Horizons of Examining Experience

The author describes a personal meditation experience that revealed a rich, varied inner life—bodily sensations, images, and thoughts—that had previously gone unnoticed. This surprise at discovering such intimate yet overlooked experience motivates her interest in studying first-person, phenomenological methods. She argues that charting the diversity and complexity of people's experiential lives is critical for understanding human cognition, as current mind sciences collect extensive neurophysiological and behavioral data but often leave participants' actual lived experience undifferentiated or unknown. She contends that rigorous phenomenological methods are an important contribution to consciousness research and cognitive science, embracing rather than avoiding their epistemological and methodological challenges.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Ema Demar: It was a late summer after noon in 2014, and I was about to start my first serious attempt at meditation.I closed my eyes.I inhaled, and exhaled.I opened a nonjudgmental (or so I tried) attention to whatever was there.What did I notice?A colorful kaleidoscope of bodily sensations, brief images, half-finished spoken sentences; a series of hasty shifts in my focus; the feeling of the inhale in my belly; a background feeling of being at home in the heavy warmth of the summer air.There was also a sense of surprise at what I saw-I hadn't expected to find experiences this numerous, varied, and rich while simply sitting there, doing nothing, being me.How could I have not already been familiar with so many of the things I was now noticing?Hadn't this experience-the experience that remains as I am just existing, breathing in, breathing out-been at the center of what it was like to be me all along?It is this potential for discovering something so intimate, yet perhaps previously unnoticed, that sits at the core of my personal interest in studying experience.People's experiential lives are magnificently diverse and cannot be reliably predicted from the outside.Behind every seemingly simple act-having a chat, letting one's mind wander while reading this text, participating in a neuroscientific experiment-there is a myriad of pos si ble experiences, which one (including the experiencing person themself ) might not become aware of without attending to them.Besides being fascinating on a day-to-day level, I believe that charting the diversity and complexity of people's experiences is critical for future advances in understanding human cognition.While mind sciences today collect unpre ce dented amounts of neurophysiological and behavioral data associated with dif fer ent phenomena of consciousness, participants' actual lived experience of these phenomena-and thereby, the bulk of what even the third-person approaches are trying to get at-often remains undifferentiated or even unknown.In my view, developing and employing rigorous phenomenological methods is an impor tant contribution to the multi-method toolkit of con temporary consciousness research and cognitive science.I am interested in first-person research because of-rather than despite-its thorny epistemological and methodological challenges.With its dynamic, transformative, and 3 Horizons of Examining Experience