Describing Inner Experience? -- book cover
Whew! I've been chugging away so hard at a draft of my "Eyes Closed" essay that I've barely come up for air the last two days. But instead of trying everyone's patience with more of that, I think I'll toss up something visual: The book cover design for Russ Hurlburt's & my forthcoming book Describing Inner Experience? Proponent Meets Skeptic.
Russ and I gave a subject, Melanie, a random beeper which she wore during her normal daily activities. When the beep went off, Melanie was to make her best effort to discern and recall her last undisturbed moment of inner experience immediately before the beep. She collected several such samples a day, and then we interviewed her about them -- Russ as a proponent of this as the best way he knows of to get at people's real inner lives, I as someone pretty skeptical about the accuracy of introspective reports.
We edited transcripts of six days of interviews, with Melanie describing her randomly sampled experiences as best she could, Russ probing her about it based on years of experience with such interviews, and I probing in my own way and asking skeptical questions. We added several dozen side boxes continuing our debates and connecting what's going on in the interviews with contemporary and historical literature in psychology and philosophy. Finally, Russ and I wrote introductory and concluding chapters each from our own perspective.
But most importantly: What do you think of the tangled thread cover design? Pretty nifty?