Inner Experience and Neuroscience―Merging Both Perspectives

The study of consciousness has advanced rapidly over the last two decades. And yetthere is no clear path to creating models for a direct science of human experience or forintegrating its insights with those of neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy. In InnerExperience and Neuroscience, Donald Price and James Barrell show how a science of humanexperience can be developed through a strategy that integrates experiential paradigms with methodsfrom the natural sciences. They argue that the accuracy and results of both psychology andneuroscience would benefit from an experiential perspective and methods. Price and Barrell describephenomenologically based methods for scientific research on human experience, as well as theirphilosophical underpinnings, and relate these to empirical results associated with such phenomena aspain and suffering, emotions, and volition. They argue that the methods of psychophysics arecritical for integrating experiential and natural sciences, describe how qualitative andquantitative methods can be merged, and then apply this approach to the phenomena of pain, placeboresponses, and background states of consciousness. In the course of their argument, they draw onempirical results that include qualitative studies, quantitative studies, and neuroimaging studies.Finally, they propose that the integration of experiential and natural science can extend efforts tounderstand such difficult issues as free will and complex negative emotions including jealousy andgreed.