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

Michael Pollan: 'Consciousness is really under siege'

New Scientist

In his latest book A World Appears: A journey into consciousness, Pollan charts the work of scientists and philosophers, weaving in literary perspectives along the way. He spoke to New Scientist about the value of writing a book where you know less at the end than before you started.

Michael Pollan Returns (on consciousness)

Armchair Expert Podcast

Michael Pollan (A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness) is a science and environmental journalist. Michael returns to the Armchair Expert to discuss why choosing surrender is liberating in both psychedelics and life, what the “hard problem” of consciousness is and how we get to it, and how sentience serves homeostasis in living beings. Michael and Dax talk about asking what the world would be like without consciousness, the remarkable fact that plants can see, hear, and fight, and experimental evidence via the ginger test that disgust originates in the gut. Michael explains the qualitative redness of red, that there’s so much more going on in consciousness besides computation, and what strange places to visit our minds are.

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.