Howard Burton - Mind-Wandering and Meta-Awareness: A Conversation with Jonathan Schooler

In 1637, Ren Descartes famously penned, I think, therefore I am, boldly sweeping aside centuries worth of perpetual doubt and forthrightly establishing once and for all a scientific bedrock of what we might know with absolute certainty.

My senses might delude me, he admitted. I might not be able to trust my memories. I might even be dreaming, and the experiences I am surrounded by thus might not even exist. But the one thing that I can be absolutely certain of, the one thing that I cannot in any meaningful way coherently reject or deny, is the indubitable fact that there is some sort of I who is having these experiences.

And with that, a dagger was driven through the heart of the infinite regress of scepticism, irrevocably establishing the rudiments of a coherent theory of knowledge that paved the way for the modern era.

So goes the standard interpretation. But look a little closer and there are ironies aplenty. Almost 400 years after Descartes paean to the power of subjectivity, our modern understanding has given rise to a scientific method that has firmly sidelined these very core subjective sensitivities that so effervescently launched Descartes inquiry to begin with.

Not too many people are bothered by this nowadays. But Jonathan Schooler is one of them. Hes convinced that a lack of appreciation of our subjective experiences has profoundly led us awry.

Jonathan, a Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is not so much out to resurrect subjectivism, but is instead intent on reconciling it with its triumphant objective counterpart.

A real passion of mine is trying to find a balance, a marriage, between these two fundamentally different ways of trying to understand the world.

In my view we understand the world, first and foremost, from a first-person perspective. The thing that we know beyond certainty, more than anything else, is our own personal experience. We always start with that.

But as scientists, we need to somehow find a third-person perspective to find consensus with scientific observations.

Its the challenge of finding that balance between the first-person and third-person perspective that really captivates me.

But is this really a necessary challenge to meet? After all, there are many well-respected scientists and academics, such as philosopher of mind Dan Dennett, who resolutely subscribe to the notion that there is no first-person mystery to human consciousness whatsoever, that all that is required to fully understand what is going on in our minds is a deeper, more coherent understanding of the mechanics of the human brain.

It is inevitable, such proponents of scientific objectivism maintain, that one day we will be able to put human subjects into some futuristic equivalent of fMRI machines and directly read off what theyre thinking.

Jonathan, suffice it to say, is profoundly unconvinced.

I complete understand why the likes of Dan Dennett want to get rid of this privileged first-person perspective. Its a thorn in his side, that theres something that cant be scrutinized in the same way that everything else can be. Its not accessible, in a way, scientifically. And so that makes it intractable; and theres a great temptation to get rid of it.

But the problem is, that when I step back and ask myself Descartes question, What do I know with absolute certainty? From my perspective, theres only one thing that I actually recognize that I know with absolute certainty, and that is that Im engaging in experience.

And we are back, it seems, full-circle, to 17th-century meditations.

But is that the best we can dosimply move back and forth on an endless philosophical merry-go-round?

Thankfully, no. For Jonathan is also the Principal Investigator of UC Santa Barbaras Meta Lab, and as such is intent on developing and carrying out a number of real-world experiments to test his subjective sentiments.

One of his main probes of first-person experiences is that of the everyday phenomenon of mind-wanderingthat sense weve all had of lapsing into a mechanical scanning of a text for several minutes, and thenvitallyrecognizing that weve been doing that for some time and consequently catching ourselves doing so.

It is this sense of catching ourselvesour penetration of the meta-level of cognition that is self-awarenessthat seems so inherently related to the elusive structure of consciousness. And so it is this very phenomenon that Jonathan has devoted so much of his recent research life to exploring.

When he first began his experiments, many scientists had been intrigued by the prospect of measuring mind-wandering, but owing to their knee-jerk belief in the necessity of implementing an objective, third-person perspective, were unable to even imagine a way of moving forwards to do so.

A common refrain was, Wed be very interested to look closely at this mind-wandering effect, but how would you ever do that?

Well, it turns out, Jonathan told me with a chuckle, that you can.

We asked subjects to start reading, and then we used two different measures to report mind-wandering. And these two different measures turn out to, very interestingly, give us two different facets of the phenomenon.

First off, we asked people to press a button every time they noticed themselves mind-wandering. This has a lot of face validity with respect to meta-awareness. If you just pressed a button saying that you were mind-wandering, that means that you were meta-aware of doing so. Thats our definition.

But in addition to that, we would also randomly probe people at particular moments and ask them, Just now, were you mind-wandering?

And what we found is that we routinely caught people mind-wandering before they had noticed it themselves.

With these two independent measures in place, Jonathan was then ready to develop an analytic framework to rigorously quantify our level of meta-awareness, tangibly demonstrating that this inherently subjective phenomenon might indeed be evaluated and assessed without any recourse to a third-person perspective.

Rock on, Ren.