Interactively guided introspection is getting science closer to an effective consciousness meter

The ever-increasing precision of brain measurement brings with it a demand for more reliable and fine-grained measures of conscious experience. However, introspection has long been assumed to be too limited and fallible. This skepticism is primarily based on a series of classic psychological experiments, which suggested that more is seen than can be retrospectively reported (Sperling, 1960), and that we can be easily fooled into retrospectively describing intentional choices that we have never made (Johansson et al., 2005, Nisbett and Wilson, 1977). However, the work by Petitmengin, Remillieux, Cahour, and Carter-Thomas (2013) could resolve this dilemma. They showed that subjects can be interactively guided to become better aware of their past experience, thereby overturning the “choice blindness” results of Johansson et al. (2005). Although some more fine-tuning of the experimental protocol is needed, interactively guided introspection may well become the most reliable and exhaustive measure of consciousness.