts, with words trailing behind as a kind of afterthought, belated attempts to translate these elusive wisps of meaning into something more substantial and shareable."
A beeper triggers immediate recall and recording of whatever occupied consciousness just before the signal. The exercise aims to capture momentary snapshots of sense impressions, feelings, images, daydreams, mind-wanderings, ruminations, deliberations, observations, opinions, intuitions and occasional insights. Many mental events turn out to be preverbal: images, sensations or concepts often precede words, which frequently arrive as belated translations or afterthoughts. The results reveal that introspective access to one’s own thinking is more limited and surprising than commonly assumed. The method used, descriptive experience sampling, was developed by Russell T. Hurlburt and has been practiced for decades.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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