Chapter 3: Modes of Experience
The second part of Chapter 3: Observation
Modes of experience
The principle modes of Experience are observation, imagination and sensation.
Imagining is popularly known as "mental activity". It includes inner speech and all other types of imagining. However, all of Experience is mental activity and the difference between sensation and inner speech/imagining is that the first deals with events that have their sources in the world beyond the brain and the latter is mostly sourced from within the brain.
Where modes use the same nets they tend to exclude each other. As an example it is difficult to hear the finer points of a piece of music whilst ruminating on a lover's tiff because both occur in the auditory net and difficult to daydream while playing squash because these must share the visual net.
Inner speech is the stream of unvoiced words that occur in the Experience of most people (but not all) and is a mode of imagining. It has submodes such as relationship planning and anxiety planning and these can stimulate other imaginings. This mode is also sometimes known as the Default Mode and it produces a characteristic pattern of activity in MRI scans of the brain.
The relationship (planning) mode is second nature for many people because we are social animals. It can entail the mental rehearsal of social interaction with other people, especially friends and family. This involves a considerable amount of inner speech. Relationship mode can greatly lessen sensations from the world in general while it is happening. Next time you are soundlessly talking to yourself you may notice that you do not easily stop to pay attention to anything. The suppression of sensation by inner speech/imagination is a result of sensation and inner speech/imagination sharing the same nets.
Anxiety submode is called “worrying”. Worrying can create an addictive cycle in which the worry creates bodily discomfort that then provokes anxious inner speech to lessen the sensation of discomfort as it shuts down sensation. Too much worry is an illness, either created by bodily discomfort or creating a sense of bodily discomfort, especially in the "tummy". Anxiety submode is not the same as clinical anxiety, clinical anxiety is due to a labile autonomic nervous system and is accompanied by forms of sensation such as palpitations, panic and sweaty palms. Clinical anxiety often leads to fearfulness and worry but it is possible to experience the physical symptoms of clinical anxiety without worrying. The modes considered above are about usual events so clinical anxiety will not be considered here.
Dream mode usually happens during sleep but can occur at other times. When we dream our Experience is largely detached from actual sensation. Most people only remember the contents of sleep dreaming that occur just before waking. During a dream the content of Experience is usually based on internal rather than external events. Dreaming has the submodes of day dreaming, lucid dreaming, hallucinating and sleep dreaming. Dreaming uses all of the nets of “mental” qualities and most of the nets for sensory qualities.
Dream mode usually just rolls on unless something in the dream provokes attention. Lucid dreaming involves gentle attention to control the flow.
Although there is a spectrum from free running inner speech through day dreams to dreams, inner speech and dreams use fairly separate nets of events and deserve to be recognised as different modes. My dreams seldom use inner speech.
Action mode can be highly absorbing, especially in sport and dance. It is less so when it is expressed as physical labour. Action mode overlaps the sensation mode. The best way to stay in sensation mode is through action. There is no truly pure action or sensation mode because sensation without action is relatively limited if even the eyes are still. Many people live much of the time in sensation/action mode. Sensation/action mode uses the nets of qualities that are populated by the senses.
Sensuality mode has submodes of relaxation and emotion. Emotion can be overwhelming, possessing Experience. The brain can signal for the release of drugs such as adrenaline or prolactin to bring purely mental qualities into an equal prominence with sensory qualities and so heavily bias decisions and actions. Calm relaxation allows untroubled mental qualities to dominate the imagination (See “Experience and Mind” below for a description of “mental qualities”).
Modes occur as whole packages of events in our Experience. We can switch between modes. The mode switch uses our “attention”. Attention isolates a particular event or events within Experience whereas observation mode contains the whole of Experience.
Observation is our Experience in general. It is listening, looking etc. without any deliberate re-processing of what is seen or felt. The observation mode uses attention to switch between modes and between submodes. The switching involves attending to, say, sensation then relaxing this attention.
When we attend to events we submit them to the parts of the brain outside of Experience that analyse them. This analysis largely consists of taking the events isolated by attention and relating these to other events in our memory or sensory input. Attention switches modes and can also focus on a small area of the space of Experience. We can see from this how attention can trigger a change of mode, for instance attending to a verbal thought in our Experience draws out the relations of this thought so triggering a succession of verbal thoughts.
Observation mode is specifically the state that is not dominated by any particular mode. Observation mode allows us to balance the other modes.
Observation often leads to the sensation/action mode because it tends to shut down the other modes. Once in sensation mode a return to observation mode can be accomplished by ceasing to attend to sensations. Pure observation mode entails not attending to anything.
The selection of modes within Experience is known as “will power”. An act of will is the ability to switch between modes or stay in a particular mode. It is the switching on and off of attention and wielding it within Experience. Attention is a push button style of switch, press once to change mode, press again after several seconds to stop an established mode. Observation mode is the first step to resisting the poorly focused attention that prolongs residence in a particular mode.
As an example of mode switching try relaxing with your eyes shut. You may find yourself attending to a fragment of inner speech, this might turn on relationship planning mode. Your attention lapses and the relationship planning mode will just continue. To switch off relationship planning mode you need to attend to it, to listen carefully to the words of inner speech. This briefly interrupts the inner speech and returns you to observation mode. If you immediately attend again to the next unconsciously generated tranche of inner speech you will switch back to relationship planning mode. This shows why the general planning mode, in which inner speech is mixed with imaginings and all of this is checked and re-processed, is difficult to sustain because it involves repeatedly attending to inner speech and imaginings, each new attention being a possible branch point to another mode.
Mindfulness is a technique of disrupting modes by attending to modes (operating the attention switch) so that Observation Mode predominates.
Sensation/action mode is a source of truth, some other modes such as dreaming and inner speech are at best entertainment because we create their contents without an outside source (notice that we forget most of our inner speech and imaginings). General planning mode is useful for work and creativity. We do also create the qualities of sensation/action mode but in this case the general form and sequence of the content comes from sensations evoked by real external events.
Next: Chapter 4: Time