When does observing or awareness of a thought happen? Is it simultaneous with the comprehension of the thought? Or is more mental machinery, requiring a bit more time, needed to actually “process” the thought? Ok, I’m answering my own question: comprehension is pretty much automatic but still takes neural-time, so comprehension happens after a thought has been produced, or – as they say – “unfolded”. I would assume that one may acquire the knack of observing thoughts as they unfold (doubtful, but I’ll grant for the sake of argument,  envisioning this process as similar to what happens during hypnagogic states). But comprehension, understanding, and insight are all more than awareness – they are a kind of after-thought. So awareness that happens before comprehension seems pretty empty, except that it creates a sense of distance from its object.

Comprehension is self-correcting as new information is assimilated. Where does awareness fit into this pattern of production, evolving comprehension, continued production and continued evolving comprehension? What does awareness add? Could “awareness” be just another a brain region that is activated a bit after the comprehension region? And then back-and-forth they go?

A common metaphor in mindfulness discourse is that observing thoughts and emotions is like being on a hillside watching the clouds go by: if you observe long enough, you’ll notice that they just fade away, like puffy little clouds do.

Question: doesn’t the act of observation change the nature of the experience being observed? Thoughts and emotions attend to their own objects and attention is a limited resource. Thoughts and emotions cannot “carry on as usual” if the limited resource upon which they depend has been diverted to the cognitive process of observing them. Thoughts and emotions are weakened through observation so they eventually end up as insubstantial wisps of nothing. Nothing here, keep moving.

Awareness tracks attention, nothing more. Attentional capacity is the boundary condition of awareness. If you cannot attend to two things at the same time, you can’t be aware of more than one stream of attention at the same time. You can’t be aware of everything. You have to pick and choose and switch and go back and forth.

It is possible to become so adept at attention switching that it feels simultaneous, especially when the switching is happening on the order of milliseconds. To the extent that attention switching becomes automatized (through overlearning, as probably happens in some types of meditation practice), it may not require all that much mental effort. One just gets in the habit of switching from being deep in the forest to looking at the trees from the outside. Of course, the view within the forest is not the same as the view from beyond its boundary.

When we are advised to Recognize, Accept, Investigate emotions with Non-attachment (RAIN) I wonder what is being recognized, accepted and investigated through the observational lens of non-attachment. Emotions and their associated thoughts require attentional resources. Accepting, observing, and investigating require attentional resources. To direct attentional resources to one thing is to withdraw attentional resources from something else. A thing observed becomes a diminished version of itself insofar as the observed and the act of observing draw from the same well.

What does it mean to investigate with non-attachment? The dictionary sense of “investigate” denotes a serious and systematic examination into the particulars of something: a deep and persistent inquiry. In contrast, the sense of investigation in RAIN is a pretty lightweight endeavor. It’s about cultivating a sense of curiosity about our experiences.

Curiosity is not the same as interest; the difference between them is instructive. Curiosity requires little commitment on the part of the agent. Curiosity may or may not lead to interest. To be curious is to be a bit detached. To be interested is to be engaged. To be curious is to stand apart. To be interested is to jump in. To be curious is to be half-way to non-attachment, which is an attitude of being witnesses to our experiences but not getting caught up with them.

While they are observed, thoughts do not unfold as they would unobserved. As we observe thoughts, they occupy the cognitive space called working memory. They are like echoes of what just happened in our heads, often represented as word fragments that may or may not be decent proxies for their pre-observed form.

It’s possible to get really efficient at directing and re-directing attention. Meditation is a useful technique for acquiring this skill. It’s possible also to get really good at tracking our attention, otherwise known as “aware-ing”. Meditation is also useful here.

Being aware of an object is not the same thing as making sense of it. Awareness is not understanding. Understanding is a dynamic process, evolving as new information comes to light. Of course, understanding can be wrong.

Awareness is not understanding yet it does operate according to assumptions about how the world works. Awareness cannot follow a moving object without anticipating its next move. Otherwise, it would keep getting stranded, not knowing where to look next. This is true whether the moving object is attention or a stream of thoughts.

Anticipation is part of the default system, at least as it initially unfolds and before it is converted to symbolic form and becomes a decoupled object in working memory. Anticipation is a type of unsymbolized thinking (without words or images) that often characterizes the resting state (Hurlburt et al, 2015). Like wordless wondering, questioning, or realizing, anticipation draws attention to certain things, with awareness tagging along.

Awareness takes its orders from unseen forces. Awareness is not the all-seeing master. Awareness is a servant.

Reference:

What goes on in the resting-state? A qualitative glimpse into resting-state experience in the scanner Hurlburt, R. T., Alderson-Day, B., Fernyhough, C.s and Kühn, S. Frontiers in Psychology www.frontiersin.org October 2015 Volume6 Article1535 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01535

Attention can be directed or involuntary. Insofar as different brain networks are involved in directed and involuntary attention, they reflect categorically distinct processes. This dual-process model of attention has been criticized, however. Rather than conceiving directed and involuntary attention as mutually exclusive categories, some argue it would be more accurate to consider their differences as matters of degree. From this perspective, the attributes of attention vary along a continuum, with directed and involuntary attention representing opposite poles of the continuum. For example, directed attention is more controlled and goal-driven and less automatic and stimulus-driven than involuntary attention (Moors and De Houwer; 2006).

However, since separate brain regions are involved in the different types of attention, they probably have some defining characteristics that do not overlap. This is the position of Evans and Stanovich (2013) who support the dual-process theory of cognition and say the key feature of Type 1 (associated with involuntary attention) is “autonomous processing” and the key feature of Type 2 (associated with directed attention) is “the ability to sustain the decoupling of secondary representations—a key feature of all working memory tasks.” Cognitive decoupling happens when we distinguish what we suppose to be true from what might actually be the case. Type 2 processing involves experiencing beliefs as beliefs, as windows-in-themselves and not windows-on-the-world.  So, when we are coupling cognitive-wise, we are considering cognitions as objects of attention – much like when we are “observing thoughts”.

Evans and Stanovich call Type 1 the default process and Type 2 the interventionist process. Thus when we consider our intuitions, beliefs, emotions, and thoughts as such, we are intervening with their unfolding. We have paused them.

References:

Moors, A., & De Houwer, J. (2006). Automaticity: A theoretical and conceptual analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 132, 297–326.

Evans, Jonathan St. B. T. and Stanovich, Keith E. Dual-Process Theories of Higher Cognition Advancing the Debate Perspectives on Psychological Science May 2013 vol. 8 no. 3 223-241.

Let’s assume that the subjects in a recent experience sampling study* were fairly typical: that is, resting-state experience – the default mode we’re in when not performing tasks – usually doesn’t involve words. The content of our resting states is mostly something else, like a sensory impressions, visual imagery, waves of emotion, or unsymbolized thinking (wordless and imageless, but there doing something – like wondering or questioning or realizing – but without words).

So if our “task-independent” experience doesn’t involve words most of the time, what does it mean to “observe thoughts as they unfold”? What are we observing when the mental activity does not include words? And when they do, how do we mark the boundary between one “thought” and another? For that matter, even when the words are a-flowing in our heads, where does one word-chunk start and another begin? When we listen to someone, we constantly update our understanding of their meaning and intention. How is it different when we observe our inner speech? If it’s not all that different, why does it sound weird to “observe” someone’s speech “unfold” but less so when we observe our “thoughts” unfold? For that matter, what’s the difference between observing someone talk and listening to them? And what would be the difference between “observing” our thoughts and listening to them?

Are we merely “aware-ing” – that is, performing the brain function of tracking attention? Attention goes all sorts of places: to our task, to verbal content of inner speech, to what we’re looking at or hearing (in our heads or in the world).

It may be that our sense of discrete thoughts is a product of working memory capacity: a thought is what we can behold as a thought the few seconds it reverberates in our awareness. Since humans extend working memory capacity by chunking things into meaningful units, we experience thoughts as meaningful units. When meaningful units have verbal content, that means whole words, complete phrases, and sentences. And even when they don’t, we tend to remember them that way, because word combinations are just so chunkable.

Wait! I’m making it sound like being aware of thoughts is remembering thoughts. That’s right.

*What goes on in the resting-state? A qualitative glimpse into resting-state experience in the scanner Hurlburt, R. T., Alderson-Day, B., Fernyhough, C.s and Kühn, S. Frontiers in Psychology www.frontiersin.org October 2015 Volume6 Article1535 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01535

“The word thinking is arguably the most problematic word in the exploration of pristine experience.” (Hurlburt and Heavey, 2015, p. 151).

University of Nevada Las Vegas psychologist Russell T. Hurlburt and his colleagues have been engaging in a series of studies involving beeping subjects randomly to have them jot down whatever they are experiencing at the moment of being beeped. This procedure has revealed five common features of everyday inner experience: inner speech, inner seeing, feelings, sensory awareness, and “feature 5.” Feature 5 is hard to describe. It’s as if the concept of feature 5 doesn’t fit with our understanding of inner experience – even though we may all experience this feature. So what is feature 5? It’s something Hurlburt calls “unsymbolized thinking”, which he describes as follows:

“Unsymbolized thinking is the experience of an explicit, differentiated thought that does not include the experience of words, images, or any other symbols. For example, if you had been beeped a moment ago, you might have experienced an unsymbolized thought which, if expressed in words, might have been something like I wonder what Feature 5 is. But if this was an unsymbolized thought, there would have been no experienced words–no experience of the word ‘wonder’ or of ‘Feature 5.’ There would have been no experienced images–no seeing of a beeper or of anything else.” – Russell T. Hurlburt Thinking Without Words https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/pristine-inner-experience/201111/thinking-without-words accessed on 11/20/15 at 6;11pm

Not everyone agrees that unsymbolized thinking even exists. For some, this may be a matter of how thoughts are conceived: as verbally mediated mental processes (Shulman et al 1997). Others may be skeptical of the idea of unsymbolized thinking because the act of self-reflection in itself produces verbal versions of experiences that may not have originally involved words or other symbols. Poor research design may also contribute to the misimpression of thoughts as steeped in language. For instance, during experience sampling studies, how subjects are questioned about their experiences may bias their response, such as if asked what they were just “thinking” (Hurlburt et al 2015. It would be better for researchers to just ask what the subjects had been experiencing.

There are cognitive spaces between the words and images. These spaces aren’t empty, but unless their content is converted into a form that can be maintained in working memory, they will likely be forgotten in a matter of seconds. We tend to remember what we have reported to ourselves, which requires our experience be in reportable form – and for the most part, that means in words and images.

References:

What goes on in the resting-state? A qualitative glimpse into resting-state experience in the scanner Hurlburt, R. T., Alderson-Day, B., Fernyhough, C.s and Kühn, S. Frontiers in Psychology www.frontiersin.org October 2015 Volume6 Article1535 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01535

Hurlburt, R. T., and Heavey, C. L. (2015).Investigating pristine inner experience: implications for experience sampling and questionnaires. Conscious.Cogn. 31, 148–159. doi:10.1016/j.concog.2014.11.002  

Shulman, G. L., Fiez, J. A., Corbetta, M., Buckner, R. L., Miezin, F. M., Raichle, M. E., et al. (1997). Common blood flow changes across visual tasks: II. Decreases in cerebral cortex.