Anusha Garg: UCSB Researcher Discusses How We Access the Conscious Mind

You know what keeps me awake at night? My stream of consciousness! Ba dum tss!

If you’re not laughing, just know that a joke like that would kill at a cognitive psychology conference. But don’t worry, you’re not missing out because this week I am bringing the psychology conference to us with a little help from early career researcher, Anusha Garg.

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to interview Anusha, a PhD candidate at UCSB in the department of Psychology and Brain Sciences, about her work on the stream of consciousness. Anusha is part of an emerging school in psychological sciences that uses a technique called “think-aloud” to access the structure and content of our active minds.

Q. Did you know when you started studying psychology that you wanted to study stream of consciousness?

A. I had a really kind psychology teacher in high school, so when I arrived to do my undergraduate degree at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor, I already knew I was really interested in psychology but I wasn’t sure exactly what part. During my undergraduate degree I worked in six different labs in six different fields – everything from assessing firstborns’ reactions to their second-born siblings to food science and addiction. These experiences led me to my senior thesis adviser, Dr. Chandra Sripada. He is the one who introduced me to the “stream of consciousness,” translating typically to what one is thinking about. Obvious questions followed, such as, how does one make sense of the structure and content of their thoughts?

So how do we make sense of what we’re thinking?

Definitely a good question! Dr. Sripada used a technique called ‘think-aloud.’ In my senior and master’s thesis for instance, I designed an interview that asked people about different concerns – positive or negative – that they might have in differing areas of life. A week later, I called the participants back to the lab and had them simply think aloud about whatever came to mind, without any further instructions. We found that when comparing between people’s think-alouds, the content of one’s stream of spontaneous thoughts uniquely held one’s own concerns as opposed to someone else’s. It was a very cool finding! Essentially it is evidence that your stream of consciousness is extremely idiosyncratic and holds a high frequency of your personal concerns. More importantly, my first couple of projects during my PhD have focused on creating a comprehensive taxonomy of the content and qualities of thoughts that one experiences during the stream of spontaneous thoughts. We’ve found evidence suggesting high frequencies of thoughts related to social relationships and environmental stimuli driven mind wanderings amongst individuals. So, we think a lot about a lot of things – we finalized 18 different categories of thoughts people have while mind wandering!

You said that people’s streams of consciousness are extremely idiosyncratic. Does this mean that if you hear me talk through my own thoughts, that you can tell things about my personality?

Definitely. We did this with The Big Five Personality Inventory and found that people who ranked high in Neuroticism displayed greater tendencies to mind wander about negatively valenced things compared to people that didn’t. We have more data that we’re looking through now, but since the stream of consciousness is so incredibly personal, it is only natural to predict that the structure and content of think-alouds can be used for such purposes.

What is drawing researchers like yourself to using think-aloud as opposed to other techniques to study our cognitive architecture?

Past research used a method that asks a participant to do a task and then interrupts them periodically to probe what they’re thinking about. The main benefit to think-aloud is that you’re not getting these isolated, time slices of information. Instead, researchers can obtain a continuous stream of information about the content of thoughts – this in turn can be used for many purposes, such as conducting diagnostic tests for ADHD, depression, anxiety, OCD, and more. Honestly that’s more so conjecture and a hope that we can refine the think-aloud protocol enough to reach that stage, but it’s a hope nonetheless. With think-aloud, you’re getting a very direct glimpse at the exact content as well as the structure of your spontaneous stream of consciousness.

And aside from being really cool, why is it important to study the stream of consciousness? Do we stand to gain any specific insights?

Your stream of consciousness is something that is with you 24/7. Why wouldn’t you want to know what you’re thinking about and how you’re thinking? And I believe there are real benefits to doing so. Aside from what I’ve mentioned previously, a lot of people might agree that they don’t enjoy being alone with their own thoughts. Incredibly, there was a study that showed people preferring to administer shocks to themselves over being left to their thoughts for periods of time. I want to change that narrative, because I believe that your mind should be a place that you embrace wholeheartedly and enjoy being with. The stream of consciousness and mind wandering has somewhat of a negative rep in the literature, however we want to study it further and understand how to help people “think better.” An example of this is when I had a few of my research assistants do think-aloud for 30 days for 10 minutes, and every week they would come back to me and report how they were feeling. They said it was a process of catharsis, where they had 10 minutes to their day, and they would just think out loud to themselves. They said they came out feeling much lighter. I want to help amplify this feeling, and more.

Do you think there are potential clinical benefits to think-aloud?

Absolutely. And that is what I am in the process of pursuing. I want to use think-aloud and explore its benefits as a therapeutic tool. By developing an app, I want to provide a space in which people can become meta-aware of their thoughts through a process of self-reflection. Think-aloud can provide a tool for someone to catch themselves when they’re thinking negatively or find themselves in an obsessive pattern of thoughts. I want to give people ways to access and maintain positive streams of consciousness and mitigate things like anxiety, depression, PTSD, OCD – all things that can take over your stream of consciousness.