Russell T. Hurlburt

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Professor of Psychology

Expertise: Thoughts, Feelings, Emotions, Sensations

Biography

Russell Hurlburt’s research is centered around inner experience, which includes thoughts, feelings, and sensations.

He is the originator of the Descriptive Experience Sampling method, which uses random beepers and intensive interviews to provide qualitative, idiographic descriptions of inner experience. In the 1970s, Hurlburt was one of the first to use beepers in psychological research and was a creator of the "thought sampling" method.

He believes that the understanding of inner experience is a fundamental task of psychology. He also has researched the experience of adults and adolescents with and without diagnoses such as bulimia, anxiety, schizophrenia, borderline personality, and Asperger's syndrome.

His work has been published in numerous academic articles and journals including the Journal of Consciousness Studies, Investigating pristine inner experience: Moments of truth, and Describing inner experience? Proponent meets skeptic.

Education

Ph.D., Clinical Psychology, University of South Dakota

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Russell T. Hurlburt In The News

The Ezra Klein Show | Michael Pollan’s Journey to the Borderlands of Consciousness

Pollan, a science writer, spent five years trying to understand how consciousness worked. The more he learned, the weirder things got.

Science Weekly | What sets human consciousness apart from AI?

Why is it like something to be ourselves and how do physical processes create our subjective experience? These questions get to the heart of the knotty problem of consciousness, and they provided the spark for the latest book from award-winning author and journalist Michael Pollan.

Not everyone has an internal monologue

Popular Science

Your inner monologue may be less constant than you think—more like a fridge light that turns on when you look.

"A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness" by Michael Pollan

KATU 2 ABC

When neuroscientists began studying consciousness in the early 1990s, they sought to explain how and why three pounds of spongy grey matter could generate a subjective point of view—assuming that the brain is the source of our felt reality. Pollan takes us to the cutting edge of the field, where scientists are entertaining more radical (and less materialist) theories of consciousness. He introduces us to “plant neurobiologists” searching for the first flicker of consciousness in plants; scientists striving to engineer feelings into AI, and psychologists and novelists seeking to capture the felt experience of our slippery stream of consciousness.