This blog is an experiment in popular or democratic phenomenology. Usually, "phenomenology" is the work of an "expert" in introspection who carefully dissects and thickly describes some aspect of being human (perhaps the most popular example is Oliver Sacks describing, for example, the world of the memory damaged patient or the experience of missing a limb). Phenomenology purports to generality by virtue of zeroing in on the essence of human experience through intense introspection. This blog reverses the process and will attempt to zero in by zeroing out and gathering multiple accounts of a given phenomenon.
Each week or so I'll post a question about some aspect of human experience. Visitors will be asked to describe their own inner experience of it. For example, our first topic is searching your mind for something you know that you know but simply cannot remember. It may be a word that you know you always use but just won't show itself right now. Or it could be the name of a person you run into or see a picture of. Or perhaps even a joke that you remember as "that joke" but cannot at all "find" the actual topic or content of. Your assignment, then, is to describe what this inner search for something in your head feels like. Where does it seem to happen? What language accompanies the experience? What do your eyes do as you seek the information? What characteristics of the knowledge CAN you feel or access even as you cannot bring the thing itself to the fore. What do these spatial relationships -- the hidden and the fore -- feel like to you?
And so I invite you to think about how you experience this phenomenon and to try to describe it for us.
