I Didn’t Know My Mind Was So Strange Until I Started Listening to It
One fine spring afternoon this year, as I was out running errands in the small Norwegian town where I live, a loud beep startled me into awareness. What had just been on my mind? After a moment’s pause, I realized something strange. I’d been thinking two things at the same time—rehearsing the combination of a new bike lock and contemplating whether I should wear the clunky white beeper that had just sounded into a bank.
How, I wondered, could I have been saying two things simultaneously in my mind? Was I deceiving myself? Was this, mentally, normal? I silenced the beeper on my belt and pulled out my phone to make a voice memo of the bizarre experience before I walked into the bank; aesthetics be damned.
I was in the midst of an experiment that involved keeping a log of my inner thoughts for Russ Hurlburt, a senior psychologist at the University of Las Vegas. For decades, Hurlburt has been motivated by one question: How, exactly, do we experience our own mental life?
My career in cognitive neuroscience didn’t prepare me for this.
It’s a simple enough question. And, one might argue, an existentially important one. But it’s a surprisingly vexing query to try to answer. Once we turn our gaze inward, the subjective squishiness of our mental experience seems to defy objective scrutiny.
For centuries, philosophers and psychologists have presumed our mental life is composed primarily of a single-stream inner monologue. I know that’s what I had assumed,
