Inner experience in the scanner: can high fidelity apprehensions of inner experience be integrated with fMRI?

By Simone Kühn, Charles Fernyhough, Ben Alderson-Day, R. T. Hurlburt. 2014

52 citations recorded by the source corpus.

To provide full accounts of human experience and behavior, research in cognitive neuroscience must be linked to inner experience, but introspective reports of inner experience have often been found to be unreliable. The present case study aimed at providing proof of principle that introspection using one method, descriptive experience sampling (DES), can be reliably integrated with fMRI. A participant was trained in the DES method, followed by nine sessions of sampling within an MRI scanner. During moments where the DES interview revealed ongoing inner speaking, fMRI data reliably showed activation in classic speech processing areas including left inferior frontal gyrus. Further, the fMRI data validated the participant’s DES observations of the experiential distinction between inner speaking and innerly hearing her own voice. These results highlight the precision and validity of the DES method as a technique of exploring inner experience and the utility of combining such methods with fMRI.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

1. Felicity Callard
2. D. Fitzgerald

Citations in the corpus

• Rethinking Interdisciplinarity across the Social Sciences and Neurosciences (2015, background): “did emerge from the conversation between SK, Russ Hurlburt, Charles Fernyhough (CF), and others (Kühn et al. 2014).”